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What is the # 1 international threat to America's security, life and limb today?

Two members of the United States Senate, regarded by their colleagues as the soundest and most sober sources on American national security, Sam Nunn and Dick Lugar, have answered that question without equivocation. "The greatest single threat to the security of America today is the threat from loose nukes from the Soviet Union."

A major study by Harvard's Center for Science and International Affairs, Avoiding Nuclear Anarchy: Containing the Threat of Loose Russian Nuclear Weapons and Fissile Material, agrees and explains why. No one whom I have met who has reviewed the evidence and the anaylsis in the study has come to any other conclusion than that this is one of the top 2 or 3 central challenges for America's security in the decade ahead.

The question is then, using the classic Russian phrase, shto delat'? What is to be done? The answer can summarized in two lines:

• Recognize the threat of loose nukes - loose nuclear weapons and weapons- usable nuclear materials - as the number one threat to American national security today and in the decade ahead;
• Mobilize a high-priority all-azimuth attack on this threat, an attack directed by a strategy, commanding attention, money, energy, and imagination commensurate to Americans' stakes in this #1 threat.

The strategy outlined here is straightforward, feasible, affordable, and certain to reduce substantially the risk of nuclear terrorist attacks on Americans at home, and on allies and friends like Israel whose pain we share today. Summarized in the language of our current political season, one might say that a strategy for containing loose nukes is as simple as A, B, C.

A is for the A#1 problem, a threat that deserves absolute priority in America's strategy for relating to Russia and the former Soviet Union. During decades of Cold War, leaders of both the United States and the Soviet Union learned that avoiding nuclear war was an absolute priority. Avoiding the global nuclear war, of which they would have been the first victims, was a necessary precondition for pursuing any other objective. Avoiding nuclear war was not the only thing the United States wanted in relations with the Soviet Union. It was not necessarily even the most important , as the old debate about "red vs. dead" reminds us. But it was an objective of absolute priority in the sense that if we failed with respect to this objective, we would not have the opportunity to pursue any other.

In the post-Cold War environment, giving the containment of loose nukes absolute priority means making this operational objective of American policy trump every other operational objective (save the continuing stake in avoiding global nuclear war). Assessed in terms of concrete American national interests, containing loose nukes deserves higher priority in our relationship with Russia than many other very important interests including condemning Russia's beastly action toward Chechens, or constraining Russian sales of nuclear reactors to Iran, or supporting stabilization and marketization of Russia's economy through a $10 billion IMF loan, or promoting Russian democratization.

B stands for two essential keys of a winning strategy: containing loose nukes must be a bilateral venture undertaken jointly by Americans and Russians, with 90% of the actions required being taken by Russians, not Americans. Bilateral initiatives and actions require that each party is motivated in terms of its own interests (as it interprets its interests). Thus, B also stands for buy: America's buying and taking directly 500 tons of Russian nuclear weapons-usable highly enriched uranium under the terms of the contract already signed in the HEU deal negotiated by the Bush Administration. In short: American money motivating a bilateral Russian-American partnership and urgent bilateral security initiatives to combat this threat in ways that serve our interests and theirs.

C is also a two-fer: concentrate and control. Concentrate the nuclear weapons and weapons-usable material that remains in Russia in the smallest number of locations. Control the dangerous, valuable material in each of these sites in every way that a serious enterprise attempts to protect any item of great value from theft or loss under the extraordinary conditions of life in Russia and other states of the former Soviet Union today.

The magnitude of the challenge is suggested by considering what Russian bankers do to prevent theft or loss of equivalent small packages of great value - piles of hundred dollar bills or gold. Mr. Gusinsky of MostBank began by careful screening of personnel and monitoring. Money and gold is kept first in the vault surrounded by a foot of steel. A cage is built around the vault, and monitored by an electronic alarm system and video monitors. The electronic system is surrounded by guards, then a building, and the building is then protected by private security, often the most talented former KGB and security officers. And beyond that come the police. With all this, dollars and gold are still lost and stolen. Contrast this security system with a security system at research facilities across Russia, 80% of which have no simple electronic monitoring system, for example. One practical step forward on this front would be to fully fund of the Department of Energy material protection, control and accounting budget, seeking to increase both the flexibility and amount of dedicated funds.

D reminds us of the urgency of getting on with the work. In Russian: Delai delat' which is a Russian knockoff of Nike's "Just do it."

E is for equities, in the language of Washington bureaucracy: Russian equities, and American equities in this mission. Equities that command resources to mount an aggressive program of action to contain the threat of loose nukes. One major lesson of America's sustained and successful strategy in winning the Cold War is the critical importance of equities in organized efforts: roles and missions for American military services; NATO; the public-private partnership between the Department of Defense and private military contractors that produced the preeminent military establishment in the world. So far, the U.S. government's efforts to combat the threat of loose nukes has failed to create substantial equities for Americans, and for Russians -the kinds of equities that would command energy and imagination of tens of thousands of serious people working to solve this problem every day.

F is for funding. Money must be proportionate to the threat. The surest recipe for failure in national security policy is what the U.S. military calls strategic mismatch: objectives that cannot possibly be achieved given the level of resources committed to the task. In Desert Storm, if American stakes justified our going to the Gulf, then it was essential to go with forces sufficient to achieve the mission. Combating the #1 threat to American security interests for the decade ahead cannot be done cheaply.

More than a decade ago Defense Weinberger observed a surprising similarity among all U.S. major strategic nuclear weapons programs: each cost $30 billion and took 15 years to deploy. He was thinking about the MX, the B-2, and the Trident. If today the U.S. can buy Russian nuclear weapons equivalents at $1 million each, then for the price of a typical major nuclear program, we could buy 30,000 weapons 9and it need not take 15 years). In fact, the HEU deal negotiated by the Bush administration buys the highly enriched uranium out of Russian nuclear weapons for a price in this ballpark - and allows us to recapture most of the cost by selling the material as fuel for civilian reactors. In Project Sapphire, in 1994, the U.S. government bought and took from Kazakhstan some 1,000 pounds of highly enriched uranium, sufficient for approximately 20 nuclear weapons, for an amount reported to be about $20 million. No one has, I believe, argued that American vital interests would have been better served by leaving the material there in Kazakhstan to be bought by Iranians or Iraqis, both of whom had expressed clear interest in acquiring this material.

One week after the series of Hamas suicide-bombers' attacks in Tel Aviv, after a year in which Americans saw Sheik Rakhman convicted for bombing the World Trade Center in New York and planning bombing attacks against New York City bridges, tunnels, the U.N., a year in which the Oklahoma City bombing of the federal office building revealed the ugly cloven hoof of American extremism, a year that also saw a Japanese sect attack the government of Japan with chemical weapons - we Americans are living on borrowed time. This year, or next year, or the year after, when Americans find ourselves victim of a nuclear terrorist incident, how will account for our behavior? Will the President, or the leaders in Congress, or the public be able to claim that we didn't really know? On the morning after, what account will we give of our failure to mobilize the level of attention, money, energy, and imagination the American public will demand?

Prophets of doom and gloom have never attracted much support - even less so when they urge strenuous endeavors to avoid otherwise catastrophic consequences. But as one citizen who has attempted to look at this issue as soberly as I can, I, with a growing group of colleagues, will keep working to bring action in the face of this frightening new reality, before the morning after.