When Outlaws Get The Bomb

(3 of 6)

Ashton Carter, a counterproliferation expert at Harvard, believes the risk of nuclear proliferation out the back door of a rogue state is increasing. North Korea or Iran could conceivably sell a bomb to a terrorist group, and Osama bin Laden is unlikely to be put off by traditional methods of deterring a nuclear attack. That means plugging the source. Says Derek D. Smith, author of Deterring America: Rogue States and the Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction: "If you can't deter the terrorist organizations, you'd better be sure to deter whoever is supplying them."

Reacting to the blast, President Bush said, "The transfer of nuclear weapons or material by North Korea to states or nonstate entities would be considered a grave threat to the United States, and we would hold North Korea fully accountable of the consequences of such action." That was an explicit embrace of Graham Allison's concept of "nuclear accountability." Thus, according to Allison, if Kim Jong Il were to sell a weapon to bin Laden and that weapon were used against the U.S. or one of its allies, then the principle would require the U.S. to "treat this precisely like a nuclear-tipped-missile attack" and retaliate against Pyongyang. "That danger [of North Korean proliferation] has always been there," says Michael Green, until last year a senior staff member on the National Security Council. "But North Korea has a mailing address, and they know it. If there was a nuclear explosion somewhere, it would probably be traced back to them, and their country would be destroyed. That's a deterrent."

The Pentagon and the IAEA both devote considerable resources to the task of identifying the source of any bomb that is tested. Still, tracking the source of nuclear material is a complex, difficult endeavor--one that is hardly guaranteed success. To this day, there are questions about the origins of the material that Pakistani nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan sold to Libya. Among the material that Libya turned over after it abandoned its program was a precursor to highly enriched uranium--uranium hexafluoride. U.S. intelligence agencies believed it came from North Korea but spent months trying to prove it. They still haven't.

THE CASE FOR STAYING CALM

It is perhaps surprising at a moment when one of the world's most isolated and despotic regimes says it has gone nuclear that some current and former security strategists view Kim Jong Il's move as far less than a disaster. No one, to be sure, regards it as a good thing. But it is possible to view the test--and the state of play in the nuclear world more broadly--in more apocalyptic terms than is warranted. Many question, for example, Allison's argument that North Korea will unleash a sort of nuclear domino effect--with one country after another scrambling to get nukes. Take, for example, the nonnuclear countries in East Asia closest to North Korea: South Korea, Japan and Taiwan. All are wealthy, technologically sophisticated countries that could go nuclear in a heartbeat. (South Korea had a clandestine nuclear-arms program in the mid-1970s.) But all reside snugly under the so-called U.S. nuclear umbrella--any attack by Pyongyang would bring the full destructive force of the U.S. military in response. And last week all swore off any notion that North Korea's test would make them rethink their policy of eschewing nukes.