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4 Brown J. World Aff. 65 (1997)
Number one Threat of Nuclear Proliferation Today: Loose Nukes from Russia

handle is hein.journals/brownjwa4 and id is 81 raw text is: The Number One Threat of Nuclear Proliferation Today: Loose Nukes from Russia GRAHAM T. ALLISON Douglas Dillon Professor of Government, Harvard University O April 19, 1995, American terrorists demolished Oklahoma City's Federal Office building, killing 162 men, women, and children. Two and one-half years earlier, international terrorists attacked New York City's 110-story World Trade Center. Had that explosion succeeded in un- dermining the structural foundation of that enormous building, 30,000 people might have died. It does not require a large step to get from terrorist acts like Oklahoma City and the World Trade Center to the first act of nuclear terrorism. Suppose that instead of mini-vans filled with hundreds of pounds of the crude explosives used in Oklahoma City and New York, terrorists had acquired a suitcase carrying one hundred pounds of highly enriched uranium (HEU), roughly the size of a grapefruit. Using a simple, well known design to build a weapon from this mate- rial, terrorists could have produced a nuclear blast equivalent to 10,000 to 20,000 tons of TNT. Under normal conditions, this would devastate a three-square-mile urban area. Much of Oklahoma City would have disappeared. The tip of Man- hattan, including all of Wall Street reaching up to Gramercy Park, would have been destroyed. Of the many extraordinary changes in the world beyond America's bor- ders since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, which change is likely to have the most profound consequences for American national security? The conventional answer is clear: Communism has expired and with it the expansionist Soviet ad- versary that served as the fixed point for the American foreign policy compass for four decades of Cold War. The threat is gone. Winter/Spring 1997 - Volume I, Issue I

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