[lit-ideas] Re: Did Al Queda get any of Saddam's nukes?
- From: Eric <eyost1132@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 01 Apr 2006 14:05:21 -0500
>> Alexander’s article is of special interest
because he takes the next step and asks, since the
WMDs (including nuclear WMDs) exist, how likely is
it that some will make it into the hands of Al
Quaeda and be used against us?
Let me repeat the few paragraphs of the article by
Washington Post Editor Steve Coll. It's sobering
stuff.
______
What Bin Laden Sees in Hiroshima
By Steve Coll
At a conference on the future of al Qaeda
sponsored by Los Alamos National Laboratory last
month, I posed a dark question to 60 or so nuclear
weapons scientists and specialists on terrorism
and radical Islam: How many of them believed that
the probability of a nuclear fission bomb attack
on U.S. soil during the next several decades was
negligible -- say, less than 5 percent?
At issue was the Big One -- a Hiroshima-or-larger
explosion that could claim hundreds of thousands
of American lives, as opposed to an
easier-to-mount but less lethal radiological
attack. Amid somber silence, three or four meek,
iconoclastic hands went up. (More later on the
minority optimists. They, too, deserve a hearing.)
This grim view, echoed in other quarters of the
national security bureaucracy in recent months,
can't be dismissed as Bush administration
scaremongering. "There has been increasing
interest by terrorists in acquiring nuclear
weapons," Mohamed ElBaradei, the Egyptian director
general of the International Atomic Energy Agency,
the world's chief nuclear watchdog, said in a
recent interview, excerpts of which were published
in Outlook last Sunday. "I cannot say 100 percent
that it hasn't happened" already, he added, almost
as an afterthought.
complete story at
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A365-2005Feb5.html
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