CNN LIVE AT DAYBREAK
Next U.S. Threat — Nuclear Weapons
Aired October 24, 2001 - 07:30 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE
UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE
UPDATED.
PAULA ZAHN, CNN ANCHOR: As America fights
terrorism at home and abroad, some experts are expressing concern that
terrorists could obtain nuclear weapons.
CNN's David Ensor reports on the reasons for this concern.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
DAVID ENSOR, CNN NATIONAL SECURITY CORRESPONDENT
(voice-over): When General Alexander Lebed was Russia's national
security chief under then President Yeltsin, he worried Chechen separatists
might try to get their hands on a nuclear weapon and ordered an inventory of
what he said were hundreds of nuclear warheads small enough to fit into a
briefcase.
BRUCE BLAIR, CENTER FOR DEFENSE INFORMATION:
And so they tried to do an inventory of them and Lebed came up short by
somewhere between 50 and 100 nuclear suitcases, and no one really has really
persuasively explained the discrepancy between Lebed's count and what the
Russian government said which was that don't worry, nothing's missing.
ENSOR: No U.S. official has ever actually
seen a Russian tactical briefcase bomb, and Russian officials insist their
inventory of nuclear weapons is meticulous, not one is missing.
Nuclear material is another matter. In 1995, Chechen separatists put a
canister in a Moscow park containing cesium-137, a highly radioactive byproduct
of nuclear fission. They then called the media. It was a stunt to show how
unprotected Moscow was and still is. So, some experts say, is the United States.
Even more serious, some experts fear instability in Pakistan over the
government's decision to back the U.S. campaign against bin Laden and the
Taliban could lead to a coup in a nation that only recently became a nuclear
power.
JOSEPH CIRINCIONE, CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT:
The military fractures and some elements sympathetic to fundamentalism,
sympathetic to the Taliban actually seize control of those nuclear weapons and
the nuclear weapons go out of Pakistan control and spread into Afghanistan or
perhaps to a third country entirely.
ENSOR: A terrifying scenario, certainly,
though most experts on Pakistan say an unlikely one given that President
Musharraf has his most trusted forces in charge of his nuclear weapons.
(on camera): These nuclear terrorist scenarios are highly unlikely in the
view of many experts, but they say the nation should prepare to deal with them
anyway. With the events of the last six weeks in mind, they say highly unlikely
does not mean impossible.
David Ensor, CNN, Washington.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
ZAHN: How real is the threat of nuclear
weapons being used against the U.S., its troops, its citizens? We're joined
again this morning by former United Weapons Chief Weapons Inspector Ambassador
Richard Butler — good morning.
RICHARD BUTLER, FORMER UNITED NATIONS CHIEF WEAPONS
INSPECTOR: Good morning, Paula.
ZAHN: How real is this threat?
BUTLER: Very real.
ZAHN: Why?
BUTLER: I'm so pleased that we're now
talking about this. Anthrax is a serious problem, no doubt biological weapons
are, but, Paula, the underlying major threat to our security continues to be
nuclear weapons, OK. Comes in a couple of categories, you know the big stuff
that Russia and the United States have. Then the next level of nuclear weapons
countries with a smaller arsenal, one of which is undeclared, that's Israel, but
we all know it has nuclear weapons. But the third layer is the one that
frightens the hell out of me.
ZAHN: And that is?
BUTLER: That is that nuclear weapons may
have been obtained by terrorist groups. Now why do I say that as those reports
just indicated?
ZAHN: And the salient word there is may
have been obtained.
BUTLER: We don't know. We don't know. I
know of reports that Osama bin Laden has been seeking to acquire nuclear
weapons.
I know with utter certainty that Iraq was months away from having nuclear
weapons when we stopped them in '90-'91. One of the key defectors from Iraq to
the West, a man who was in charge of elements of Saddam's bomb program, actually
says that he's already made one — that Saddam has already put together a crude
nuclear weapon.
But the piece that is — as I said, worries the hell out of me is what
happened to Russia's nuclear weapons and nuclear materials.
ZAHN: Well we know they had scientists...
BUTLER: They had so many of them... ZAHN:
Right.
BUTLER: ... and the Soviet Union broke
down, and, Paula, we don't know where they all are. We don't have an inventory,
including weapons that could be carried in a suitcase. So bottom line for me is
that if there is another terrorist action in the future, and please God this
won't be true, it could be with a nuclear weapon.
ZAHN: Let's talk more about what we do
know. We know that some 7,000 scientists in Russia are — who were then a part
of the Soviet Union, were doing work on this program.
BUTLER: Right.
ZAHN: They've scattered all over the
world.
BUTLER: That's right.
ZAHN: Do we know where any of them are
today definitively? Some of them are here, right, in the Untied States?
BUTLER: Well, I know for — I know
personally some of them, and some of them are fully committed to keeping the
world safe, but we don't know where all of them are. We do know that the
scientific infrastructure broke down, they lost their jobs. Some of them, you
know, have no money at all. They have knowledge in their heads of how to make
nuclear weapons of various kinds. We don't know where they are.
Also, we don't know — this is — this is a real bedrock that, you know,
sustains this concern I have. We don't know, and I don't even believe the
Russians know, how much special fissionable material they made. That is the
stuff that is the core of a nuclear weapon. I don't think they even know how
much of it they made. And I know that a man like Saddam Hussein will pay
breathtaking sums of money for such material.
ZAHN: And we know he has the money.
BUTLER: Material the size of a
cantaloupe, that's it.
ZAHN: Wow.
BUTLER: That's it. That's the core, the
pit of a nuclear weapon, and he would pay millions and millions of dollars for
that. It's a problem.
ZAHN: Let's come back to Russia for a
moment. There's been a lot of attention focused on this new relationship that's
being forged between...
BUTLER: Right.
ZAHN: ... President Putin and President
Bush.
BUTLER: Right. ZAHN: You said we're not
even clear what the inventory is in Russia right now.
BUTLER: Right.
ZAHN: Are you confident that this — at a
time when the ABM Treaty is being, you know, debated that these two men will
move the process far enough along that we will know how many of those types of
bombs are in the Russian arsenal?
BUTLER: Confident. I hope they do address that. They're sensible and I
suspect they will.
I've written a book about this, which will be coming out in a few weeks'
time. And what I argue there and I hope both of these men start to do this is
that the first step that has to be taken is to greatly reduce the number of
nuclear weapons out there, to get a clear inventory and to take those that are
on hair-trigger alert off alert then talk about missile defense. I hope they do
that.
ZAHN: And we will continue to talk with
you about a whole range of issues.
BUTLER: OK.
ZAHN: Ambassador Butler, again, thanks
for dropping by.
BUTLER: Good to see you.
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