Weekend Edition: June 30-July 1, 2007
This afternoon, the United Kingdom raised its terrorism threat level to critical, the highest level possible, after a vehicle plowed into the Glasgow International Airport terminal building and burst into flames. According to CNN, authorities are assuming the incident is directly linked to the discovery of 2 explosives-laden cars in London on Friday. In the United States, security is being boosted at airports across the country as I write this post.
The other day, I talked about the threat posed by natural disasters, specifically hurricanes, to the U.S. economy. Today I’d like to focus on man-made disasters, particularly the threat of nuclear terrorism. Warnings of a nuclear attack on American soil have originated from the government, the military, and academia, as well as the private sector. In the 2004 American presidential election, both President Bush and his opponent John Kerry agreed on only one fundamental point. In the first televised debate the two were asked, what is “the single most serious threat to the national security to the United States?” President Bush, who answered second, said, “I agree with my opponent that the biggest threat facing this country is weapons of mass destruction in the hands of a terrorist network.” According to journalist, author, and former FBI consultant Paul L. Williams in his book The Al Qaeda Connection, Vice President Dick Cheney, while on the campaign trail, warned that a nuclear attack by al-Qaeda appears imminent. Upon leaving office, Attorney General John Ashcroft and Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge both indicated that plans for a nuclear attack on the U.S. might be carried out. General Eugene Habiger, the former executive chief of U.S. Strategic Weapons at the Pentagon, claims that an act of nuclear terrorism is “not a matter of if, but when.” Graham T. Allison, Director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University’s JFK School of Government, concludes that the chances of a nuclear terrorist attack in the next decade are greater than 50%. He was quoted in WorldNetDaily on April 20 to say, “From the technical side, Richard Garwin, a designer of the hydrogen bomb who Enrico Fermi once called, ‘the only true genius I had ever met,’ told Congress in March he estimated a ‘20 percent per year probability with American cities and European cities included’ of ‘a nuclear explosion — not just a contamination, dirty bomb — a nuclear explosion.’” Finally, legendary investor Warren Buffett, who establishes odds against cataclysmic events for major insurance companies, predicts that a nuclear attack within the United States is “virtually a certainty.”
Dr. Allison, a well-know nuclear terrorism expert, explained at a Council of Foreign Relations forum in April why the stakes are so high for terrorists to conduct a nuclear attack. He said, “[T]he effect of a nuclear terrorist attack would reverberate beyond U.S. shores. After a nuclear detonation, the immediate reaction would be to block all entry points to prevent another bomb from reaching its target. Vital markets for international products would disappear, and closely linked financial markets would crash. Researchers at RAND, a U.S. government-funded think tank, estimated that a nuclear explosion at the Port of Los Angeles would cause immediate costs worldwide of more than $1 trillion and that shutting down U.S. ports would cut world trade by 7.5 percent.” Dr. Williams paints a grim picture of what would happen if a 10-kiloton nuclear device is detonated in New York City. In his book he says, “The financial and cultural center of America would cease to exist. The GNP would drop more than 3 percent in a matter of seconds. One of America’s ports would be closed indefinitely. Millions of Americans would lose their jobs… Within hours of the blast, the US economy would fall into a deep depression from which it might never recover.”
The detonation of a nuclear device in an American metropolitan area is a chilling thought. Such an event could in and of itself trigger a financial crash in the United States. In an upcoming post, we’ll look at a purported al-Qaeda plan to detonate nuclear devices in several U.S. cities simultaneously.
Have a SAFE weekend!
Christopher E. Hill
Editor
editor@boom2bust.com
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