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Ernesto Zedillo: Nuclear Threat to U.S. is Real
The detonation of a nuclear weapon in one of the world’s major cities could usher in the beginning of another "dark age” – but the U.S. isn’t doing enough to head off nuclear terrorism. That’s the sobering opinion of Ernesto Zedillo, former president of Mexico and director of the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization. Writing in Forbes magazine, Zedillo points out that there are around 30,000 nuclear weapons in the arsenals of nuclear states and hundreds of tons of enriched uranium and plutonium, ingredients for a nuclear device, in over 40 nations. The bulk of the most vulnerable nuclear material is in Russia and some of the nations that formerly belonged to the Soviet Union, due to obsolete security measures, Zedillo states.
Story Continues Below In the U.S., the threat of nuclear attack by terrorists is real, but an exclusive investigation detailed in the December issue of NewsMax Magazine revealed that America is better prepared to stave off such an attack than many believe. That’s in large part due to drastically stepped-up security measures put in place after 9/11, NewsMax found. But the U.S. needs to do more to secure the weapons and fissile material in other nations, according to Zedillo, who writes in Forbes: "We are not confronting this crisis with the urgency it warrants. This is a big mistake. There will be no valid excuses if a nuclear atrocity occurs. "It is the responsibility of all countries to address this risk. However, by virtue of its being the most powerful nation on earth – as well as the terrorists’ most desirable target – the U.S. must play a bigger role than any other nation.”
Zedillo suggests that the U.S. take a closer look at the Nuclear Threat Initiative, an organization founded in 2001 by Ted Turner and former Sen. Sam Nunn. The NTI calls for every nuclear weapon and all nuclear material around the world to be secured and accounted for as soon as possible. "For this to happen, the U.S. would have to build an effective global nuclear security partnership, including an accelerated alliance-based approach with Russia, as well as develop a stringent global nuclear security standard and provide assistant to any state willing to meet this standard but lacking the means to do so,” Zedillo concludes. "A plan like the NTI’s should be only the first major step in dissipating the risk of nuclear holocaust.”
Editor's note:
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