“It’s past time to focus on the gravest dangers that we face.” A Nuclear Nightmare: It Could Happen Today

Few things concentrate the mind like the prospect of a nuclear mushroom cloud in your own neighborhood. So please concentrate on this: I asked Ambassador Thomas Graham Jr., a sober, respected, retired career arms control official who was President Clinton’s special representative for nonproliferation and disarmament from 1994-97, to quantify the risk of nuclear terrorism. Here is what he said, from Moscow, via cell phone:

“Any judgment like this is a guess. But my judgment is that in the next year, there is perhaps a 10 percent risk of a major nuclear event in a large city, and in the next five years, perhaps a 50 percent risk. This risk would include the theft and use of an actual nuclear weapon, the fabrication and detonation of a crude nuclear device from fissile material, as well as a radiological bomb possibly based on fissile material.”

Five years. Fifty percent. Maybe several cities destroyed. Hundreds of thousands or millions dead. The nation in chaos. Worse than our worst nightmares. The Atlantic

Part of my reaction to the scale of the destruction in the World Trade Center attack was its eerie resonance with the recurrent waking nightmares I’ve had for most of my adult life as someone preoccupied with preventing the use of nuclear weapons. Yet I flinch every time I hear the lower Manhattan site referred to, as has come to be general practice, as ‘ground zero’. We can’t afford the degree of denial and minimization in that linguistic artifice, diluting as it does the internal imagery we must have about a veritable ground zero.