GANNETT NEWS SERVICE / The Olympian,
Programs in Mideast, Asia viewed as potential weapon sources for terrorism
WASHINGTON — The regime-ending mistakes of Saddam Hussein were not lost on the mullahs of Iran.
Instead of pursuing banned weapons underground as the ousted Iraqi leader did after the first gulf war, Iran, by most accounts, is pressing forward with a nuclear weapons initiative in full view of the world.
Only it's disguised as a civilian energy program.
The strategy, intelligence analysts say, is to get as close to weapons production as possible while abiding by international nonproliferation restrictions, then start making warheads when the United States is caught in a vulnerable position that discourages pre-emptive strikes.
Much like it is now.
If Iran succeeds, an anti-American theocracy that supports both terrorists and the eradication of Israel would be able to strike anywhere in the Middle East with nuclear weapons.
That's just one of the many nightmare scenarios the intelligence community is confronting as weapons of mass destruction seep from the thaw of the Cold War into a clandestine coven of hostile governments and terrorists that trade in murky black markets.
And it isn't just adversaries that threaten national security.
Russia, a U.S. ally against terrorism, sits atop the world's largest WMD arsenal with frighteningly inadequate security and legions of ambitious arms dealers. If Pakistan's shaky President Pervez Musharraf falls to Islamic extremists, so goes his nuclear arsenal.
Here are the four most dangerous places:
Russia
Sometime in the 1990s, according to recently declassified intelligence reports, authorities intercepted 3 kilograms of highly enriched uranium from a car in Prague, Czech Republic.
The material, stolen from an engineering institute southwest of Moscow, was about a third of the mass necessary to make a nuclear weapon. The seizure led to the capture of a Ukrainian and a Belorussian, both with nuclear backgrounds.
When the Soviet Union dissolved, so did its iron grip on the world's largest arsenal of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons scattered from Russia's Arctic coast to Kazakhstan.
Since 1993, the International Atomic Energy Agency has investigated 175 cases of attempted nuclear smuggling, many of them involving elements of the former communist regime.
According to congressional security estimates, 60 percent of Russia's 20,000 nuclear warheads and 600 tons of weapons-grade material is not under adequate security.
Much of Russia's 40,000 metric tons of nerve gas and other chemical agents have not been sufficiently safeguarded because Moscow will not allow U.S. experts to engineer security upgrades, according to a General Accounting Office report.
At the Shchuchye chemical weapons repository in the Ural Mountains southeast of Moscow, there are some 2 million shells filled with sarin, VX and other nerve agents.
At Vozrozhdeniya Island in the Aral Sea, the Russians dealt with 100 tons of biological agent simply by burying it, with minimal security.
The human element in the Russian equation is cause for equal concern: thousands of WMD scientists making less than $50 a month, some thought to be freelancing in Iran under cover as civilian energy experts.
Iran
For a country that claims it just wants nuclear energy, Iran is going about it in highly suspicious ways.
Iran is trying to build a uranium enrichment facility it claims is meant to produce fuel for the energy reactors it is constructing at Bushehr on the Persian Gulf. The enrichment equipment could also be capable of producing weapons-grade nuclear material.
Iran also wants to produce heavy water, a liquid containing a form of hydrogen that's useful in making bomb-grade plutonium, yet its energy reactors will use only ordinary water.
The United States and Europe recently challenged Iran to prove its nuclear program is intended to produce only energy by submitting to aggressive inspections.
“The conclusion is inescapable that Iran is pursuing its 'civil' nuclear energy program not for peaceful and economic purposes, but as a front for developing the capability to produce nuclear materials for nuclear weapons,” said John Bolton, undersecretary of state for arms control and international security.
Iran is known already to have blister, blood and choking agents, according to the Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies in California.
Combine all that with well-established connections to terrorists in Lebanon, and the result is unacceptable to both Washington, D.C., and Jerusalem.
Iran has signed the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, but it can legally back out with 90 days notice. If Iran is allowed to use the treaty as cover for an illegal weapons program, it would set a dangerous precedent, igniting similar ambitions in Egypt, Turkey and even Saudi Arabia.
Pakistan
Third World countries eager to go nuclear or acquire chemical or biological weapons once needed help from a superpower.
Now they're approaching Pakistan, which has a nuclear arsenal and a well-documented record of selling deadly technology to some of the planet's most dangerous regimes, including North Korea.
Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan's nuclear program, is known to have visited North Korea extensively. Meanwhile, Pakistan's Ghauri liquid-fuel ballistic missile is an identical copy of the North Korean Nodong missile, indicating some bartering.
Khan has been a frequent visitor to Iran as well, according to U.S. intelligence, while two retired Pakistani nuclear scientists have admitted to holding “academic” discussions with Osama bin Laden.
Pakistan's volatile politics and restive Islamic radicals are cause for further concern.
Sympathy for Afghanistan's ousted Islamic Taliban regime is rampant among Pakistan's cash-strapped military, which freely sells equipment without approval from the government, according to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
“Pakistan is now leaking dangerous technology,” said Joseph Cirincione, director of Carnegie's Non-Proliferation Project. “If it destabilizes, it will hemorrhage the stuff.”
North Korea
There could scarcely be a more worrisome addition to the nuclear family than Pyongyang's wildly unpredictable Stalinist leader Kim Jong Il. Kim might already have one to three nuclear weapons and the capacity to make more.
The evidence all indicates North Korea can launch missiles across most of East Asia and possibly to Hawaii and Alaska, and it has a record of selling advanced weapons technology to Iran, Syria, Libya, Egypt and Pakistan.
U.S. officials have accused Kim's cash-strapped regime of selling drugs and missiles and counterfeiting currency to raise money. But would Kim sell fissile material on the terrorist market?
Kim has not been linked to any known terrorists, but he has been caught peddling weapons to the governments that support them.
The more immediate concern is whether Kim will test a nuclear weapon soon, as he has recently threatened. A successful test could easily kick off an Asian arms race, with security implications for Americans as the nuclear dominos fall.
The volatility would almost inevitably push China to expand its nuclear arsenal. India, a longtime foe of China, would follow suit, as would India's archenemy Pakistan.
According to both American and Russian intelligence, North Korea possesses large stocks of the nerve agents sarin and VX that were made at as many as eight chemical weapons facilities. Russian intelligence has reported that North Korea is experimenting with anthrax, cholera, plague and smallpox, and might have weaponized some of these lethal pathogens.
“This is one of the most intractable problems in the world,” said Choi Young-jin, chancellor of South Korea's Institute of Foreign Affairs and National Security.
