New leadership planned to fight WMD terrorism
WASHINGTON - President-elect Barack Obama plans to appoint a new White House official to coordinate efforts to prevent terrorists from obtaining nuclear or biological weapons, advisers say, giving the highest priority to thwarting a catastrophic attack that a bipartisan panel warns could come in the next five years.
Naming a top deputy whose sole mission is to oversee the government's wide-ranging programs to stop such an attack would mark a significant break with the Bush administration, which in resisting such a post has maintained that US efforts to reduce nuclear stockpiles and safeguard deadly pathogens are adequate.
A law requiring the position, passed by Congress more than a year ago and signed into law by President Bush, has been ignored for more than 15 months, in part because Bush opposes giving the Senate the power to confirm the official.
But Obama, whose first foreign trip as a US senator was to assess initiatives to lock down nuclear materials in the former Soviet Union, believes the programs lack coordination, are underfunded, and need a top official supervising them, according to three advisers with knowledge of the transition team's deliberations.
"I think it is a good idea and will probably happen" soon after Obama is sworn in Jan. 20, said one of those advisers, who asked not to be identified discussing private conversations with the president-elect.
The need for a top-level official to coordinate nonproliferation programs - now spread across numerous agencies - is expected to gain new urgency today with the release of the sobering new report that warns that without drastic new measures, the world faces the real prospect of a nuclear or biological attack by 2013. Leaders of the commission that drafted the report said that terrorists have made it clear that the United States is their number one target.
"The simple reality is that the risks that confront us today are evolving faster than our multilayered responses," according to the report, a copy of which was obtained by the Globe. "Many thousands of dedicated people across all agencies of our government are working hard to protect this country, and their efforts have had a positive impact. But the terrorists have been active, too - and in our judgment America's margin of safety is shrinking, not growing."
Vice President-elect Joe Biden, who has also been active in the Senate on nuclear nonproliferation, and Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano, named Monday by Obama as homeland security secretary, are to be briefed today by the commission.
The 160-page report - ordered by Congress last year as a road map for the next administration and completed after more than six months of study and access to classified intelligence briefings - also calls for Obama to make it a top priority to stop nuclear weapons programs in Iran and North Korea, using diplomacy backed by the credible threat of force; to beef up international efforts to slow the spread of nuclear weapons; and to work with Pakistan to eliminate terrorist safe havens and secure nuclear and biological materials in that country.
"Terrorist organizations are intent on acquiring nuclear weapons," it says. "Anyone with access to the Internet can easily obtain designs for building a nuclear bomb. Our crucial task is to secure the material before terrorists can steal or buy it on the black market."
Pakistan is the most likely source of terrorists armed with nuclear or biological weapons, said former senator Bob Graham of Florida, cochairman of the commission along with former senator Jim Talent of Missouri. "It is the potential bombshell where terrorism and weapons of mass destruction will intersect," Graham said yesterday on CNN.
The report also raises new alarms about the prospect of a biological attack, saying that too little focus has been given to controlling the ingredients for biological weapons - even though they pose a "more likely threat" and facilities with pathogens, especially civilian labs, are less carefully guarded than nuclear facilities.
Terrorists could obtain the know-how to fashion biological weapons by finding scientists willing to share or sell their knowledge, the commission warns. "The United States should be less concerned that terrorists will become biologists and far more concerned that biologists will become terrorists," the report says.
The shortfalls in prevention measures are due in large part to the lack of leadership at the highest levels of the US government, according to the commission, which urged the appointment of the top White House coordinator, either in the National Security Council or the vice president's office, though it recommends that Congress change the law so that the official does not require Senate confirmation.
"We have to make sure our own government is working effectively and somebody is waking up every day with this as their urgent call," said former US representative Tim Roemer of Indiana, a member of the commission, which also includes Obama's State Department transition chief, former ambassador Wendy Sherman. Roemer also served on the panel that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks; it recommended the weapons study.
The current structure is too haphazard, according to the commission, and "no single person is in charge of and accountable for preventing WMD proliferation and terrorism, with insight into all of committees and interagency working groups focused on these issues."
Obama, according to his advisers, has decided that will change. The specific details of a White House coordinator will be worked out between the new president, his national security adviser, James L. Jones, and his chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, according to one Obama confidant. But the president-elect provided a preview in a little-noticed paper issued by his campaign in July.
"Everything involving nuclear weapons is inherently presidential and will require presidential leadership," the paper stated, adding that if elected Obama would "appoint a deputy national security advisor to be in charge of coordinating all US programs aimed at reducing the risk of nuclear terrorism and weapons proliferation."
Such high-level attention and authority is long overdue, according to many specialists.
"Neither the Clinton administration, the Bush administration, nor the Congress under Democratic or Republican leadership has given preventive nonproliferation programs the priority they deserve," said Brian Finlay, a senior associate at the nonpartisan Henry L. Stimson Center, a Washington think tank.
Bryan Bender can be reached at bender@globe.com. 