Osama bin Laden or like-minded terrorists could kill thousands of people and wreak global havoc by detonating a crude nuclear device in the heart of Europe, security experts warned this week.
”We are in a race between cooperation and catastrophe,” said the former United States senator Sam Nunn, who helped organise Black Dawn, a war-gaming exercise conducted by the European Union, Nato and others.
”To win this race, we have to achieve cooperation on a scale we’ve never seen or attempted before,” he said, insisting far greater efforts were needed to ensure nuclear material could not be obtained by terrorists.
Nunn was speaking after the closed-door simulation attended by the EU’s security supremo, Javier Solana, and his counter-terrorism coordinator, Gijs de Vries, who was appointed after the Madrid bombings in March.
The EU is stepping up its efforts to help the US combat nuclear proliferation, despite differences over Iraq.
”The threat of catastrophic terrorism is not confined to the US or Russia or the Middle East,” said Solana. ”The new terrorist movements seem willing to use unlimited violence and cause massive casualties.”
Officials were asked in the first part of the exercise how they would respond to intelligence showing al-Qaeda had obtained enough enriched uranium to build a nuclear bomb.
In the second, they were confronted with computer projections and video displays illustrating the impact of a 10-kilotonne device exploding at Nato’s sprawling headquarters near Brussels airport.
The notional attack immediately killed 40 000 people and injured 300 000, swamping hospitals, as a radiation cloud spread panic across Belgium and The Netherlands, and plunged the world economy into turmoil.
”Once you are in this phase there are no good options,” said Michele Flournoy, of the Washington-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies, who helped prepare the exercise.
Rolf Ekeus, a former head of the United Nations weapons inspectors in Iraq, warned that Europe could be a prime target for nuclear terrorists because of the ease with which extremists could hide and recruit in the Muslim communities, and because Russian nuclear material could be more easily smuggled into Europe than the US.
”Europe has become the breeding ground, the place where planning for terrorism takes place,” he said. — Â