Ex-senator Nunn warns of nuclear terror threat

By Tom Sabulis

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

It’s probably a safe bet that former U.S. Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) has never been mistaken for a movie star, yet he plays a central role in one of the world’s biggest potential dramas: keeping nuclear weapons out of the hands of terrorists.

As co-chairman and CEO of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a nonprofit organization working to curtail weapons of mass destruction, Nunn, 71, gets his share of camera time in the new documentary, “Nuclear Tipping Point,” along with former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and George Shultz and former Defense Secretary William Perry. The foursome tackles the escalating risk of a deadly terrorist strike.

The documentary is available for free through the Web site nucleartippingpoint.org and free public screenings are being set up around the country.

Nunn recently talked about the film and its message.

Q: How did “Nuclear Tipping Point” come about?

A: Shultz and Bill Perry, Kissinger and I have been working together for about three years on this whole subject. I started to notice we were all getting older. I figured the younger generation might benefit in the years to come with having the views of four people who went through the Cold War, basically explaining how the threats have fundamentally changed and that we have to change the responses.

Q: It’s a little reminiscent of Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth,” using a film to gain traction for an issue, right?

A: Ours is much more of a discussion; Al had a lot more drama in his. I’d call this a very low-budget version.

Q: Why isn’t it getting exposure in theaters or on TV?

A: We’d love to get it on television, but we had to principally devote ourselves to getting agreement among all four of us on the content of the film, making sure that everybody was on board with it, making sure it was carefully done, making sure it was not hyped or dramatized in a way that any of our participants would be uncomfortable. When you’ve got that job to do, you don’t set out to get it on television. If it fits into a television mode, that’ll be great. If it doesn’t, that’s also OK.

Q: What were those conversations like — getting everyone to agree on the content? Did it get thorny?

A: Well, I would say that it’s not as hard as negotiating a treaty with China, Russia and Iran combined [laughs]. I’d say we had a lot of cooperation, a lot of good spirit. But everybody had their sensitivities about what was said and what would be in the film.

Q: Is it going to take some kind of nuclear near-miss to get this topic on the radar of the public at large?

A: I hope not. The public consciousness of the changing threat has really gone up in the last several years. When we started our Nuclear Threat Initiative 10 years ago, it basically was not on the radar at all. The more countries that get nuclear weapons, or even the more countries that go into enrichment, like the Iranians have now, the more likely it is that we’ll have a group of people with no return address getting enough material [for] a nuclear weapon.

Q: Is Iran the biggest worry right now?

A: I would probably put Pakistan at the top of the list. I would say Pakistan, Iran and North Korea, sort of in that order. The Pakistanis already have many nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them. Any time you have a country with a substantial nuclear inventory and major instability, you’ve got a dangerous combination. Iran is certainly a concern. The world has to come together to put the pressure on them.

Q: Why?

A: The governments of the world must understand what a threat it is if the Iranians get nuclear weapons because there are probably 10 other countries in the Middle East over the next 10-20 years that would follow down that road.

You’re not going to have a Shiite government controlling nuclear weapons and not have Sunni governments respond. We think verification is pretty clear on the Iranian situation, but we’ve got to be willing to enforce.

Q: When does all this discussion turn into action?

A: Our foundation has been involved in actions now for 10 years. We actually helped complete the securing of about four bombs’ worth of material outside Belgrade, Yugoslavia; we put $5 million into that project. We helped Kazakhstan move a large supply of their highly enriched uranium over from the Iranian side of Kazakhstan to the Russian side.

Three countries have given up their nuclear weapons altogether — Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine. There’s been progress; it’s just that the progress is not commensurate with the growing threat.

Q: How dire is the situation?

A: As I view the threat, we have a perfect storm. We have weapons of mass destruction-type material spread in at least 40 countries around the globe. We have technological know-how that is spread very wide now. It was formerly thought that only a state could make a bomb; nobody that’s informed on the subject believes that any more. We’ve got an increasing number of terrorists who would not hesitate to use a nuclear weapon if they were able to get one.

And now we’ve got the spread of enrichment technologies.

Q: Is the thinking that if terrorists got their hands on a bomb they would automatically use it?

A: I think they’d probably do it in a calculating way. My worst case [scenario] is, they would set off one explosion. It would be a crude weapon; it wouldn’t come in on a missile. It would probably come in on the back of a truck to a city. And if one went off and killed hundreds of thousands of people, they’d basically probably announce they had six or eight more in cities around the country or around the globe. That would have huge devastating impact, certainly on the people who were the original victims, but also the whole world economy. You’d have people dumping out of cities all over the world like nothing we’ve ever seen.