The threat of nuclear attack

60 years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Noam Chomsky reflects on the prospects for a nuclear attack today:

McNamara regards "current US nuclear weapons policy as immoral, illegal, militarily unnecessary and dreadfully dangerous", creating "unacceptable risks to other nations and to our own", both the risk of "accidental or inadvertent nuclear launch", which is "unacceptably high", and of nuclear attack by terrorists. McNamara endorses the judgment of William Perry, President Bill Clinton's defense secretary, that "there is a greater than 50 per cent probability of a nuclear strike on US targets within a decade".

Similar judgments are commonly expressed by prominent strategic analysts. In his book Nuclear Terrorism, the Harvard international relations specialist Graham Allison reports the "consensus in the national security community" (of which he has been a part) that a "dirty bomb" attack is "inevitable", and an attack with a nuclear weapon highly likely, if fissionable materials - the essential ingredient - are not retrieved and secured.

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