- Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center Newsletter

Atlantic Monthly Features Belfer Terrorism Experts

Winter 2004-05

The January/February issue of The Atlantic Monthly included a feature story about terrorism. In his article, "Success Without Victory," James Fallows quotes several Belfer faculty and fellows about terrorism and its prevention.

"U.S. officials have refused to appear on al-Jazeera," says Steven Miller, the director of international security programs at the Belfer Center. "That's nuts! Yes, al-Jazeera is often a vitriol machine. But you have to engage it, or Arab publics hear nothing but the vitriol."

"Nobody can ‘prove' that it's wrong to have so little [budgeted] for ports and roads and railroads . . . says Daniel B. Prieto . . . a staff member for the House Select Committee on Homeland Security . . . now at the Belfer Center. But it sure doesn't seem right . . . when experts view insecure ports and cargo containers as among the most likely means of WMD entering the United States."

"Suppose the United States viewed the loose-nukes project as the equivalent of the race to the moon in the 1960s, or the search for a polio cure in the 1950s. Suppose it had to succeed, and as fast as possible. What might that cost? According to Graham Allison, the total might be as high as $30 billion over three years. America now spends that much every six months in Iraq."

"How would the terrorists get the bomb? The easiest way would be to buy one smuggled from the Soviet arsenal. ‘Since the accounting system in the USSR was so bad, you just don't know what went missing' in the turbulent years following the Soviet collapse, says Matthew Bunn, of STPP's Managing the Atom Project. ‘I would say there's stuff that got stolen that we don't know about, because there is stuff that got stolen we do know about.'"

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For Academic Citation: Atlantic Monthly Features Belfer Terrorism Experts.” Belfer Center Newsletter (Winter 2004-05).