Can Nuclear Terrorism Be Deterred?

**Senior U.S. officials are debating whether to rewrite the rules of deterrence, focusing on ways to deal with a possible terrorist attack involving a nuclear weapon. As the New York Times reports:

Every week, a group of experts from agencies around the government — including the C.I.A., the Pentagon, the F.B.I. and the Energy Department — meet to assess Washington’s progress toward solving a grim problem: if a terrorist set off a nuclear bomb in an American city, could the United States determine who detonated it and who provided the nuclear material?

So far, the answer is maybe.

That uncertainty lies at the center of a vigorous, but carefully cloaked, debate within the Bush administration. It focuses on how to refashion the American approach to nuclear deterrence in an attempt to counter the threat posed by terrorists who could obtain bomb-grade uranium or plutonium to make and deliver a weapon.

A previously undisclosed meeting last year of President Bush’s most senior national security advisers was the highest level discussion about how to rewrite the cold war rules. The existing approach to deterrence dates from the time when the nuclear attacks Washington worried about would be launched by missiles and bombers, which can be tracked back to a source by radar, and not carried in backpacks or hidden in cargo containers.

I'm not sure this debate is as "cloaked" as the article suggests; officials lately have been increasingly vocal about working on nuclear attribution, an ability that dates back to Cold War-era analysis of Soviet tests. In fact, Bill Broad published an article in the New York Times in 2004 detailing attempts -- even prior to 9/11 -- to bone up on attribution analysis. There's also been a great deal of discussionof this concept as a factor in deterrence, including some of the pitfalls.