A noted nuclear weapons scientist deplores what he calls "government chicanery on nuclear threats."
"Immediately after World War II, the U.S. government's prediction, shared by the bulk of the knowledgeable U.S. scientific community, was that the Soviet Union would not test its first A-bomb for at least a decade," recalls nuclear weapons scientist Sam Cohen. "The USSR was so bogged down by socialist incompetence," he explains, "that it was [considered] incapable of accomplishing the U.S Manhattan Project miracle. But, in fact, its first test came along only a few years after these negative predictions. Of course, as usually has been the case where nuclear matters are involved, the predictions [were distorted by] more than a small element of politics."
Writing in a recent issue of the Washington Inquirer, Cohen warns that America faces a similar situation today. There is no consensus as to when the U.S. will become "vulnerable to nuclear ballistic missile threats from Third World rogue nations such as Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, and North Korea, which bear considerable hostility toward the U.S. The position openly taken by U.S. intelligence that there is no danger of attack for at least 10 years is very much akin to that existing on the Soviet A-bomb half a century ago," Cohen observes. "The administration, now that the old Soviet nuclear threat allegedly is gone, certainly doesn't wish to alarm the American people about a new threat sufficiently close at hand as to call for an ABM system."
The assertion that "a determined rogue nation will need at least 15 years to attain an ICBM capability is technically irresponsible and politically duplicitous, dangerously so," Cohen charges. For one thing, such a view presumes the development of massive, heavy-yield weapons like our own, rather than smaller, more mobile, more concealable missiles. "Practically all the technology to build such small missiles has long been in the public domain," Cohen contends, "and there is no reason why a country such as Iran . . . can't achieve such a capability within several years [especially] if they brought in Russian scientific and engineering defectors."
Sam Cohen cites "another facet of this problem that is never brought out by the government and rarely, if ever, brought out by the mainstream media. This has to do with the nature of requirements for nuclear warheads and missiles that rogue nations establish," he explains. "Whereas practically everyone agrees that these nations have a political mindset drastically different from that of the U.S., few, if any, bother to think that their nuclear weapons system requirements may be far more dominated by political rather than military performance considerations."
In other words, fanatic anti-Americans determined to exact symbolic vengeance on the United States may not really care exactly what their missiles hit, or just how much damage they do. Unburdened by our commitment to precision targeting and maximum impact, "rogue nations can far more quickly develop missiles adequate to inflict untold damage in the U.S." Cohen's analysis proves that there's no time to lose in building the anti-missile defenses we need to protect American lives.
