An American Hiroshima

What's this? Nicolas Kristof, on the opinion pages of the New York Times (!), admits that maybe there is something to all of this war on terror nonsense:

Dragonfire's report was wrong, but similar reports - that Al Qaeda has its hands on a nuclear weapon from the former Soviet Union - have regularly surfaced in the intelligence community, even though such a report has never been confirmed. We do know several troubling things: Al Qaeda negotiated for a $1.5 million purchase of uranium (apparently of South African origin) from a retired Sudanese cabinet minister; its envoys traveled repeatedly to Central Asia to buy weapons-grade nuclear materials; and Osama bin Laden's top deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, boasted, 'We sent our people to Moscow, to Tashkent, to other Central Asian states, and they negotiated, and we purchased some suitcase [nuclear] bombs.

Of course, it has the obligatory "Iraq war was a distraction" meme - Kristof can't get his mind around the concept that Arab tyranny is the major reason for the hopelessness that cultures terrorism - but the article is a serious study of the enormity of the task before us: preventing a nuclear sneak attack on our political and financial centers of power.
- posted by total @ 8/13/2004 05:35:00 AM .