Experts Question Detection Unit’s Reach, Highlight Need for Overall U.S. Strategy on Nuclear Attack

By Joe Fiorill
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — A new Homeland Security Department office will not have the power to spearhead the much-needed global coordination of U.S. programs for preventing a nuclear terror attack, proponents of a higher-level “czar” on the problem said this week (see GSN, April 21).

Although ambiguous and still evolving, official characterizations of the Domestic Nuclear Detection Office’s mission have at times indicated a scope of activity broad enough to belie the new bureau’s name.

Officials have made reference to a potential key role for the office in integrating not only detection but also threat reduction, interdiction and other related U.S. programs around the world. According to two top experts and a lawmaker contacted by Global Security Newswire over the past few days, though, any such ambitions would be futile.

“I don’t think they’re set up in the right department, have the right authority or have the right mission statement to get the job done,” said Representative Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), who along with Representative Christopher Shays (R-Conn.) is sponsoring legislation to create a presidential Office of Nonproliferation Programs.

“They don’t have the power to dictate, to allocate budgetary resources, to command the president’s attention. A lot of this is international in scope. It’s not homeland security exclusively or even primarily,” Schiff said yesterday. “I think their title is really what they’re about first and foremost, which is detection, and they may be kind of adding on to the mission of this agency out of a sense that it was too narrowly conceived.”

The new office’s acting director, Vayl Oxford, told a House of Representatives Homeland Security subcommittee last week that the unit “is now responsible for developing an overall global architecture that assesses and links” a wide variety of detection, threat reduction, interdiction and other programs “in an effort to ensure that the nation proceeds with a single, comprehensive prevention and detection strategy.”

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff has at times used similarly broad language in describing the office, for which the Bush administration is requesting $227 million in fiscal 2006. Last week, Chertoff testified to a Senate Appropriations subcommittee about the new “joint national office to protect the nation from radiological and nuclear threats.”

The remarks by Oxford and Chertoff were contained within much longer statements that elsewhere focused mainly on nuclear detection technology and on setting policy for its use. Nevertheless, in their more ambitious interludes, they departed noticeably from initial government descriptions of the office.

Oxford’s reference to a “single, comprehensive prevention and detection strategy” set by the new office, for example, appeared to add to a Homeland Security fact sheet last week that made reference only to a “global nuclear detection architecture.”

The acting chief also offered what appeared to be the first list of non-Homeland Security programs — including the Energy Department’s Material Protection, Control and Accountability program, the Defense Department’s Cooperative Threat Reduction program and the State Department’s Export Control and Border Security program and Nonproliferation and Disarmament Fund — that the new office would “assess” and “link.”

The office’s eventual authority over such programs remains unclear. Homeland Security Undersecretary for Science and Technology Charles McQueary said two weeks ago that the detection office would “be responsible for the implementation of the domestic portion of the global architecture” but that Defense, Energy and State would keep policy and implementation responsibility for their various international programs.

Meanwhile, security experts and lawmakers such as Schiff and Shays continue to push for a top-level office to tie together U.S. national and international programs related to preventing a nuclear attack, particularly by terrorists. They say the role is not now filled anywhere in the federal government.

Schiff, Harvard University nuclear expert Graham Allison and Homeland Security Associates founder Randall Larsen all recommended creating an office within the White House to set overall strategy and tie together the disparate existing efforts.

A “czar” is needed, Allison said yesterday, simply “because you’ve got multiple agencies” working on the problem. The former assistant defense secretary recommended creating a position within the National Security Council whose occupant would focus single-mindedly on the spectrum of ways to keep would-be attackers from obtaining or using nuclear weapons.

Another agency that has been cited as a possible location for such a program is the proposed National Counterproliferation Center, which Bush’s WMD intelligence commission recommended last month (see GSN, April 1) and creation of which is stipulated in the mammoth intelligence reform bill Bush signed into law late last year (see GSN, Dec. 17, 2004). Definitions included in the law, though, make it clear that its scope “does not include” threat reduction activities or programs related to nonproliferation treaties.

Larsen said last week that the counterproliferation center could still be the proper setting for an overall leader on preventing a nuclear attack, but that such a position should not be placed under the national intelligence director, as some have suggested and as the center’s presence in the intelligence reform law could imply.

In Congress, a small but bipartisan group will continue to work for establishment of a czar position, said Schiff, despite being rebuffed in the past when seeking to include the project in legislation such as the intelligence bill.

“Right now it’s still a very small cadre of people. It’s a bipartisan cadre, but we’re not the majority,” he said. “There’s still not a buy-in by the leadership in Congress.”

As for the new detection office, he said, the effort is “fine as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go very far.”

“This office, housed where it’s housed, doesn’t seem to have that kind of responsibility,” he said. “If the president is serious that this is the No. 1 threat facing the country, then why is it a suboffice of a mammoth agency which is having trouble already with what’s under its roof?”

A lack of overall leadership of the sort envisioned by Schiff could be what is causing Homeland Security officials to contemplate a larger role for the detection office, Allison suggested. He said addressing detection alone on a global scale in the absence of a more general global structure would be difficult.

“This fellow starts thinking how do his job, and works way up the logic chain,” Allison said, but “he can’t call a meeting of Stratcom [the U.S. Strategic Command].”

Larsen said Oxford’s unit is not set up to succeed in reaching beyond detection.

“That would be great if he can do that,” he said, but “when you look at the whole statement that he has there — you know, why are they calling it domestic?”

Efforts to tie together programs to head off a nuclear attack are “sort of being written as we go,” Larsen said. The new detection office may ultimately do more than its name implies, he said, but the need for a White House-level czar would nonetheless remain.

“I think it’s improperly named,” he said, “and I think we should have someone in charge of preventing a nuclear attack on the U.S.”

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