Nuclear Babies Stillborn.(Brief Article)(Column)

NEW YORK, NOVEMBER 16

The Northern Alliance gang in Kabul reports that our air force had a really good hit, an American rocket that opened up a Taliban compound that seems to have been a library/laboratory for ultimate war. It stored, in the account of the Associated Press, "room after room filled with papers, formulas and maps some with handwritten Arabic notations." The Times of London reported written "descriptions of how the detonation of TNT compresses plutonium into a critical mass, sparking a chain reaction, and ultimately a thermonuclear reaction."

There is a way of contriving an optimistic reading of the Kabul Compound Library, with scattered notes on weapon construction. We can say we don't have much to fear from people who need Atom Bombs for Dummies manuals. That's true, but also it is apparently true that not a great deal of sophistication is required, given the presumptive knowledge of modern scientists, to piece together a nuclear device.

On the specific question of such weaponry in Afghanistan, we bear in mind that President Bush has declined to say that we know the enemy to be without a nuclear repository. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld would go no further than that he "doubted" they had such weapons. We know that two Pakistani nuclear scientists sympathetic to the Taliban were brought in and questioned in Islamabad. Stretching away from believable commentators on the question, we get to the statement of Osama bin Laden, that in the event the United States used chemical or nuclear weapons, he would retaliate in kind. How far they are (were) from developing a dirty bomb is a fit study for the Rand Corporation in years to come. What is a fit subject for the moment is concern over the critical need to take the loose information we have got from the sorcerers' apprentices loose in Afghanistan and apply it to strategic action elsewhere, specifically Iraq.

One reasons reasonably in the matter of nuclear weapons. If we learned at midnight that the Swiss had developed a nuclear bomb, ...