Offcase AT Coast Guard T/Off DA

Non-unique- Coast Guard performance can’t solve as of the status quo.

• 
  Hopper 13- Washington D.C. Correspondent at The Day, internally quoting Vice Admiral John Currier (Kelsey, 12/12/13, “Budget cuts leave Coast Guard short of performance targets”, The Day, http://www.theday.com/article/20131212/NWS09/312129425/1018, accessed 7/20/14)//GZ
  

2AC --- Slayer

no link – plan gets funded by other agencies

Another potential issue for Congress, if it is determined that one or more new icebreakers should be procured by the government through a traditional acquisition, is whether the acquisition cost of those ships should be funded entirely through Coast Guard’s Acquisition, Construction, and Improvements (AC&I) account, or partly or entirely through other parts of the federal budget, such as the Department of Defense (DOD) budget, the NSF budget, or both.54 Within the DOD budget, possibilities include the Navy’s shipbuilding account, called the Shipbuilding and Conversion, Navy (SCN) account, and the National Defense Sealift Fund (NDSF), which is an account where DOD sealift ships and Navy auxiliary ships are funded.¶ There is precedent for funding Coast Guard icebreakers in the DOD budget: The procurement of Healy was funded in FY1990 in the DOD budget—specifically, the SCN account.55 Advocates of funding new icebreakers partly or entirely through the SCN account or the NDSF might argue that this could permit the funding of new icebreakers while putting less pressure on other parts of the Coast Guard’s budget. They might also argue that it would permit the new icebreaker program to benefit from the Navy’s experience in managing shipbuilding programs. Opponents might argue that funding new icebreakers in the SCN account or the NDSF might put pressure on these other two accounts at a time when the Navy and DOD are facing challenges funding their own shipbuilding and other priorities. They might also argue that having the Navy manage the Coast Guard’s icebreaker program would add complexity to the acquisition effort, and that it is unclear whether the Navy’s recent performance in managing shipbuilding programs is better than the Coast Guard’s, since both services have recently experienced problems in managing shipbuilding programs—the Coast Guard with the procurement of new Deepwater cutters, and the Navy in the Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) program and the LPD-17 class amphibious ship program.56

1AR—Slayer

The coast guard commander your ev cites advocates interagency funding

O’Rourke 6/5 (Ronald O’Rourke, Specialist in Naval Affairs, June 5^th 2014, “Coast Guard Polar Icebreaker Modernization: Background and Issues for Congress,” http://fas.org/sgp/crs/weapons/RL34391.pdf, HSA)

Note: ev is quoting Admiral Robert Papp

I can't afford to pay for an icebreaker in a 1-billion-dollar [per year] SIP [sic: CIP] because it would just displace other things that I have a higher priority for.¶ So we're looking at other alternatives, perhaps one of those alternatives, the Congress came up with a requirement for a business base analysis on the remaining Polar Seal [sic: Sea] icebreaker, Polar Sea and potentially, we might be able to overhaul Polar Sea and fit that into the SIP [sic: CIP] as an affordable means for providing an additional icebreaker as we await a time that we can build a new icebreaker.¶ If we are going to build a new icebreaker, if that is a priority, we just can't fit it within our acquisition account and I would look across the inter-agency [for the funding].6¶ The Coast Guard states on its Internet page for the polar icebreaker program that¶ In order to fully fund subsequent phases of this project, the Coast Guard believes that a “whole-of-government” approach will be necessary. Obtaining a new, heavy polar icebreaker that meets Coast Guard requirements will depend upon supplementary financing from other agencies whose activities also rely upon the nation possessing a robust, Arctic-capable surface fleet.62

Naval Power Impact Defense

No impact to naval power

Goure 10- Vice President, Lexington Institute, PhD (Daniel, 7/2/10 “Can The Case Be Made For Naval Power?”, Lexington Institute, http://www.lexingtoninstitute.org/can-the-case-be-made-for-naval-power-?a=1&c=1171

This is no longer the case. The U.S. faces no great maritime challengers. While China appears to be toying with the idea of building a serious Navy this is many years off. Right now it appears to be designing a military to keep others, including the United States, away, out of the Western Pacific and Asian littorals. But even if it were seeking to build a large Navy, many analysts argue that other than Taiwan it is difficult to see a reason why Washington and Beijing would ever come to blows. Our former adversary, Russia, would have a challenge fighting the U.S. Coast Guard, much less the U.S. Navy. After that, there are no other navies of consequence. Yes, there are some scenarios under which Iran might attempt to close the Persian Gulf to oil exports, but how much naval power would really be required to reopen the waterway? Actually, the U.S. Navy would probably need more mine countermeasures capabilities than it currently possesses. More broadly, it appears that the nature of the security challenges confronting the U.S. has changed dramatically over the past several decades. There are only a few places where even large-scale conventional conflict can be considered possible. None of these would be primarily maritime in character although U.S. naval forces could make a significant contribution by employing its offensive and defensive capabilities over land. For example, the administration’s current plan is to rely on sea-based Aegis missile defenses to protect regional allies and U.S. forces until a land-based variant of that system can be developed and deployed. The sea ways, sometimes called the global commons, are predominantly free of dangers. The exception to this is the chronic but relatively low level of piracy in some parts of the world. So, the classic reasons for which nations build navies, to protect its own shores and its commerce or to place the shores and commerce of other states in jeopardy, seem relatively unimportant in today’s world.

And, the United States navy cannot prevent inevitable conflict through deterrence

Daniel 2 (Donald C.F., “The Future of American Naval Power: Propositions and Recommendations,” Globalization and American Power. Chapter 27. Institute for National Strategic Studies National Defense University, http://www.ndu.edu/inss/Books/Books_2002/Globalization_and_Maritime_Power_Dec_02/0 1_toc.htm)

force should be employed to ensure that its comparative advantages are maximized with full recognition of where limits exist. The point of the above recommendations is to emphasis that naval forces possess unique flexibility as politico-military instruments, but there are also limitations to what they can achieve as elements of conventional deterrence to regional crises. Naval forces can be effective instruments in training toward interoperability with friends, allies, and potential coalition members and do appear to have a reassuring effect on treaty allies. But this does not necessarily require the current rigorous force deployment schedule. In the globalizing world, naval forces will be critical elements in responding to crises and will have a modest role in shaping the environment, but it is not certain that they can have considerable direct effect in deterring the inevitable politico-military crises that will occur in less stable regions buffeted by the effects of globalization. U.S. Navy force structure should be optimized for what it can do, not for tasks that cannot be proven effective.

Alt causes to navy power decline

Ewing 11-Staff Writer, DOD Buzz (Philip, 7/12/11, “Surface Navy: ‘We’re not good to go’”, DOD Buzz, http://www.dodbuzz.com/2011/07/12/surface-navy-were-not-good-to-go/)

A pair of top Navy officials admitted Tuesday that its endemic readiness problems are basically unresolved — and may keep getting worse — before the service’s plans to fix its surface fleet finally take effect. Vice Adm. Bill Burke, the Navy’s top maintenance officer; and Vice Adm. Kevin McCoy, head of Naval Sea Systems Command, told a House Armed Services Committee panel that it took so many years, and so many interconnected decisions, to put the surface Navy in its current state that it would take a lot of time and effort to get it right again. “We have a good plan,” McCoy told committee chairman Rep. Randy Forbes, a Virginia Republican, “We’re not good to go right now.” In fact, he said some negative indicators “may turn a little harsher.” Over the past five years and beyond, Navy inspections have found that a growing number of the Navy’s surface warships aren’t ready to fight: The ships are in bad physical shape, carry broken equipment, insufficient spare parts, and can’t even rely upon their advanced weapons and sensors. But despite years of embarrassing reports in the press and harangues from Congress and top DoD officials, the fleet has been slow to recover, given the wide range of causes for its woes. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, when the “running government like a business” craze swept the Pentagon, top leaders rewarded commanders who could get the job done for less money, which then sparked a flurry of inter-related decisions that had the net effect of reducing the readiness of the surface Navy: The Navy fielded smaller crews, making fewer hands available for regular maintenance; it cut human-led, hands-on instruction, preferring to teach sailors their jobs using “computer-based instruction,” which meant they weren’t qualified to do their jobs at sea. And simple budget cuts meant ships didn’t get the regular maintenance or spare parts they needed. On top of all this, Navy commanders blame an increase in operational tempo, which meant more demands on their smaller, poorly maintained fleet, which meant less time and money to do the full-scale repairs ships need to keep them in service for their design lives. Crews realized all these problems at the operational level, but it has taken years to get the top brass to acknowledge the failures of initiatives such as “top 6 roll-down,” “lean manning,” and the “fleet response plan.” According to Tuesday’s hearing, all those problems are more or less still in effect, although Burke and McCoy told Forbes they acknowledge what’s wrong and they know what they have to do to fix it. The surface Navy is doing the inconvenient, expensive maintenance it has long put off, McCoy said, because it now accepts the need to keep ships around for their full lives — something the Navy traditionally has not done. McCoy gave the example of the cruiser USS Chosin, now in dry-dock in Hawaii: Initially the repair bill for that ship was estimated at $35 million, McCoy said, but when engineers did their deep inspections and discovered the state of its tanks, pipes and other equipment, they realized they would have to spend $70 million to get the ship into the best shape they could. This is why McCoy and Burke warned the Navy could continue to have bad results on its inspections, as long-hidden problems finally come into view. McCoy and Burke said that about 70 percent of the Navy’s hoped-for fleet of 313 ships is in service today, but the service can only get to that goal if all its destroyers and cruisers, for example, actually serve for their full 40 or 35 years. But Congress has heard Navy leaders give this explanation many times before, Forbes said. He pointed to statistics that showed an ever-growing number of Navy warships were being found unready each year — from 12 percent in 2009 to 24 percent last year, and 22 percent already this year. What is the Navy’s target for that number? Forbes asked. McCoy and Burke said the service is in the process of formulating one, but it’s a complicated situation. Forbes complained that defense witnesses always come before Congress with a plan for how they’ll get better, but they seldom appear to be able to act on it; as when DoD was unable to even conduct the basic audits of itself that officials promised they would. McCoy and Burke repeated that the Navy is “stretched” by the number of forces it must provide to combatant commanders, who Burke said want more carriers, aircraft and submarines than the Navy can deploy in answer. Burke, a submariner, said that combatant commanders want between 16 and 18 nuclear attack submarines at any one time, but the Navy only has enough to deploy 10. He and McCoy said the Navy wasn’t forcing commanders to miss missions, but that the rate of operations today was affecting the surface fleet’s ability to do maintenance and could hurt the service lives of its ships. Overall, the admirals warned, today’s operational tempo is “unsustainable.” But Forbes alluded to a classified report from the combatant commanders that he suggested found the Navy was forcing them to miss missions, although he said he and the witnesses couldn’t talk about it in open session. Forbes also blasted the Navy’s decision to under-fund its depot maintenance for ships and aircraft, a calculated risk by service officials to defer work in order to afford other priorities. Forbes hinted at a high “cannibalization” rate in the surface force, alluding to the practice in which crews’ swap their ships’ equipment when inspectors are due so they aren’t dinged for non-functional gear. Although surface sailors quietly talk about this practice among themselves, it’s very seldom broached publicly, and the Navy brass denies it happens.

Naval power is strong and resilient – even with a net decrease in fleet size, the US Navy has only gotten stronger

Farley 07, Dr. Robert Farley is an Assistant Professor at the Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce. He specializes in National Security Policy, Defense Statecraft, History of Strategy, Airpower, Asian Security, Seapower, Military Diffusion, and Maritime Affairs, (“The False Decline of the U.S. Navy”, http://prospect.org/article/false-decline-us-navy, 11/23/2007) Kerwin

We live in strange times. While the United States is responsible for close to 50 percent of aggregate world military expenditure, and maintains close alliances with almost all of the other major military powers, a community of defense analysts continues to insist that we need to spend more. In the November issue of The Atlantic, Robert Kaplan asserts that United States hegemony is under the threat of “elegant decline,” and points to what conventional analysts might suggest is the most secure element of American power; the United States Navy. Despite the fact that the U.S. Navy remains several orders of magnitude more powerful than its nearest rival, Kaplan says that we must beware; if we allow the size of our Navy to further decline, we risk repeating the experience of the United Kingdom in the years before World War I. Unfortunately, since no actual evidence of U.S. naval decline exists, Kaplan is forced to rely on obfuscation, distortion, and tendentious historical analogies to make his case. The centerpiece of Kaplan’s argument is a comparison of the current U.S. Navy to the British Royal Navy at the end of the 19th century. The decline of the Royal Navy heralded the collapse of British hegemony, and the decline of the U.S. Navy threatens a similar fate for the United States. The only problem with this argument is that similarities between the 21st century United States and the 19th century United Kingdom are more imagined than real. It’s true that the relative strength of the Royal Navy declined at the end of the 19th century, but this was due entirely the rise of the United States and Germany. But the absolute strength of the Royal Navy increased in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as the United Kingdom strove to maintain naval dominance over two countries that possessed larger economies and larger industrial bases than that of Great Britain. In other words, the position of the Royal Navy declined because the position of the United Kingdom declined; in spite of this decline, the Royal Navy continued to dominate the seas against all comers until 1941. Britain’s relative economic decline preceded its naval decline, although the efforts to keep up with Germany, the United States, and later Japan did serious damage to the British economy. The United States faces a situation which is in no way similar. Returning to the present, Kaplan takes note of the growth of several foreign navies, including the Indian, Chinese, and Japanese. He points out that the Japanese Navy has a large number of destroyers and a growing number of submarines. He warns that India “may soon have the world’s third largest navy” without giving any indication of why that matters. Most serious of all, he describes the threat of a growing Chinese Navy and claims that, just as the Battle of Wounded Knee opened a new age for American imperialism, the conquest of Taiwan could transform China into an expansionist, imperial power. The curious historical analogies aside, Kaplan is careful to make no direct comparisons between the growing navies of foreign countries and the actual strength of the United States Navy. There’s a good reason for this oversight; there is no comparison between the U.S. Navy and any navy afloat today. The United States Navy currently operates eleven aircraft carriers. The oldest and least capable is faster, one third larger, and carries three times the aircraft of Admiral Kuznetsov, the largest carrier in the Russian Navy. Unlike China’s only aircraft carrier, the former Russian Varyag, American carriers have engines and are capable of self-propulsion. The only carrier in Indian service is fifty years old and a quarter the size of its American counterparts. No navy besides the United States' has more than one aircraft carrier capable of flying modern fixed wing aircraft. The United States enjoys similar dominance in surface combat vessels and submarines, operating twenty-two cruisers, fifty destroyers, fifty-five nuclear attack submarines, and ten amphibious assault ships (vessels roughly equivalent to most foreign aircraft carriers). In every category the U.S. Navy combines presumptive numerical superiority with a significant ship-to-ship advantage over any foreign navy. This situation is unlikely to change anytime soon. The French Navy and the Royal Navy will each expand to two aircraft carriers over the next decade. The most ambitious plans ascribed to the People’s Liberation Army Navy call for no more than three aircraft carriers by 2020, and even that strains credulity, given China’s inexperience with carrier operations and the construction of large military vessels. While a crash construction program might conceivably give the Chinese the ability to achieve local dominance (at great cost and for a short time), the United States Navy will continue to dominate the world’s oceans and littorals for at least the next fifty years. In order to try to show that the U.S. Navy is insufficient in the face of future threats, Kaplan argues that we on are our way to “a 150 ship navy” that will be overwhelmed by the demands of warfighting and global economic maintenance. He suggests that the “1,000 Ship Navy” proposal, an international plan to streamline cooperation between the world’s navies on maritime maintenance issues such as piracy, interdiction of drug and human smuggling, and disaster relief, is an effort at “elegant decline,” and declares that the dominance of the United States Navy cannot be maintained through collaboration with others. It’s true that a 600 ship navy can do more than the current 250-plus ship force of the current U.S. Navy, but Kaplan’s playing a game of bait and switch. The Navy has fewer ships than it did two decades ago, but the ships it has are far more capable than those of the 1980s. Because of the collapse of its competitors, the Navy is relatively more capable of fighting and winning wars now than it was during the Reagan administration. Broadly speaking, navies have two missions; warfighting, and maritime maintenance. Kaplan wants to confuse the maritime maintenance mission (which can be done in collaboration with others) with the warfighting mission (which need not be). A navy can require the cooperation of others for the maintenance mission, while still possessing utter military superiority over any one navy or any plausible combination of navies on the high seas. Indeed, this is the situation that the United States Navy currently enjoys. It cannot be everywhere all at once, and does require the cooperation of regional navies for fighting piracy and smuggling. At the same time, the U.S. Navy can destroy any (and probably all, at the same time) naval challengers. To conflate these two missions is equal parts silly and dishonest. The Navy has arrived at an ideal compromise between the two, keeping its fighting supremacy while leading and facilitating cooperation around the world on maritime issues. This compromise has allowed the Navy to build positive relationships with the navies of the world, a fact that Kaplan ignores. While asserting the dangers posed by a variety of foreign navies, Kaplan makes a distortion depressingly common to those who warn of the decline of American hegemony; he forgets that the United States has allies. While Kaplan can plausibly argue that growth in Russian or Chinese naval strength threatens the United States, the same cannot reasonably be said of Japan, India, France, or the United Kingdom. With the exception of China and Russia, all of the most powerful navies in the world belong to American allies. United States cooperation with the navies of NATO, India, and Japan has tightened, rather than waned in the last ten years, and the United States also retains warm relations with third tier navies such as those of South Korea, Australia, and Malaysia. In any conceivable naval confrontation the United States will have friends, just as the Royal Navy had friends in 1914 and 1941. Robert Kaplan wants to warn the American people of the dangers of impending naval decline. Unfortunately, he’s almost entirely wrong on the facts. While the reach of the United States Navy may have declined in an absolute sense, its capacity to fight and win naval wars has, if anything, increased since the end of the Cold War. That the United States continues to embed itself in a deep set of cooperative arrangements with other naval powers only reinforces the dominance of the U.S. Navy on the high seas. Analysts who want to argue for greater U.S. military spending are best advised to concentrate on the fiascos in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Terror Impact Defense

No risk of attack inside the US

Mueller 6- national security expert and author of Overblown [John, December 13, “Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats, and Why We Believe Them,” Cato Institute, http://www.cato.org/event.php?eventid=3367]

Instead, Americans are told--often by the same people who had once predicted imminent attacks--that the absence of international terrorist strikes in the United States is owed to the protective measures so hastily and expensively put in place after 9/11. But there is a problem with this argument. True, there have been no terrorist incidents in the United States in the last five years. But nor were there any in the five years before the 9/11 attacks, at a time when the United States was doing much less to protect itself. It would take only one or two guys with a gun or an explosive to terrorize vast numbers of people, as the sniper attacks around Washington, D.C., demonstrated in 2002. Accordingly, the government's protective measures would have to be nearly perfect to thwart all such plans. Given the monumental imperfection of the government's response to Hurricane Katrina, and the debacle of FBI and National Security Agency programs to upgrade their computers to better coordinate intelligence information, that explanation seems far-fetched. Moreover, Israel still experiences terrorism even with a far more extensive security apparatus. It may well have become more difficult for terrorists to get into the country, but, as thousands demonstrate each day, it is far from impossible. Immigration procedures have been substantially tightened (at considerable cost), and suspicious U.S. border guards have turned away a few likely bad apples. But visitors and immigrants continue to flood the country. There are over 300 million legal entries by foreigners each year, and illegal crossings number between 1,000 and 4,000 a day--to say nothing of the generous quantities of forbidden substances that the government has been unable to intercept or even detect despite decades of a strenuous and well-funded "war on drugs." Every year, a number of people from Muslim countries-perhaps hundreds--are apprehended among the illegal flow from Mexico, and many more probably make it through. Terrorism does not require a large force. And the 9/11 planners, assuming Middle Eastern males would have problems entering the United States legally after the attack, put into motion plans to rely thereafter on non-Arabs with passports from Europe and Southeast Asia. If al Qaeda operatives are as determined and inventive as assumed, they should be here by now. If they are not yet here, they must not be trying very hard or must be far less dedicated, diabolical, and competent than the common image would suggest. Another popular explanation for the fact that there have been no more attacks asserts that the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, although it never managed to snag bin Laden, severely disrupted al Qaeda and its operations. But this claim is similarly unconvincing. The 2004 train bombings in Madrid were carried out by a tiny group of men who had never been to Afghanistan, much less to any of al Qaeda's training camps. They pulled off a coordinated nonsuicidal attack with 13 remote-controlled bombs, ten of which went off on schedule, killing 191 and injuring more than 1,800. The experience with that attack, as well as with the London bombings of 2005, suggests that, as the former U.S. counterterrorism officials Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon have noted, for a terrorist attack to succeed, "all that is necessary are the most portable, least detectable tools of the terrorist trade: ideas." It is also sometimes suggested that the terrorists are now too busy kilting Americans and others in Iraq to devote the time, manpower, or energy necessary to pull off similar deeds in the United States. But terrorists with al Qaeda sympathies or sensibilities have managed to carry out attacks in Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Spain, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere in the past three years; not every single potential bomb thrower has joined the fray in Iraq. Perhaps, some argue, terrorists are unable to mount attacks in the United States because the Muslim community there, unlike in many countries in Europe, has been well integrated into society. But the same could be said about the United Kingdom, which experienced a significant terrorist attack in 2005. And European countries with less well-integrated Muslim communities, such as Germany, France, and Norway, have yet to experience al Qaeda terrorism. Indeed, if terrorists are smart, they will avoid Muslim communities because that is the lamppost under which policing agencies are most intensely searching for them. The perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks were ordered generally to stay away from mosques and American Muslims. That and the Madrid plot show that tiny terrorist conspiracies hardly need a wider support network to carry out their schemes. Another common explanation is that al Qaeda is craftily biding its time. But what for? The 9/11 attacks took only about two years to prepare. The carefully coordinated, very destructive, and politically productive terrorist attacks in Madrid in 2004 were conceived, planned from scratch, and then executed all within six months; the bombs were set off less than two months after the conspirators purchased their first supplies of dynamite, paid for with hashish. (Similarly, Timothy McVeigh's attack in Oklahoma City in 1995 took less than a year to plan.) Given the extreme provocation of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, one would think that terrorists might be inclined to shift their timetable into higher gear. And if they are so patient, why do they continually claim that another attack is just around the corner? It was in 2003 that al Qaeda's top leaders promised attacks in Australia, Bahrain, Egypt, Italy, Japan, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United States, and Yemen. Three years later, some bombs had gone off in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Yemen, and Jordan (as well as in the unlisted Turkey) but not in any other of the explicitly threatened countries. Those attacks were tragic, but their sparseness could be taken as evidence that it is not only American alarmists who are given to extravagant huffing and puffing

9/11 was the anomaly – terrorist attacks don’t cause retaliation.

Mueller 05- Chair of National Security Studies and Professor of Political Science Ohio State University,(John, “Six Rather Unusual Propositions about Terrorism,” Terrorism and Political Violence, p.500-501)

Although it is often argued that it is imperative that public officials ‘‘do something’’— which usually means overreact—when a terrorist event takes place, there are many instances where no reaction took place and the officials did not suffer politically or otherwise. Ronald Reagan’s response to a terrorist bomb in Lebanon in 1983 that killed 241 American Marines was to make a few speeches and eventually to pull the troops out. Bill Clinton responded similarly after an unacceptable loss of American lives in Somalia ten years later. Although there werethe (apparently counterproductive) military retaliations after the U.S. embassy bombings in Africa in 1998 as noted earlier, there was no notable response to terrorist attacks on American targets in Saudi Arabia (Khobar Towers) in 1996 or to the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000. The response to the anthrax attacks of 2001 was the same as to terrorist attacks against the World Trade Center in 1993 and in Oklahoma City in 1995— the dedicated application of police work to try to apprehend the perpetrator—and this proved to be politically acceptable. The demands for retaliation tend to be more problematic in the case of suicide terrorists since the direct perpetrators of the terrorist act are already dead. Nonetheless, the attacks in Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and against the Cole were all suicidal, yet no direct retaliatory action was taken. Thus, despite short-term demands that some sort of action must be taken, experience suggests politicians can often successfully ride out this demand after the obligatory (and inexpensive) expressions of outrage are issued.

Stealing and striking a city with stolen nuclear material would be next to impossible – constant maintenance and the ability for material to be tracked make an attack unlikely.

Choong 2k9 - Senior Writer at The Straits Times(William, Jan 16, Senior Writer at The Straits Times, “Fear is the worst enemy in war on terror,” Lexis)

The juxtaposition of those two words - 'nuclear' and 'terrorism' - evokes fear. The detonation of an atomic device by terrorists could conceivably lead to the deaths of thousands, if not tens of thousands, of people. According to a 2006 article written by Harvard professor Matthew Bunn, the economic cost of a nuclear terrorist attack would be US $1.2 trillion (S $1.8 trillion) over 10 years. To say that such an attack would have an impact on the global economy - including Singapore's - would be an understatement. No one quibbles with the argument that the threat of nuclear terrorism has to be assessed coolly and tackled with determination. There are, however, considerable grounds for optimism. The spectre of nuclear terrorism was first raised in 1946 by Robert Oppenheimer, a prime architect of the A-bomb. He warned that a few men could smuggle nuclear bomb units into New York and blow up the city. In the mid-1970s, analysts warned of suitcase-sized nuclear devices that could be used by terrorists. Since 1946, however, no attack as conceived by Oppenheimer has occurred. In addition, experts point out that none of these so-called 'suitcase bombs' - which were built in the former Soviet Union before 1991 - have been lost. And since they require constant maintenance, their effectiveness by now would also be very low. Essentially, terrorists have two major routes to a nuclear device: getting or buying it from a nuclear-armed state or building one themselves. Getting a bomb from a nuclear-state is a formidable task, since such states know that the source of a nuclear weapon can be easily tracked. Mr Stephen Younger, the former head of the US Defence Threat Reduction Agency, says that regardless of what is reported in the media, 'all nuclear nations take the security of their nuclear weapons very seriously'.

Having instructions does not guarantee success – the odds of actually constructing and detonating a nuclear weapon is one in over three billion

Choong 2k9 - Senior Writer at The Straits Times (William, Jan 16, Senior Writer at The Straits Times, “Fear is the worst enemy in war on terror,” Lexis)

This leaves the second route: terrorists building a nuclear device themselves. And arguably, nuclear terrorists can find do-it-yourself instructions for a nuclear weapon, albeit crude ones, on the Internet. Having the blueprint for a weapon, however, does not guarantee the production of that weapon. In the estimation of Professor John Mueller, a political scientist at Ohio University, terrorists will have to successfully navigate about 20 steps to build an improvised nuclear device - and all the steps must be achieved. These include processes centred on producing, transporting and detonating the device. If the terrorist group has a 50 per cent chance of success for each step, the odds of the group pulling off all the steps would be one in a million. If each step involves a 33 per cent chance of success, the odds of pulling off all of them would drop to one in over three billion, Prof Mueller says in an e-mail in reply to questions by this newspaper.

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