Robert Gates and America's Nuclear Future

If you haven't done so already, you should head on over to the main page and read the speech that Defense Secretary Robert Gates delivered to the Carnegie Endowment on the future of America's nuclear weapons.

In it, Gates discusses the future of deterrence. He says:

Today we also make clear that the United States will hold any state, terrorist group, or other non-state actor or individual fully accountable for supporting or enabling terrorist efforts to obtain or use weapons of mass destruction – whether by facilitating, financing, or providing expertise or safe haven for such efforts. To add teeth to the deterrent goal of this policy, we are pursuing new technologies to identify the forensic signatures of any nuclear material used in an attack – to trace it back to the source.

This is something that sounds right at first blush, but I wonder how feasible it really is. We know that two Pakistani nuclear scientists met with bin Laden in 2001. Should Pakistan be held responsible for (God forbid) a future act of nuclear terrorism by al-Qaeda? What about rogue scientists or military officers acting without the knowledge of the government? How do you weigh the impact of stealth cooperation among various government officials or scientists? How do you determine culpability?

And what about Russia? There is ample worry that a conspiracy (or just sheer inattention or corruption) among corrupt military officials could see nuclear material transferred to terrorists - if not a working bomb, then significant components or fissile material. If that were the case, clearly the U.S. would not launch a nuclear attack against Russia. They could nuke back!