THE RISING EAST

By Richard Halloran

President Bush and Sen. John Kerry evidently surprised and puzzled their audiences during their first debate when they both pointed to nuclear proliferation as the greatest threat to the security of the United States.

The alacrity and agreement of their answers surprised national security analysts, several of whom immediately surmised in private that the president and senator had seen intelligence reports that had not been disclosed to the public.

Voters who worry about paying their rent or mortgages or wonder how they will get their children into college seemed puzzled because nuclear proliferation is an arcane topic not high on their daily agendas.

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President Bush and Sen. John Kerry both called nuclear proliferation the greatest external threat facing the United States. This might have surprised debate watchers. However, it's a point worth taking seriously. Associated Press

Kerry, who was the first to be asked to define the greatest threat to the national security, hardly waited for it to be uttered before blurting out: "Nuclear proliferation." He added that terrorists are "trying to get their hands on that stuff today."

Bush said: "I agree with my opponent that the biggest threat facing this country is weapons of mass destruction in the hands of a terrorist network." Weapons of mass destruction include chemical and biological weapons, but the term today primarily means nuclear arms.

Recent Pentagon studies assert that today's nuclear threat is far different from that of the Cold War when, according to one assessment, "the nuclear posture had one central purpose: to deter the Soviet Union."

Instead, the Defense Science Board reported, the chief danger now comes from terrorists or rogue nations. A task force of specialists called them "urgent emerging threats" that require new "strategic strike capabilities" to destroy them before they could attack the United States.

"When striking rogue or terrorist leadership," the report said, "the mission is to kill the leaders themselves." Earlier nuclear doctrine called for destroying military targets.

The task force did not name the terrorists or rogue nations but left little doubt that it was referring to al-Qaida, the Islamic network that mounted the assaults of 9/11; affiliates like Jemaah Islamiya in Southeast Asia; North Korea and Iran.

A report by Jonathan Medalia of the Congressional Research Service says the most likely source from which terrorists could acquire a nuclear bomb are the "loose nukes" floating around nations that were formerly part of the Soviet Union with minimum security to keep them out of dangerous hands.

A second likely source is Pakistan, where extremists in the armed forces could provide covert assistance to Muslim terrorists or overthrow the government in Islamabad to gain access to the weapons.

Still other sources could be the 130 nuclear reactors in 40 countries, many of which have little more security than a night watchman and a chain-link fence. As the technology for making a crude nuclear device has become known over the 59 years since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, terrorists could even make their own.

Stopping terrorists from delivering a nuclear weapon would be far more difficult than deterring Russia, China or even North Korea, which have targets of value, including capitals and leaders. Terrorist leaders are hard to trace — witness Osama bin Laden, who is believed to have sought a nuclear weapon and is still at large three years after 9/11.

As Medalia wrote: "If terrorists acquired a nuclear weapon, they could use many means in an attempt to bring it into the United States. This nation has many thousands of miles of land and sea borders, as well as several hundred ports of entry. Terrorists might smuggle a weapon across lightly guarded stretches of borders, ship it in using a cargo container, place it in the hold of a crude-oil tanker, or bring it in using a truck, a boat or a small airplane."

If a bomb with only two-thirds the power of the Hiroshima bomb were detonated at ground level in the center of a big city, 500,000 people would be killed immediately and hundreds of thousands more would be injured. Damage could exceed $1 trillion. The consequent chaos could halt the nation's economy.

And given the role of the U.S. economy in the world, the harm to the economies of other nations would be incalculable. Thus Bush and Kerry seemed, if anything, to be understating the danger to everyone of nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorists.

Richard Halloran of Honolulu is a former New York Times correspondent in Asia.