Counterproliferation in the 21st Century By Michael Jacobson

Counterproliferation in the 21st Century
By Michael Jacobson

This afternoon, the Washington Institute hosted Ambassador Ken Brill, the director of the National Counterproliferation Center, as part of a speaker series with senior national security officials.

Here is an excerpt of his remarks:

In an era of globalization – where advanced scientific and technical knowledge and capabilities have spread beyond the major powers and where states are not the only global actors that matter – we must understand that the challenge of countering the proliferation of WMD has taken on new dimensions.

WMD is a 20th century phenomenon being made more complex by these 21st Century realities. If you Google the words “how to build a nuclear bomb,” you get more than 6.5 million results. Even when you subtract for the cranks, kooks and uninformed, the results are still a very significant number. The knowledge is out there, the expertise is out there, the drive – seen most clearly in states like North Korea and terrorist groups like Al-Qa’ida – is out there – and the materials can be found.

To be effective, we must adapt our approaches for countering WMD proliferation to the realities of the 21st Century. The WMD oligopoly – that is to say, where only a few states had the means to produce WMD – is a thing of the past.

We now live in what is close to an open market, where many states have the scientific and technological capabilities required to produce WMD and where networks like A.Q. Khan’s – the subject of The Nuclear Jihadist – and other non-state actors can distribute and acquire a wide range of capabilities once reserved for states. The destructive power of WMD, as one scholar has noted, is spreading downwards and outwards.

But let’s be clear – this globalized world does not exacerbate and complicate just nuclear threats. Biological capabilities, as the National Academy’s National Research Council wrote in 2006, have grown and spread even more dramatically.

To read the entire prepared remarks,

http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/html/pdf/brill20090804.pdf