Additional Links Regarding our 2006 World Citizen Award Recipient:

 

Professional Bio: Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs

Director of Harvard's major Center for Science and International Affairs, Graham Allison has for three decades been a leading analyst of U.S. national security and defense policy with a special interest in terrorism.  (Source: www.harvard.edu)

 

Article: How Good is American Intelligence on Iran's Bomb?

 

The US should be wary of progress in the Iranian nuclear standoff that could either be promising or illusory. Without discounting recent diplomatic achievements, Graham Allison, a former US defense official and a leading analyst of national security and nuclear weapons, cautions that US intelligence on Iran’s nuclear program may not be accurate. US intelligence officers could be drastically underestimating Iran’s nuclear weapons capability, as much as they overestimated Iraq’s weapons capability. The consensus of the US intelligence community is that Iran won’t be capable of manufacturing a nuclear bomb for at least five years, but that could be dangerously naïve. The US must fill in the gaps in its knowledge – or the “known unknowns,” to use the words of US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Allison lists four unknowns and ends with a warning – that Iran’s covert nuclear program could be more advanced than its overt program. Opponents of Iran’s nuclear capability could yet discover that Iran has made great strides undercover. (Source: Yale Global Online)

 

Article: The Ongoing Failure of Imagination (Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Sept./Oct. 2006)

 

Prior to 9/11, most Americans found the idea that international terrorists could mount an attack on their homeland and kill thousands of innocent citizens not just unlikely, but inconceivable. Psychologically, Americans imagined that they lived in a security bubble. Terrorist attacks, including those on U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, occurred elsewhere. These beliefs were reinforced by the conventional wisdom among terrorism experts, who argued that terrorists sought not mass casualties but rather mass sympathy through limited attacks that called attention to their cause.

As we approach the fifth year without a second successful terrorist attack upon U.S. soil, a chorus of skeptics now suggests that 9/11 was a 100-year flood. They conveniently forget the deadly explosions in Bali, Madrid, London, and Mumbai, and dismiss scores of attacks planned against the United States and others that have been disrupted. [1]  The idea that terrorists are currently preparing even more deadly assaults seems as far-fetched to them as the possibility of terrorists crashing passenger jets into the World Trade Center did before that fateful Tuesday morning.

As one attempts to assess where we now stand, and what the risks are, the major conclusion of the bipartisan 9/11 Commission deserves repetition: The principal failure to act to prevent the September 11 attack was a "failure of imagination." [2]  A similar failure of imagination leads many today to discount the risk of a nuclear 9/11.

Interview: Preparing for Terrorism (PBS)

There are any number of reasons why we should be worried about the dirty bomb menace, says nuclear terrorism expert Graham Allison, director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University and former Assistant Secretary of Defense under President Clinton. Among them: Radioactive substances are everywhere; anyone can build a dirty bomb; and Al Qaeda has sought to make or acquire one. There is also one reason why we shouldn't be so worried, Allison says, and that's because a far more threatening sword of Damocles hangs over our heads: a potential terrorist attack with a nuclear bomb. To better grasp the scope of these very different threats, NOVA interviewed Allison in his office at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government in Harvard Square, across the Charles River from Boston.

(Source:www.pbs.org)

 

Article: "How to Stop Terrorism" (Foreign Affairs Jan/Feb. 2004)

President Bush has called nuclear terror the defining threat the United States now faces. He's right, but he has yet to follow up his words with actions. This is especially frustrating since nuclear terror is preventable. Washington needs a strategy based on the "Three No's": no loose nukes, no nascent nukes, and no new nuclear states.

(Source: www.foreignaffairs.org)

 

List of Publications - http://ksgfaculty.harvard.edu/Graham_Allison

 

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The World Citizen Award Dinner is held annually to raise funds for programming offered by the World Affairs Council of Charlotte and to recognize a notable individual with ties to the Carolinas.