Intelligence estimate warns of terrorist, nuke sleeper cells in the US - India News and Travel Times Provides India-centric and other News and Features

The United States is faced with an enemy with 'no scruples about employing any weapon or tactic,' a top secret National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) has said. According to a report in the New York Times, nuclear weapons smuggled across porous borders could devastate American cities, and the document also warned that sleeper cells might already be in the country. According to the paper, a broad range of security experts agree that nuclear terrorism may well be the most serious danger the United States faces today. This is not a new development. Hundreds of pages of declassified documents from the 1950s, obtained by The New York Times from the F.B.I. under the Freedom of Information Act, lay out a strikingly familiar story, in which Communist agents played the role of today’s Al Qaeda . Then, as now, investigators searched for agents they feared were in the United States awaiting orders to attack. Then, too, the government spent millions to install radiation detectors at airports and seaports despite doubts about their effectiveness. Micah Zenko, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations ( CFR ), who has written on nuclear history, said: “The fear of a clandestine nuclear attack on American soil goes back to the very beginning of the nuclear era. There’s certainly nothing new here, even if they didn’t call it terrorism back in the ’50s.” Most security experts believe the focus in recent years on destroying or locking up nuclear material is far more effective than sealing American borders. The global effort to reduce the threat was advanced at the summit meeting in Washington this week, with commitments from many countries to destroy or secure supplies of plutonium and highly enriched uranium.