Avoiding a nightmare

Thursday, June 19, 2008 | 2:08 a.m.

One of the painful lessons of the 9/11 attacks was the realization that American law enforcement and intelligence agencies had to forgo turf battles and learn to share information to achieve the common goal of protecting this country from rogue operatives.

It is a lesson worth repeating in light of a Washington Post story Sunday in which it was reported that the blueprints for an advanced nuclear weapon were discovered in 2006 on computers owned by Swiss businessmen who were linked to a now-defunct smuggling ring led by Pakistani nuclear weapons scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan. It is unknown whether the drawings were obtained by countries such as Iran or North Korea but they reportedly depicted a weapon compact enough to possibly fit on their ballistic missiles.

A follow-up Associated Press story added the troubling element that the U.S. government is not doing enough to acquire uranium and plutonium from the black market to keep the nuclear material out of terrorists’ hands, according to Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, the Energy Department’s intelligence chief.

These developments should serve as a wake-up call to this country’s nuclear intelligence experts, who are scattered throughout various agencies, that they must share vital information if this country wishes to avoid potentially devastating attacks. Mowatt-Larssen insists that cooperation is now occurring as part of a classified effort. But Congress should use its oversight powers to keep a close eye on cooperation to make sure the experts do not slip back into the turf mentality that got our country into trouble in the past. Terrorists and other rogue individuals will do all they can to obtain nuclear weapons, if they have not already. The best way to counteract those efforts is with a coordinated intelligence network that gives us the ability to assess with confidence the status of all global nuclear weapons developments.