Cold War Nuclear Fears Now Apply to Terrorists

It has become conventional wisdom, repeated by President Obama at the nuclear summit meeting this week, that the cold war danger of huge strikes by thousands of nuclear missiles has given way to a new threat: terrorists killing tens of thousands of Americans with a stolen or homemade nuclear device. A broad range of security experts agree that nuclear terrorism may well be the most serious danger the United States faces today.

But it is not new. In fact, almost from the invention of the atomic bomb, government officials were alarmed by the threat that compact nukes would be smuggled into the United States by Soviet agents and detonated.

“Officials regard the possibility of atomic sabotage as the gravest threat of subversion that this country, with its virtually unpatrolled borders, has ever faced,” The New York Times reported in 1953, telling readers that the Eisenhower administration was preparing to alert the public to the danger from “valise bombs.”

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. (In those days, false nuclear alarms were set off by radium watch dials, once hidden in a woman’s corset.)

Nor is the worry in recent years about nuclear material crossing the permeable Mexican border new. An F.B.I. memo from 1953 warned that “a saboteur could easily pose as a Mexican ‘wetback’ and get into the country without detection, presumably carrying an atomic weapon in his luggage.”