Chancellor addresses U.S. national security

  TYSON EVANS Chancellor Albert Carnesale
speaks on the topic of rethinking national security to an audience
of roughly 1,000 Thursday evening.

By Dexter Gauntlett
Daily Bruin Staff

A nuclear engineer, a former advisor to the president and the
head of the CIA, Chancellor Albert Carnesale put on his
professor’s hat to address national security Thursday
afternoon.

Approximately one thousand people attended Carnesale’s
speech in Royce Hall titled “Rethinking National
Security,” in which he voiced stern personal stances on
national issues brought to the forefront after Sept. 11.

The end of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union marked
the last “principal adversary” of the United States, a
role that terrorists have now filled, he said.

“It used to be that terrorists wanted the largest number
of people to watch, but the trend in recent years is to kill larger
numbers of people.”

Carnesale went on to explain the fear of “loose
nukes,” especially from the former Soviet Union, that could
potentially land in the hands of a terrorist group such as
al-Qaeda, the group allegedly responsible for the Sept. 11
attacks.

“Weapons of mass destruction threaten our way of
life,” he said.

Carnesale also addressed “weapons of mass
disruption” such as anthrax and new methods of attack in the
technological age.

“Advanced technical societies are more vulnerable to
cyberterrorism and attacks on communication systems,” he
said.

Speaking from his experience as a nuclear engineer, he discussed
the credibility of chemical and biological attacks and the need to
continue arms control agreements.

And although he said that biological weapons are harder to
produce than chemical weapons, producing nuclear weapons is the
most difficult.

“It’s difficult to produce uranium or plutonium, but
any country with a nuclear program could do it,” he said.

“The smallest nuclear weapons are equivalent to 1,000 tons
of TNT, while the biggest are as big as 15,000 tons,” he
added.

The chancellor, who served as a nuclear arms advisor seeking to
reduce the number of weapons of mass destruction in the world, said
the U.S. needs to reduce its six thousand nuclear weapons in order
to initiate a similar commitment from Russia.

He went on to stress the importance of destroying the facilities
in Iraq that could produce weapons of mass destruction ““
which doesn’t necessarily mean killing Saddam Hussein, he
said.

In domestic issues, Carnesale said that Tom Ridge has a very
difficult job and criticized the lack of authority granted to Ridge
as director of Homeland Security.

“He has no control over the department of Transportation,
Coast Guard, Federal Emergency Management Agency who responds to
emergencies,” he said.

He also said that a missile defense shield is not the answer to
the threat of weapons of mass destruction. Under the current
proposal, he said, the shield would be ineffective against chemical
and biological weapons and against more conventional means of
attack such as airplanes and trucks.

At the end of the lecture, Carnesale reiterated the three
characterizations of national security he originally made at the
end of the 1990s, for what the country should be concerned with:
“Survival ““ protecting lives; security ““avoiding
conflicts that could become threats to survival; satisfaction
““ extending (the U.S.) way of life to those who choose that
way.”

Student Regent Tracy Davis said the speech was a great way to
share the experience of the post-Sept. 11 seminars with the rest of
the community.

Simon Louie, a third-year business economics student, was more
critical, saying the speech didn’t offer any new information,
and that he would have liked to learn something that wasn’t
already in the media.