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  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.

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