Last Stand: Ted Turner's Quest to Save a Troubled Planet

by Todd Wilkinson

  In the NTI office along Pennsylvania Avenue before he retired and was succeeded by Rohlfing, Curtis said: “If there were to be a nuclear terrorist attack on Washington, we’d be sitting now somewhere near probable ground zero. We are equidistant between the White House and the World Bank, both potential targets. We are only as secure as the weakest link. I’ve seen too many weak links to feel comforted.”

  The only reality more frightening than knowing how utterly unprepared America is to deal with nuclear terrorism is how complacent society has been in its denial, a state worsened by political sparring, Turner says.

  “Am I supposed to derive comfort from assertions that we are doing all we can when I know it’s not the case?” he asks. “We couldn’t even stop two terrorists from nearly taking down a pair of commercial aircraft, one guy who stuffed explosives in his shoe and the other guy who lit himself on fire as he tried to ignite material smuggled aboard in his underwear. Had it not been for their own incompetence, we would have had two more planes taken out in midair and hundreds of innocent people dead. If we can barely prevent the amateurs from succeeding, how are we going to stop the professionals with nukes? It’s the fear of them executing a plot that makes me want to crawl into the fetal position.”

  Fully a year after Turner stood in his Atlanta office and described a hypothetical doomsday event in Times Square, Faisal Shahzad, who had connections to the Pakistan Taliban, drove a car loaded with explosives to almost the exact same point as Turner’s fictional van bomber. A homemade bomb, fabricated of tightly packed gunpowder, had been in the vehicle Shahzad drove, but failed to ignite. According to investigators, Shahzad had three other potential New York City targets to pursue if he had been successful in Times Square: Rockefeller Center, Grand Central Terminal, and the World Financial Center across from 9/11 ground zero. It is unclear if he was acting as a loner or on behalf of a group using him to probe security.

  With thousands of US and Russian warheads still aimed at one another across the Atlantic, and newer members of the nuclear club facing border tensions, Gorbachev believes the level of danger is higher than ever before. His concern extends to bombs that can be fabricated from stolen weapons-grade material, their construction aided by experts from former Soviet labs who, in financial desperation, could be wooed by handsome amounts of money.

  “If the processes in the nuclear sphere continue as they are now,” Gorbachev has said, “one hundred years from now humankind will be no more.” He suggests that given social instability rising in many dangerous corners of the world, the real horizon line for possible nuclear disaster, if it’s not confronted, is not a century from now but imminent.

  Why does the world need to rally together? This is one compelling reason, he says.

  “Ted’s been pretty low key about talking to the media about his work with nuclear issues,” Nunn says, summoning an anecdote. “Because he may not openly divulge this story, I will. It speaks to his character.”

  After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Turner was reeling. His marriage to Jane Fonda had ended and a granddaughter had died months before.

  Turner and Nunn were rapidly moving forward, establishing NTI based on a commitment of $250 million worth of AOL Time Warner stock. Turner was, after all, the largest shareholder of the newly merged company. By the start of 2002, however, the AOL securities had plummeted and lost nearly 80 percent of their value, decimating Turner’s net worth, nearly forcing him to sell some properties, and threatening the commitment he had made to NTI. With much of his personal fortune tied up in land and other investments, he had little free cash.

  Turner doesn’t remember exactly what he was doing when Nunn telephoned him. But he remembers where he was—at the Flying D Ranch in Montana. He had just come in from fishing on Cherry Creek.

  “Ted had always said, ‘If there is something I need to do, tell me.’ I told Ted that one of those moments had arrived,” Nunn says, recalling their conversation.

  NTI had been contacted by an official with the US State Department about the Vinca Institute of Nuclear Sciences near Belgrade. The research reactor had approximately two and a half bombs’ worth of poorly secured, highly enriched uranium vulnerable to theft by terrorists.

  The US government was working with concerned officials from Serbia and Russia to remove the material, but the Serbs would not release the highly enriched uranium unless they received international assistance to address problems related to 2.4 tons of highly radioactive spent reactor fuel at Vinca and to decommission the Vinca research reactor altogether.

  “The US government lacked the authority to fund such work and asked NTI to contribute to a joint project,” said Curtis.

  NTI committed up to $5 million to catalyze a project that allowed the United States, Russia, and Serbia to remove the highly enriched uranium. Turner, Nunn, and Curtis convened quickly by conference call to approve NTI’s role.

  Turner never hesitated in making the money available, Nunn says, even though the stock he had pledged to NTI was blocked from sale at the time. Turner met with Taylor Glover, his chief financial manager who has turned the juggling of his boss’s priorities into an art form. It would require some more juggling, Glover said, but they could get the money.

  “I don’t want to sound melodramatic. I’m not a melodramatic person, but the threat was dramatically real,” Nunn explains. “That amount of material, if used to make bombs, could have taken out the center of two US cities.”

  In an overview about the nuclear threat written by M. J. Zuckerman for the Carnegie Corporation titled “Nuclear Doomsday: Is the Clock Still Ticking?,” the authors note how former vice president Dick Cheney, while serving as defense secretary, said that accounting for even 99.9 percent of Russia’s active and former nukes wasn’t good enough.

  “That’s because if you do the math,” the report pointed out, “99.9 percent of the Soviets’ estimated 22,000 tactical nuclear weapons would leave 22 weapons unaccounted for, each with yields ranging from 0.5 kilotons to 2 kilotons, the equivalent of from 200,000 to 800,000 sticks of dynamite.”

  The bad guys likely knew the stuff at Vinca was there, he added. Intelligence sources had picked up chitchat in central Asia about al Qaeda wanting to do something that would be more spectacular and rack up more casualties than 9/11.

  Turner flew back to Montana to try and put his thoughts at ease. He spent the next several days fly fishing and horseback riding. On August 22, 2002, he received word from Nunn that the mission at Vinca had gone according to plan.

  News of the “dramatic, military-style operation” with special commandos used to address “one of the world’s most dangerous nuclear repositories—a large and unusually vulnerable stash of the kind of weapons-grade uranium that would be prized by . . . terrorist groups such as al Qaeda” ran on the front page of the Washington Post.

  “Ted wasn’t looking to receive praise or get a thank you plaque from the State Department,” Nunn said. “He gave $5 million out of his pocket, at a time of extreme personal financial difficulty, to basically put bomb making material and a nuclear reactor to bed. They don’t build monuments to people for this kind of philanthropy. What we both got was one more night’s rest.”

  The operation reinforced the urgent need for action, and the US government created the Global Threat Reduction Initiative, which has since repatriated more than forty nuclear bombs’ worth of highly enriched uranium from dozens of countries.

  Several years after the Vinca episode, Nunn and Turner traveled to Kazakhstan, taking a tour of a drab, rusty warehouse that just as well could have been an abandoned steel mill in Pittsburgh. It was Ust-Kamenogorsk in central Asia. Given its security status related to nuclear weapons production, it had been one of the Soviet Union’s “closed cities.” Since the end of the Cold War, it has become notorious as a crossroads for smugglers, drug and arms traffickers, and other cr
iminals. Gorbachev told them to be careful.

  NTI was working with the Kazakhstan president and his government to rid the country of nuclear weapons usable highly enriched uranium. The plan was to take the material to the Ulba Metallurgical Plant and blend it down to fuel for use in nuclear power plants. When they visited Kazakhstan, they had been told the job was nearly complete but, while walking around the facility and asking questions, the pair saw tubes containing highly enriched uranium. They were guarded, but Turner thought the protection didn’t seem commensurate to the risk.

  “Are you kiddin’ me?” Turner reacted (saying he actually used more colorful language). “Hell, Sam, you and I could walk out with this right now and give it to terrorists. Here we are in a part of the world that is known for being dangerous, on the backdoor of where a war is being fought against people who want to do us harm, and the material is just sittin’ there. If this is the front line of defense protecting millions of people from harm, the world is in serious trouble.”

  Nunn said close calls that prevent trouble from happening are the ones the public seldom hears about. Indeed, as Allison points out that Russia has improved nuclear security over the past decade, he worries about Pakistan, which he calls “a ticking nuclear time bomb.” “It has the most rapidly expanding nuclear arsenal and the one most vulnerable to collapse or breach,” he says. “A theft or hijacking of nuclear material or a device would come from an insider, such as a terrorist or sympathizer working in a facility or from outsiders, such as a careful planned external attack like the one that targeted a nuclear facility in South Africa in 2007.” He can cite a litany of recent incidents as harrowing as those at Vinca.

  Allison presented a paper for a forum sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations. The title of the event was: “How Likely Is a Nuclear Terrorist Attack on the United States?” Allison wrote, “Al-Qaeda spokesman Suleiman Abu Gheith has stated al-Qaeda’s objective: ‘to kill four million Americans—two million of them children—and to exile twice as many and wound and cripple hundreds of thousands.’”

  Michael Levi, a policy expert on nuclear and climate change issues as well as author of the book On Nuclear Terrorism, argues, correctly, that such a tally could be reached in a series of smaller installments. “Our national security would benefit from insights into how to prevent such events,” Allison noted. “But ask yourself how many 9/11s it would take to reach that goal. Answer: 1,334, or one nuclear weapon.”

  While serving together on the board of the Coca-Cola Company, headquartered in Atlanta, Nunn had a number of conversations about nuclear threats and NTI’s work with Warren Buffett, the billionaire founder of Berkshire Hathaway and humanitarian.

  Buffett is a consummate numbers guy. He’s been influenced by Turner’s constant leaning on the wealthy of the world to give back more to society and he has acted on his own conscience by joining Bill and Melinda Gates in making disease vaccination in poor countries a major emphasis of their multibillion-dollar push of philanthropy. One of their major partners is the UN Foundation.

  “Warren, like Ted, keenly understands the dynamic between managing risk by reducing the odds and then paying the price if things go wrong,” Nunn says.

  Turner is often quoted as citing a fifty-year horizon line—for addressing nuclear proliferation, climate change, and the population crisis. Fifty years isn’t an arbitrary figure. In fact, Buffett lends it credence.

  He applied the same theorems to the risk of Armageddon that have been used in the business world. He did it in the company of Nunn, and the former senator has never forgotten it. As an advisor to NTI’s board of directors, Buffett figured that:

  If the chance of a weapon of mass destruction being used in a given year is 10 percent and the same probability exists for fifty years—the chance of getting through the fifty-year period without a disaster is .51 percent (roughly one-half of 1 percent).

  If the chance can be reduced to 1 percent each year, there is a 60.5 percent chance of making it through fifty years. This means that if we make it ten times harder for terrorists or nations to use a weapon of mass destruction in any given year, we can make it 120 times less likely that we will suffer from a use of these weapons for the next fifty years.

  Buffett was intrigued by the important but low profile activities of NTI, impressed by Turner’s philanthropic zeal, and moved by the fact Nunn, a political moderate, was at the helm. Seeing NTI’s agenda, he became a significant contributor with a multimillion-dollar donation.

  “Ted can’t do it alone. He needs help from those most in a position to give him help,” Nunn said. “Warren recognized it. More outside funders need to get involved. If you’re a businessperson, it’s in your best financial interests to make sure nuclear terrorism doesn’t occur.”

  Nunn knew that NTI needed to do something bold to raise awareness about these dangers, something that would capture the attention of citizens. In 2005, with the support of the Carnegie Corporation and the MacArthur Foundation, NTI partnered with writer and director Ben Goddard to produce Last Best Chance, a film dramatizing the risks from nuclear weapons and materials.

  The short docudrama tracks the journey from an unguarded warehouse to a rogue nuclear engineer and then portrays a bomb being smuggled across the US border from Canada in a van. The forty-five-minute film debuted on HBO and clips of it aired on Nightline and Meet the Press, CNN and FOX, and other networks. More than one hundred thousand copies have been ordered from a special website, www.lastbestchance.org.

  For months, practically every guest who visited Turner in Atlanta or one of his properties was treated first to dinner and then prevented from leaving until they had given him an hour to watch Last Best Chance.

  Turner regards the triad of foundations he created as ripe opportunities for “cross-pollinating” ideas to better the problem-solving. Recycling weapons-grade nuclear materials into power sources is a means to address climate change by burning less coal. And it can help make America less dependent on fossil fuels produced by unstable political regimes in the Persian Gulf.

  Reid Detchon, vice president of climate and energy issues with the UN Foundation, helped launch an offshoot called the Energy Future Coalition, considered one of the most progressive proponents of alternative energy in Washington. Two domestic pilot initiatives spun off of the UN Foundation via Energy Future Coalition are promotion of a smart grid aimed at maximizing efficiency in transmitting power, and “25 X 25,” pushing to have 25 percent of US energy needs met by alternative, sustainable, homegrown energy sources by 2025.

  Both initiatives, partially funded by the Turner Foundation, enjoy bipartisan support from governors and members of Congress as well as being endorsed by farm and ranch groups, organized labor, forestry companies, power cooperatives, banks, restaurants, car companies, and universities. “Reid is working at the intersections where real breakthroughs are possible,” says Mike Finley of the Turner Foundation.

  At his office in the nation’s capital, Detchon explains Turner’s involvement. “I would describe him as a rainmaker, both on the nuclear and energy fronts. He has used his money and influence to seed the clouds, enabling organizations to get off the ground. What’s good for the environment is also good for national defense.”

  “Frankly, we’re in a deep mess,” Turner says. “The only way for us to find our way out of these problems, if indeed we can, is to design a map to help ensure that everyone moves in the same direction. Once we get our bearings, I’m convinced not only that we’ll find solutions but that we’ll be able to move on them quickly.”

  Turner says none of the major survival questions facing humanity can be confronted in isolation from one another. They all are intricately linked. “The nuclear issue,” Turner says, “is fundamentally an environmental one in the damage it would cause and in the catalysts that trigger it. People who live in desperately impoverished environments are more
apt to resort to doing desperate things. Why do people in other countries want to do harm to the Western world? Because we are rich and they are poor. They resent us not for being wealthy but for being arrogant and insensitive to their misery. Why do I support the UN? Because, like it or not, its mission is to help all people achieve lives of dignity.”

  If serious headway is ever to be made in the fight against global warming—if we want to follow, for instance the advice of NASA’s chief climate specialist, James Hansen—then coal-fired power plants must be phased out. Alternatives must be found. That’s far easier said than done. The state of Wyoming, America’s largest coal producer, is now planning to export massive amounts of coal to China, which is opening old-style, coal-burning power plants at the rate of about one every couple of weeks. At the same time, some members of Congress are refusing to push for a carbon tax to regulate CO2 emissions in America, based on the fact that China is reluctant to curb its coal consumption, which is being fed by US suppliers.

  In recent years, Turner has been engaged in serious discussions with his old friend from the 1980s, Texas oilman and corporate raider T. Boone Pickens, about investing in a new power grid, one that would carry energy produced by wind, solar, and natural gas (the latter being a cleaner-burning transition fuel, helping us move away from coal and oil).