The Senate has begun taking a harder look at U.S. intelligence on nuclear threats facing the United States, including revelations of missing nuclear materials in Russia, congressional officials said on Friday. The Republican-led Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which held a closed-door hearing on nuclear issues earlier this month, has come to view nuclear proliferation as a threat that overshadows other dangers posed by terrorist groups. "We're going to be following it very, very closely," said Sen. John Rockefeller of West Virginia, ranking Democrat on the Senate oversight panel. He said the nuclear threat against the United States was posed "not just from North Korea, but most dangerously from unaccounted for weapons that could be black-marketed to terrorists."Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas, who chairs the Senate panel, first referred to the committee's deepened focus on nuclear terrorism this week when CIA Director Porter Goss presented his agency's annual report on world threats to the committee. A Senate aide said the heightened scrutiny on nuclear issues is part of a larger effort to enhance intelligence oversight on potential spots including Iran and North Korea. The intelligence panel, which produced a highly critical report about prewar U.S. intelligence on Iraq last year, is expected to hold a series of classified hearings on nuclear issues with officials from the CIA, the Pentagon and other agencies, officials said.
The dangers were made disturbingly clear this week by Goss, who told the senators that enough nuclear material to make a weapon was missing from Russian facilities. Asked by Rockefeller for an assurance that the material had not found its way into the hands of terrorists, Goss said: "No. I can't make that assurance. I can't account for some of the material, so I can't make the assurance about its whereabouts." U.S. authorities have long struggled with the nightmare possibility of a nuclear weapon in the hands of terrorists aligned with Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network, which is blamed for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington. "The concern is greater than what was expressed in public," said another Senate aide.