Assessing Risk Key to Terrorism Fight

AP: One of the biggest hurdles in fighting terrorism is assessing the risk, U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said Thursday, as Muslim leaders debated extremism, and weapons experts warned of terrorists building a nuclear bomb.

Each day countries are faced with a myriad of risks - to railroads, public transport and chemical plants - but officials need to look at the consequences, the vulnerability and the nature of the threats to prevent attacks, Chertoff said at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

"I personally think the biggest danger we face is a nation-state developing a bomb ... and making that bomb available to somebody not inhibited to using it. That is a nightmare scenario," Chertoff said.

Terrorism dominated debate at the Swiss ski resort on Thursday, after Hamas - a Palestinian group that has long been on the U.S. list of terrorist groups - won a landslide victory in parliamentary elections, rattling the future of Mideast peacemaking and reopening a prickly question that has plagued diplomats - what's the definition of terrorism?

Recent terror attacks such as the London transit bombing on July 7 that killed 56 people, including four suicide bombers, also dogged participants - particularly Muslim leaders who asked audiences to understand that extremism was not unique to Islam.

Prince Turki al-Faisal, the Saudi ambassador to the United States, said his kingdom was the first victim of al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden, and lashed out at Western nations that allowed radicals to operate for years and spread dangerous ideologies.

"This was a combination of ideas that came from various parts of the world, including, if I may say, from places like London, where the hospitality given by the British government to a few individuals who promoted this kind of hateful ideology ... spread wide among practitioners. Blaming Islam is not only unfair, but a mistake."

Abu Hamza al-Masri - the one-eyed, hook-handed radical cleric in London - is currently on trial for inciting his followers at the Finsbury Park mosque to kill civilians.

Much of Thursday's banter focused on the international crisis over Iran's nuclear program - a topic that caused the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency chief, Mohamed ElBaradei, to cancel a session so he could attend closed-door meetings.

The session ElBaradei opted out of at the last minute was focusing on whether terrorists had the capability of getting nuclear and biological material for a bomb, and whether they had the know-how to transfer and use the weapons.

One way of preventing a nuclear catastrophe, leaders said, was keeping enriched uranium out of the wrong hands.

"That means no new national production of highly enriched uranium from which a bomb could be made, and that's the issue over Iran," said Graham Allison, U.S. assistant secretary of defense under former President Bill Clinton and a specialist in nuclear weapons.

So far, the al-Qaida terror network has not shown the technological sophistication to build a nuclear bomb or even a dirty bomb, but "they are just one good idea short of building a nuclear weapon," said John Holdren, director of the Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts and a leader of a secret White House study that looked at nuclear weapons, particularly the containment of nuclear material from Russia.