Dealing with 'dirty bomb' threats. (Security Beat).

Speeding up the elimination of highly-enriched uranium and plutonium is one way to mitigate the "dirty-bomb" threat, experts said.

Security analysts and policymakers have speculated in recent months on whether terrorists could get their hands on dirty bombs. These devices contain nuclear

materials, packed with conventional high explosives. When detonated, it wouldn't cause a nuclear explosion, but it would contaminate a large area with toxic radiation. "It would cause widespread panic, and it would be difficult to clean it up," said Rose Gottemoeller, the Clinton administration's deputy secretary for defense nuclear non-proliferation at the Department of Energy.

The dirty bomb was in the headlines this month, after the Justice Department disclosed an alleged terrorist plot involving nuclear radiation. An al Qaeda associate, a U.S. citizen named Abdullah al Muhajir was arrested after authorities learned he might have been scouting potential dirty-bomb targets in the United States.

Gottemoeller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said administration officials would benefit from reading Harvard's Kennedy School of Government new study, entitled, "Securing Nuclear Weapons and Materials: Seven Steps for Immediate Action." The study makes recommendations on how to tackle the nuclear threat, for example. "We've got to mix enhancing physical protection with trying to speed up disposition or elimination of highly enriched uranium and plutonium," she said.

Another problem has to do with the "brain drain" of nuclear scientists from the former Soviet bloc countries and the possibility that they might sell their expertise to countries hostile to the United States, she said.

"We have to accelerate and develop a wider-ranging cooperation not only with Russia but with our current allies in Europe and with Japan," she said.

Peter Huessy, a missile defense expert from the National Defense University, said that the United States has "a number of critically important programs to get rid of Russian nuclear material, including spent-fuel plutonium warheads, which the Bush administration has proposed to specifically expand and strengthen ... so these materials don't fall into the hands of terrorist organizations or rogue states.