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- Cassandra for a New Millennium: Alexander Rossolimo ('58)Reprinted with A. Rossolimo's permissionSource: The Boston Consulting Group Prophecy can be as much of a burden as a gift. According to Greek mythology, the god Apollo gave that power to Cassandra, daughter of King Priam of Troy, in an attempt to seduce her. When his advances were spurned, his curse was that all her predictions would be ignored. So it was that her warning, “beware of Greeks bearing gifts,” was dismissed by those in power in Troy, whose gates would soon be confronted by one very large wooden horse. Modern history has numerous examples of similarly spurned warnings. Churchill reproved Parliament in the 1930s for ignoring ominous military intelligence and was bounced from office in the next election. Billy Mitchell, in the same period, warned that American naval power was at risk from the air and was court-martialed in the years before the attack on Pearl Harbor. None of this is lost on Alex Rossolimo. As chairman of the Center for Security and Social Progress Inc., the BCG alumnus has spent the last 14 years thinking the unthinkable, to use the old Cold War phrase. Since 1991 he’s seen things that many of us missed, warned of catastrophes that none of us wanted to dwell on, and generally bent the ear of those in power and those just willing to listen. His point was a simple one. Disaster is out there waiting to happen and taking action now is the only real hope for averting it. Three years before September 11, he wrote an article titled “Defending the Homeland,” which ended with the prescient sentence: “Will the United States muster the resolve to mount a national effort against terrorism with weapons of mass destruction, or must a new Pearl Harbor occur before our nation will act?” After September 11, people started to pay more attention. Shortly after 9/11, Alex received a letter from Paul A. Samuelson, the Nobel laureate in economics, stating: “Your CSSP effort has certainly been prescient!” What Alex had been saying was that these threats were hiding in plain sight: loose nukes and fissile materials being poorly guarded by demoralized and unpaid Russian soldiers, biochemical threats, hijacked aircraft used against high-profile buildings, nuclear bombs from a bankrupt North Korea being used to blackmail governments including our own. Today all of these threats are a daily reality in what’s become known as the war on terrorism. But to a man of Alex Rossolimo’s gravitas, there’s nothing to be gained by saying anything as trite as I told you so. To better understand the complexities of a man who routinely applies probability theory to acts of mass destruction requires a bit of background. Alex was born in Paris, where his father was chess champion of France. At age 12, he moved with his family to New York City. He attended the city’s famed Stuyvesant High School and studied electrical engineering at the City University of New York. In 1973, he received a Ph.D. in applied physics, math, and engineering from Harvard and an M.B.A. in finance and marketing from MIT’s Sloan School of Management. He would later return to Cambridge as a visiting fellow at Harvard. At this point, it’s worth mentioning that Alex is also trilingual, which played a factor in his noticing a headline in Izvestia during a lunchtime stroll through the fabled Harvard Square landmark, Out of Town News. The headline read, “Where Have the Soviet Stinger Missiles Disappeared To?” and the writer noted that 50 of those missiles and their launchers had apparently been stolen from a Soviet air force base. The writer further speculated that they would probably end up on the weapons black market. Alex remembers that moment as if it were yesterday. “I did not even know that a black market for these weapons existed. This triggered an alarm in me. I thought, Well, if these missiles disappear so easily, what about the nuclear weapons as this country disintegrates? The 30,000 or so nuclear weapons, plus the missiles to deliver them.” The issue continued to nag him until a few weeks later, when he attended a conference at which Ken Olsen, the founder and chairman of Digital Equipment Company, was a featured speaker. The company had sponsored Alex as a visiting fellow at Harvard. Olsen had just finished telling the audience what a great job Digital’s computers and equipment had done during Operation Desert Storm in 1991. “I immediately had a spark,” Alex recalled. “I thought, why not use high technology to build a management and control system for these loose nukes and fissile materials in Russia?” Olsen listened and said, “It sounds interesting. Write a proposal.” Alex also approached the president of Novell, which had a major operation in Moscow, and he too thought the idea held much promise. That was the beginning of an illuminating period in Alex’s life. He would head up the group writing the proposal that was enthusiastically approved by the Digital executive board and begin a long period of trying to better ascertain the type and degree of the many threats then considered likely. At the same time, he began speaking with high-level officials at the Department of State, The Pentagon, the Department of Energy, and the White House, and at a number of international symposiums on the subject. His interactions with government officials revealed that whereas the Departments of Defense and Energy were taking this threat seriously, the Department of State was denying there was a problem. In fact, when a high-level State Department official told Alex that “the Soviets are in good control of their nuclear weapons and materials, and do not need the assistance of U.S. industry to help with their management and control,” Alexander spotted evidence to the contrary in a photograph in the French magazine Le Point: a dozen Russian nuclear warheads sitting unattended in an open field. Equally troubling was a frank exchange he had with General Zelentsov, then in charge of Russia’s nuclear arsenal, at a symposium on the subject in Moscow. “I asked him in Russian. I said, ‘Do you know precisely how many nuclear weapons you have and where they are?’ He said, ‘I know where the weapons under my control are.’ He then added, ‘However, I cannot vouch for the others.’ So I knew what that meant. Total disarray.” To speak at any length with Alex is to hear little-known details of the recent past that reveal how close we may have come to a cold war nuclear confrontation and how many thousands of still-lethal weapons continue to present a threat. He tells of 84 Russian suitcase nuclear bombs that are unaccounted for. Plutonium that could be spread by a “dirty” bomb that would render a city uninhabitable for longer than the 24,000 years that represent plutonium’s half-life. He speaks about “secret cities” (later renamed “closed cities” and “nuclear cities”) within the old Soviet Union, housing a million people and massive nuclear-production facilities whose existence was only recently officially acknowledged and whose inhabitants are still forbidden to leave their country. In 1995, he proposed that the United States launch “a new Manhattan Project”—a massive national program to combat the threat of proliferation and terrorism with weapons of mass destruction. His analysis of more current threats is no less dire. He first published an article on North Korea and nuclear blackmail in 1994. Every aspect of his predictions—from that country’s development of a nuclear capability to its current development of an ICBM to its willingness to sell its technologies to the highest bidder in light of the catastrophic state of its economy—has been borne out in the last 24 months. Today, in Alex’s words, “I wear two hats.” He continues to be involved in the progress of the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, established by an act of Congress in 1991 to provide assistance in dismantling the nuclear arsenal in the former Soviet Union. He’s a featured speaker at numerous international venues on the topics of nuclear materials, bioterrorism, North Korea, Iran, and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. As a forum to present his views, he chairs the Center for Security and Social Progress. He also heads his own strategic consulting firm specializing in security, entrepreneurship, and the commercialization of innovation, and serves on corporate boards. But most of all Alex Rossolimo continues to be someone who wants a better future for his children and his country and someone who refuses to ignore the very real threats he sees confronting us. It was, after all, the lord mayor of Dublin, Alex informed us, and not Thomas Jefferson, who first noted that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. It may well be an effort for which future generations will prove to be eternally grateful. |
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