Could terrorists seize a Russian nuke plant? The Energy Secretary says such a threat is credible. The war in chechnya could prompt such an attack.

The war in Chechnya is a war without mercy. Russians shell the Chechen capital killing civilians. Chechens allegedly bomb apartment buildings in Moscow. And, according to Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, there is the threat of a nuclear nightmare - an attack on one of Russia's nuclear power plants, reports CBS News Correspondent David Martin.

If terrorists seized a nuclear power plant, they could at a minimum cut off electricity in the Russian winter. At a maximum, they could cause a Chernobyl-like disaster that would spew radioactive debris into the atmosphere.

Rushaylo was in Washington this week for meetings with the FBI and State Department. But in 1995, when Chechen rebels seized a Russian hospital, they were able to hold off the Russian army until the government was forced to negotiate. Are the Russians any better prepared to deal with an attack on a nuclear power plant?

The threat will probably last as long as the fighting lasts, and despite American pleas for restraint, the latest intelligence shows the Russians are gearing up for a major offensive against the Chechen capital.

Congress says that, because they've stolen our nuclear secrets, the Chinese can now build a better nuclear warhead. Dearly beloved, what the heck is a better nuclear warhead?

Come on, from a consumer's (that's a euphemism for victim) viewpoint, if the darn thing can get to one's vicinity and explode, what further quality improvements matter? Better grade of radiation? A prettier mushroom cloud? Methinks we are in Dr. Strangelove country.

For those of us who may be on the receiving end of a nuclear missile, there is only one question: Is it a dud or does it explode? If it explodes, everything else is moot, irrelevant and not germane.

I can remember when the American official attitude was, "Yah, yah, the Russians have to use big warheads because they can't make them as small as we can." That matters? Americans were supposed to feel better because they would get killed by a bigger warhead?

I have long contended that Americans, at least as reflected by public discussion, some time ago drifted into a form of mild insanity. It is probably inevitable as generations grow up fixated on fictional images bombarding them from television and movie screens. Most public discussion of most public issues is only barely related to reality, if at all. And nowhere is this more evident than when the subject is nuclear.

There are only two issues that should be on the nuclear agenda: 1. how to get rid of them, and 2. how to avoid their use until they are gotten rid of. The guy in the White House has not only failed to pursue nuclear disarmament, he has come as close as anyone to making a nuclear war a probability.

Dr. Mary-Wynne Ashford, co-president of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, had some alarming things to say after recent meetings in Moscow and Sweden.

She said that, because of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's attacks on Yugoslavia, the world is much closer to nuclear war than is understood by the Western press, which dismisses Russian warnings as just rhetoric. She quoted Dr. Aleksander Arbatov, deputy chairman of the Defense Committee of the Russian State Duma, as saying the following:

U.S.-Russian relations are at the "worst, most acute, most dangerous juncture since the U.S.-Soviet Berlin and Cuban Missile Crisis." The anti-U.S. sentiment is deep, and the slogan, "Serbia today, Moscow tomorrow," is deeply planted in the Russian mind. Disarmament treaties are dead, and nuclear rearmament is back on the agenda. Other Russian officials told her that Russia would not allow the bombing to continue and that, because its conventional forces are in such disarray, it would have no choice but to rely on nuclear weapons.

We have more important things to worry about than the quality of Chinese nukes.

Since 1940, the United States has spent $5.8 trillion on nuclear weapons programs, more than on any single program except Social Security, according to a Brooking Institute study billed as the first comprehensive audit of the country’s effort to build a nuclear arsenal. If divided equally among all of today’s Americans, the cost would be $22,000 per person.

The study notes that spending on the current nuclear arsenal has stood at about $35 billion annually, or roughly 15 percent of the total defense budget. Although new weapons are no longer being produced, the stockpile has the equivalent explosive force of about 120,000 Hiroshima bombs, according to Stephen I. Schwartz, chairman of the four-year project.

Rivalries among the Air Force, Army, and Navy led to the development of 65 varieties of nuclear bombs. Ultimately, the United States built more than 70,000 nuclear weapons. A variety of defense experts—including Robert McNamara, secretary of defense in 1964—thought that it would take fewer than 1,000 long-range nuclear weapons to defend America and deter Soviet aggression. Yet since 1958 there have typically been 10 to 15 times as many nuclear weapons in the U.S. arsenal.

The Stage: The Los Alamos nuclear weapons laboratory. The Actor: A Taiwanese-American already suspected of spying for the Chinese. The Act: Apparently downloading the computer codes that reveal most of America's nuclear secrets. If it's true, it's one more victory in a long-running string of triumphs for Chinese espionage.

But until recently, Chinese spying rarely made headlines and few of China's agents were ever caught. There are good reasons. One is that America is so vulnerable because the Chinese operate so differently from the Soviet spies United States counterintelligence is used to.

Thor Ronay at the Center for Security Policy in Washington D.C. has studied the Soviet Cold War style of espionage. "They want to go get A bomb in A laboratory, and they will send A team managed by An executive to get that. And we'll be able to follow that process in a fairly linear way."

Ed Timperlake co-authored "Year of the Rat," which chronicles how China has compromised U.S. national security during the Clinton years. He says the Chinese haven't operated in the methodical, linear way of the Soviets. "What they would do apparently is identify an objective and then EVERYONE would come to the party. They would bring professionals at it. They would bring relatives!"

With more than a billion people, China can afford to throw thousands of them at espionage objectives. And it doesn't mind going way outside the ranks of professional spies. Ronay describes the process this way: "The Chinese send thousands over, telling them all, 'Go, have a good time, prosper, do as well as you can, and one time or another we may visit you, we may call on you, we may send you a postcard from your uncle." In other words, you may spend an absolutely normal life, and just once or twice, the spy network may ask for just a little help here or there.

Ronay says even second-generation Chinese here in the States are sometimes called upon. "The Chinese call them 'fish at the bottom of the sea,' just lying here waiting for an opportunity to be surfaced."

With thousands of agents poking their noses into all these areas, why have so few ever been caught? It may be because they don't act like secret agents, but more like butterflies. Timperlake says of the Chinese using this style, "It was very clever, and in doing so, they would accomplish the goal and then they'd fly apart and the network would be disestablished, so there were really no fingerprints."

Ronay: "There aren't cells. You don't find one guy and his case and uncover his cell. Each one is run directly. It's the advantage of having a population of a billion-two: you can afford to have a lot of case officers."

Timperlake: "This is probably the most damning spy operation this country has ever faced...the greatest damage of the century, if not of our whole history."

Timperlake says almost every secret the U.S. had about nuclear weapons was thrown out into the open. "By moving it to an open-source computer, we now know that hits have been, as reported, from the People's Republic of China, from Russia and India. But God knows who else heard about it."

Timperlake is clearly worried. "And it may take a great tragedy, somebody doing something stupid...some rogue regime doing something stupid...to bring to the American people how damning and dangerous and damaging this whole mess actually is and will be for our kids' kids' future."

The Pentagon believes that China has about 20 nuclear missiles that can reach America and 300 nuclear weapons that could hit Japan, India or Russia. Although the arsenal is supposedly small compared with the thousands of warheads still maintained by America and Russia, the Pentagon is trying to determine whether China's nuclear fleet will stay that way 10 or 20 years into the future or become a far more potent arsenal that could rekindle the kind of fears that shaped the Cold War. The recent scandal that surfaced that China may have stolen the design of the U.S. W-88 miniaturized warhead from the Los Alamos National Laboratory more than 10 years ago has prompted anger in Washington, especially in Congress. Many in Washington reportedly believe that China desires a nuclear arsenal large enough to give them global status and deter the potential for nuclear blackmail, but small enough to avoid the Soviet Union's mistake-a military force so expensive that it sped [facilitated] the bankruptcy of the nation.

During an investigation by the Department of Energy to determine how secure U.S. nuclear facilities were against terrorist attacks it was determined that there are more than 5,000 pounds (two and a half tons) of plutonium missing or unaccounted for, 2,400 pounds alone from its Rocky Flats weapons factory near Denver.

To demonstrate his point a DOE investigator, McCallum, had turned in 1996 to a sophisticated computer-modeling program designed to simulate terrorist attacks against each of the country's nuclear labs. NEWSWEEK has learned that in every one of the scenarios that the computer devised, the hypothetical terrorists succeeded in penetrating security at the Rocky Flats weapons factory near Denver and blowing up some of the highly radioactive plutonium used to make bombs. In 80 percent of the simulations, the attackers were able to get through the razor wire and security checks and walk out with enough plutonium to build a nuclear bomb—or poison millions of people with the radioactive dust.