U.S. "not technically capable" of detecting WMD

"It's a fairly trivial process to shield that bomb or that material so that it's not picked up by even radiation detection," says Laura Holgate, now Senior Director, WMD Terrorism & Threat Reduction at the National Security Council.

Holgate was interviewed several months ago while she was the Vice President for Russia/NIS Programs at the Nuclear Threat Initiative.

The Nuclear Threat Initiative produced a movie several years ago called "Last Best Chance." The story is fiction, but every scene in the movie is based on "two notebooks full of documented facts," says Holgate.

Al-Qaida leader Osama Bin Laden and other terrorists have made no secret of their desires to acquire weapons of mass destruction to use against the U.S.

Some experts believe a part of the strategy for creating a nexus with global drug traffickers was to take advantage of a vast network or tunnels, technology and human intelligence that achieve their goal without risking exposure.

"When you get to the point where you can smuggle tons of drugs through one border, through another border and though another border, and into the U.S., then you certainly have the capacity to smuggled in weapons of mass destruction or agents that can be used to comprise weapons of mass destruction," says Doug Wankel, the Former Director of the Kabul Counter-narcotics task force at the U.S. Embassy in Afghanistan.

Currently a managing partner at the Spectre Group in Kabul, Wanke says the narco-traffickers can do it because "they have no allegiance to the criminal enterprise other than the ill-gotten dollar."

This was a central theme of the "Last Best Chance." The storyline follows three separate operations to slip weapons of mass destruction into the U.S. and detonate them. Money is the motivator and knowledge of U.S. detection loopholes fuel to drive the whole enterprise.

"In the last crossing scene," says Holgate, "we show a border guard actually taking a Geiger counter to a bomb and not detecting it."

Whether it's the Mexican border or Canadian border, the U.S. is at a huge technological disadvantage.

"Even the system we have in place today is not capable of detecting this type of material," says Holgate.

While the movie was fiction, the factual basis was designed to draw a picture of the nation's vulnerability to the viewer and to stir the creative juices within the U.S. intelligence community.

Holgate says the solution lies in not only mounting a defense where a WMD might come in across the border or the port.

"It lies where the highly enriched uranium or the plutonium sits today, because once it starts to move, it's very easy to slip through."