On Saturday, April 30th, twenty thousand investors filed into a large
arena in Omaha to hear Warren Buffett, a man widely regarded as one of
America’s most successful investors, speak on the economy, the
financial markets and the performance of the company in which they were
all shareholders: the famed Berkshire Hathaway, Inc.
To be sure, they heard from Buffett, and his partner Charles Munger, on
investments and economics.
But they also heard something that you would not necessarily expect to
hear at such a conference: a warning about terrorism, terrorism using
weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in particular.
How worried are Buffett and Munger about the threat of WMD terror?
Their insurance arms now have clauses in the policies that they write
excluding losses from such events. They are literally “putting their
money where there mouth is.” Here is what Buffett had to say about the
issue of terrorism:
“My job is to think absolutely in terms of the worst case and to know
enough about what's going on in both investments and operations that I
don't lose sleep. Everything that can happen will happen. It's
Berkshire job to be prepared absolutely for the very worst. A few years
ago we did not have NBCs [nuclear, biological and chemical attacks]
excluded from our exposure, but we do now.
"If you go to lastbestchance.org, you can obtain a tape, free, that
the Nuclear Threat Initiative has sponsored, that has a dramatization
that is fictional but is not fanciful. We would regard ourselves as
vulnerable to extinction as a company if we did not have nuclear,
biological and chemical risks excluded from our policies. There could
be events happening that could make it impossible for our checks to
clear the next day."
It may be a sad commentary on the times in which we live that
investment experts are issuing such statements, but that is simply a
byproduct of the post-September 11th world.
As if on cue, the news in the days following the Berkshire Hathaway
shareholder meeting was laced with disturbing news about the terrorist
threat and WMD:
• The Tuesday, May 3rd issue of The Washington Post, included a feature
article entitled U.S. Called Unprepared for Nuclear Terrorism. In that
article, no fewer than five homeland defense experts were quoted with
varying degrees of skepticism and disapproval of the federal
government’s preparations for a terrorist attack involving a nuclear
weapon.
• That same day, Reuters reported that U.S. intelligence (read: spy
satellites) had detected the movement of heavy equipment in North Korea
which indicated possible preparations for a nuclear test. North Korea
is on the State Department’s list of terrorist sponsoring nations and
counts Syria and Iran among its customers for weaponry.
• Meanwhile, at the United Nations conference to review the
Non-Proliferation Treaty, Iran announced that it planned to go ahead
with nuclear activity, including uranium enrichment, which could lead
to the creation of nuclear weapons. The State Department calls Iran the
world’s most active sponsor of terrorism and the 9-11 Commission report
detailed extensive contacts between Iran and Al Qaida.
• Speaking of Al Qaida, the Spanish newspaper ABC reported that Al
Qaida planned to carry out a chemical attack on the U.S. Navy base in
Rota, Spain.
All of this explains why Warren Buffett is justifiably concerned and
why we should all be concerned with our national security. Today, like
no time in our nation’s modern history, national security is a state,
local and, indeed, a family issue.
Christopher Holton has been writing about national security issues for
more than a decade. He can be reached at prgraph3@bellsouth.net.
