Fuerth was national security adviser to former Vice President Al Gore and is now Shapiro Visiting Professor of International Relations at George Washington University.

After a brief review of the chemical, biological and radiological agents that might be used as weapons of mass destruction, Fuerth noted that even small atomic bombs are within the reach of terrorists who hate the United States. He said such bombs require only a “Coke can-sized container of plutonium or enriched uranium.” He said the construction of an atomic bomb would require no more computational capacity than that of a personal computer.

“We are in a battle against time to block this,” he said, although he predicted it will take “years” before the new Office of Homeland Security “develops the kind of homeland defense system that we need.”

Fuerth said that countries around the world must change laws so that terrorists will be denied secure electronic communications and banking services. He said the American government should be willing to consider preemptive military strikes that set back development of weapons of mass destruction, such as the air strike Israel made against an Iraqi nuclear reactor under construction in 1981.

Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, he said, remains “a menace, and there is no way to discriminate between him and the unfortunate nation that he dominates.”

Fuerth observed that since Sept. 11, Republicans have been espousing  the same sort of engagement in foreign affairs that they criticized during the Clinton Administration. “If the Republicans succeed in nation-building (in Afghanistan), it will be because of Democratic experiences in Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo.”

Fuerth declined a request to say what he would have recommended since Sept. 11 to a Democratic administration, had Gore won the presidency. He said he would use the same reply that Gore gave a reporter, that “President Bush is my commander-in-chief.”

He noted that in the Arab world, the meltdown of the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians has increased the militancy of average citizens. He said a very large and young Arab population in the Middle East is being raised in a “culture of anger, in part against globalization with an American face. It is a cultural anger taught in the schools.”

Asked by a listener how Americans might defuse that anger, Fuerth replied: “I don’t know if that is possible.”

A 1950 Bates graduate, Kumekawa is the director and a professor emeritus of the Intergovernmental Policy Analysis Program at the University of Rhode Island. The Current Crisis: Recalling the Internment of Japanese Americans, his talk at Bates, will consider connections between the ethnic profiling of Arab Americans following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the government’s internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans following Pearl Harbor.

Issued by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in February 1942, Executive Order No. 9066 gave Japanese Americans 48 hours to dispose of any possessions they couldn’t carry and forcibly concentrated them in 10 relocation camps. Kumekawa was 14 years old when he, his parents, his brother and his sister were put behind barbed wire at a camp in Utah.

Even during the height of wartime anti-Japanese sentiment, though, many Americans were appalled by the order. Glenn Kumekawa was one of many young Japanese Americans assisted by the National Japanese American Student Relocation Council, a volunteer organization that obtained security clearances and college placements for internees. It was through that council that Kumekawa attended Bates, graduating cum laude in 1950.

After obtaining his master’s degree and doctorate from Brown University, Kumekawa entered the field of municipal planning. He was city planner for Warwick, Rhode Island, during its greatest period of growth and later rose to statewide and regional prominence as an expert in interdisciplinary planning. Among numerous achievements, Kumekawa is credited with promoting the preservation of open space and natural resources in Rhode Island and with helping the state recover economically from the closure of major military bases.

Kumekawa was profoundly affected by both the internment experience and the efforts of Americans of conscience who worked to free Japanese Americans from the camps. He sees parallels between racial attitudes in this country then, following the attack on Pearl Harbor, and now, after the terrorist attacks – with nearly a third of Americans telling a Time magazine poll that they would support interning U.S. citizens of Arab descent in camps until they were shown to be uninvolved with terrorist efforts.