WASHINGTON, Oct 29: US Defence Secretary Robert M. Gates has said that the United States would hold “fully accountable” any country that allowed terrorists to acquire weapons of mass destruction and provided safe havens to them and would respond with “overwhelming force.”

In a speech at Washington’s Carnegie Endowment for International Peace on Tuesday evening, Mr Gates said that the United States was also developing new forensic technologies to get to the source that supplied nuclear material to a terrorist outfit.

“Today we also make clear that the United States will hold any state, terrorist group, or other non-state actor or individual fully accountable for supporting or enabling terrorist efforts to obtain or use weapons of mass destruction – whether by facilitating, financing, or providing expertise or safe haven for such efforts,” Mr Gates said.

“To add teeth to the deterrent goal of this policy, we are pursuing new technologies to identify the forensic signatures of any nuclear material used in an attack – to trace it back to the source,” he added.

“We also still face the problem of weapons passing from nation-states into the hands of terrorists,” said Mr Gates. “After September 11, the president announced that we would make no distinction between terrorists and the states that sponsor or harbour them.”

Mr Gates not only emphasised the need to respond with “overwhelming force” against those who allowed terrorists to acquire WMDs but also urged the next US Congress to finance the production of a new warhead designed to deal with this threat.

“Imagine easily deployable, replacement satellites that could be launched from high-altitude planes – or high-altitude UAVs that could operate as mobile data links. The point is to make the effort to attack us seem pointless in the first place,” he said.

Mr Gates acknowledged that the new approach was more expansive than the previous US policy on this issue, which entailed “responding with overwhelming force to the use of weapons of mass destruction against the United States, our people, our forces, and our friends and allies.” The United States, he said, was now also determined to go for the source of such weapons.

Diplomatic observers in Washington noted that a change of government in the US would not affect this new approach as future administration would not only maintain but may further strengthen the US resolve to punish those who enable terrorists to acquire unconventional weapons.

They also noted that the country that has more reasons than others to be alarmed is Pakistan as it has nuclear weapons, a major insurgency problem and a past record of some of its scientists selling weapons to other states.

“It would seem to apply to Pakistan, whether he intended it or not,” said Marvin Weinbaum, a US scholar on South Asian affairs at Washington’s Middle East Institute. “But there are other candidates as well.”

Mr Weinbaum said he was “taken aback” by this statement. “If you are going to operate on a hair-trigger approach, you have to be sure you are right. You have to make sure whether it is a government policy.”

Mr Weinbaum warned that there’s a “danger of rushing to judgment without adequate investigation” while implementing this policy.

The US defence secretary, however, explained that the United States needs to develop a new approach because future attacks on US soil will not be aimed at conventional military targets.

“Attacks on communications systems and infrastructure will be a part of future war. Our policy goal is obviously to prevent anyone from being able to take down our systems,” he said.