“The biggest nightmare that any of us have is that one of these terrorist member organizations within this syndicate of terror will get their hands on a weapon of mass destruction.”

Obama administration figures took to Sunday’s political talk shows to rebut charges of White House weakness on Islamist terrorism, with the nation’s top diplomat saying such networks pose the greatest threat to national security.

While one of the White House’s top national security advisers criticized lawmakers for politicizing national security threats, including the Christmas Day attack over Detroit, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said even a nuclear-armed North Korea or Iran isn’t as great a threat to the U.S. as al Qaeda and allied jihad groups.

“The biggest nightmare that any of us have is that one of these terrorist member organizations within this syndicate of terror will get their hands on a weapon of mass destruction,” she said in a Sunday appearance on CNN. “So that’s really the most threatening prospect we see.”

Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair told Congress earlier this month he was “certain” there will be an attempted terrorist attack on the United States within the next six months.

Also on Sunday, Iran threw down another gauntlet against international sanctions on its nuclear development, saying it will start Tuesday to enrich uranium to six times the nuclear purity usually used in civilian nuclear power plants, a step toward producing uranium pure enough to use in a nuclear weapon.

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