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Abstract

Fear of nuclear weapons is rational, but its extension to terrorism has been a vehicle for fear-mongering that is unjustified by available data. The debate on nuclear terrorism tends to distract from events that raise the risk of nuclear war, the consequences of which would far exceed the results of terrorist attacks. And the historical record shows that the war risk is real. The Cuban Missile Crisis and other confrontations have demonstrated that miscalculation, misinterpretation, and misinformation could lead to a “close call” regarding nuclear war. Although there has been much commentary on the interest that Osama bin Laden, when he was alive, reportedly expressed in obtaining nuclear weapons, evidence of any terrorist group working seriously toward the theft of nuclear weapons or the acquisition of such weapons by other means is virtually nonexistent. The acquisition of nuclear weapons by terrorists requires significant time, planning, resources, and expertise, with no guarantees that an acquired device would work. It requires putting aside at least some aspects of a group’s more immediate activities and goals for an attempted operation that no terrorist group has accomplished. While absence of evidence does not mean evidence of absence, it is reasonable to conclude that the fear of nuclear terrorism has swamped realistic consideration of the threat.

Keywords

Cuban Missile Crisis fear of terrorism Iraq War nuclear terrorism nuclear theft surveillance state

Human history displays many examples of political leaders who manipulate public fears to gain support for policies that, in the end, produce disastrous outcomes for large numbers of people. Racist fears helped Nazis obtain support for the oppression and ultimate murder of millions of Jews, Slavs, homosexuals, and Roma. Eliminating Nazi predations required a war that cost 50 million lives. Excessive fear of communism built support for a war in Vietnam that resulted in two million lives lost in that country and another two million lost on the killing fields of a destabilized Cambodia. Today, the fear of terrorism brought on by 9/11, coupled with the fear of nuclear weapons, has become the source of policies that threaten the destruction of American democracy because of a lack of perspective in the public discussion of these issues.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki have shown the world the damage that nuclear weapons can do,¹ but two facts are important to keep in mind during discussion of policy issues motivated by the fear of nuclear war or nuclear terrorism: Since the end of World War II, no one has died from a nuclear attack, by a state or by a sub-national group, and from the end of WWII to the year 2000, approximately 40 million people died in conventional armed conflict (Leitenberg, 2006).

Even so, stories about possible nuclear conflict or accidents are likely to be given as much or more media visibility as real, conventional conflicts. For example, examination of news media and congressional hearings over the period 1990–2009 shows a significant increase in attention to nuclear terrorism (SHIELD Project, undated), while the war in Congo, which is estimated by the International Rescue Committee to have resulted in the deaths of more than five million people since 1998 (Coghlan et al., 2007), has been virtually invisible to most media outlets.

This situation, the result of the heightened fear of nuclear weapons engendered by the possibility of nuclear conflict with the Soviet Union during the Cold War, has been magnified by the spread of the Bomb to seven countries besides the United States and Russia. It has been boosted further by the rise of international terrorism and the frequently cited prospect that terrorists might steal or otherwise obtain nuclear explosive devices (Allison, 2004; Ferguson and Potter, 2005). In a televised debate during the US presidential election of 2004, the challenger, John Kerry, stated that nuclear terrorism was the “the single greatest threat we face in the world today” (Kerry, 2004), and the incumbent candidate, George W. Bush, replied, “I agree with my opponent that the biggest threat facing the country is weapons of mass destruction in the hands of a terrorist network” (Allison, 2005). During that same campaign, then-Vice President Dick Cheney, also running for re-election, said:

The biggest threat we face now as a nation is the possibility of terrorists ending up in the middle of one of our cities with deadlier weapons than have ever been used against us … a nuclear weapon … able to threaten the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans. (White House, 2004)

These statements by Bush, Cheney, and Kerry were in keeping with the ostensible, but ultimately discredited, reason for the war with Iraq in 2003 that they all supported. This threat mantra has been picked up by President Obama, who called nuclear terrorism “the single biggest threat to US security” (Jackson, 2010), a phrase that returns hundreds of thousands of links when it is entered in the Google Internet search engine.

While fear of nuclear weapons is rational, its extension to terrorism has been a vehicle for fear-mongering that is unjustified by available data. Some writers have recognized this lack of data on the subject,² and their works have started a lively debate, with pushback by proponents of the more conventional alarmist view (see Mowatt-Larssen, 2010). This debate on nuclear terrorism tends to distract from events that raise the risk of nuclear war, the consequences of which would far exceed the results of terrorist attacks. And the historical record shows that the war risk is real.

Despite the development and deployment of command-and-control systems in all nations with nuclear weapons (some more sophisticated than others), the Cuban Missile Crisis demonstrated that miscalculation, misinterpretation, and misinformation could lead to a “close call” regarding nuclear war, and that the possibility of a war being launched under conditions of confrontation cannot be dismissed. Accordingly, most analysts believe that reducing the motivation of non-weapon states to acquire nuclear weapons and increasing the motivation of weapon states to reduce and eliminate their nuclear arsenals is a worthwhile ongoing goal. Achieving this goal has been helped by a number of cases in which countries have halted nuclear weapon programs or activities, or dismantled weapons in their possession.³ In these cases, the calculus dictated that security would be enhanced by giving up nuclear weapons, thus reducing the likelihood of becoming a target of another country’s nukes or motivating a rival to acquire such weapons.

If the fear of nuclear war has thus had some positive effects, the fear of nuclear terrorism has had mainly negative effects on the lives of millions of people around the world, including in the United States, and even affects negatively the prospects for a more peaceful world. Although there has been much commentary on the interest that Osama bin Laden, when he was alive, reportedly expressed in obtaining nuclear weapons (see Mowatt-Larssen, 2010), and some terrorists no doubt desire to obtain such weapons, evidence of any terrorist group working seriously toward the theft of nuclear weapons or the acquisition of such weapons by other means is virtually nonexistent. This may be due to a combination of reasons. Terrorists understand that it is not hard to terrorize a population without committing mass murder: In 2002, a single sniper in the Washington, DC area, operating within his own automobile and with one accomplice, killed 10 people and changed the behavior of virtually the entire populace of the city over a period of three weeks by instilling fear of being a randomly chosen shooting victim when out shopping.

Terrorists who believe the commission of violence helps their cause have access to many explosive materials and conventional weapons to ply their “trade.” If public sympathy is important to their cause, an apparent plan or commission of mass murder is not going to help them, and indeed will make their enemies even more implacable, reducing the prospects of achieving their goals. The acquisition of nuclear weapons by terrorists is not like the acquisition of conventional weapons; it requires significant time, planning, resources, and expertise, with no guarantees that an acquired device would work. It requires putting aside at least some aspects of a group’s more immediate activities and goals for an attempted operation that no terrorist group has previously accomplished. While absence of evidence does not mean evidence of absence (as then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld kept reminding us during the search for Saddam’s nonexistent nuclear weapons), it is reasonable to conclude that the fear of nuclear terrorism has swamped realistic consideration of the threat. As Brian Jenkins, a longtime observer of terrorist groups, wrote in 2008:

Nuclear terrorism … turns out to be a world of truly worrisome particles of truth. Yet it is also a world of fantasies, nightmares, urban legends, fakes, hoaxes, scams, stings, mysterious substances, terrorist boasts, sensational claims, description of vast conspiracies, allegations of coverups, lurid headlines, layers of misinformation and disinformation. Much is inconclusive or contradictory. Only the terror is real. (Jenkins, 2008: 26)

The three ways terrorists might get a nuke

To illustrate in more detail how fear has distorted the threat of nuclear terrorism, consider the three possibilities for terrorists to obtain a nuclear weapon: steal one; be given one created by a nuclear weapon state; manufacture one. None of these possibilities has a high probability of occurring.

Stealing nukes. Nothing is better protected in a nuclear weapon state than the weapons themselves, which have multiple layers of safeguards that, in the United States, include intelligence and surveillance, electronic locks (including so-called “permissive action links” that prevent detonation unless a code is entered into the lock), gated and locked storage facilities, armed guards, and teams of elite responders if an attempt at theft were to occur. We know that most weapon states have such protections, and there is no reason to believe that such protections are missing in the remaining states, since no weapon state would want to put itself at risk of an unintended nuclear detonation of its own weapons by a malevolent agent. Thus, the likelihood of an unauthorized agent secretly planning a theft, without being discovered, and getting access to weapons with the intent and physical ability to carry them off in the face of such layers of protection is extremely low—but it isn’t impossible, especially in the case where the thief is an insider.

The insider threat helped give credibility to the stories, circulating about 20 years ago, that there were “loose nukes” in the USSR, based on some statements by a Soviet general who claimed the regime could not account for more than 40 “suitcase nukes” that had been built. The Russian government denied the claim, and at this point there is no evidence that any nukes were ever loose. Now, it is unclear if any such weapon would even work after 20 years of corrosion of both the nuclear and non-nuclear materials in the device and the radioactive decay of certain isotopes.

Because of the large number of terrorist groups operating in its geographic vicinity, Pakistan is frequently suggested as a possible candidate for scenarios in which a terrorist group either seizes a weapon via collaboration with insiders sympathetic to its cause, or in which terrorists “inherit” nuclear weapons by taking over the arsenal of a failed nuclear state that has devolved into chaos. Attacks by a terrorist group on a Pakistani military base, at Kamra, which is believed to house nuclear weapons in some form, have been referenced in connection with such security concerns (Nelson and Hussain, 2012). However, the Kamra base contained US fighter planes, including F-16s, used to bomb Taliban bases in tribal areas bordering Afghanistan, so the planes, not nuclear weapons, were the likely target of the terrorists, and in any case the mission was a failure. Moreover, Pakistan is not about to collapse, and the Pakistanis are known to have received major international assistance in technologies for protecting their weapons from unauthorized use, store them in somewhat disassembled fashion at multiple locations, and have a sophisticated nuclear security structure in place (see Gregory, 2013; Khan, 2012).

However, the weapons are assembled at times of high tension in the region, and, to keep a degree of uncertainty in their location, they are moved from place to place, making them more vulnerable to seizure at such times (Goldberg and Ambinder, 2011). (It should be noted that US nuclear weapons were subject to such risks during various times when the weapons traveled US highways in disguised trucks and accompanying vehicles, but such travel and the possibility of terrorist seizure was never mentioned publicly.)

Such scenarios of seizure in Pakistan would require a major security breakdown within the army leading to a takeover of weapons by a nihilistic terrorist group with little warning, while army loyalists along with India and other interested parties (like the United States) stand by and do not intervene. This is not a particularly realistic scenario, but it’s also not a reason to conclude that Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal is of no concern. It is, not only because of an internal threat, but especially because it raises the possibility of nuclear war with India. For this and other reasons, intelligence agencies in multiple countries spend considerable resources tracking the Pakistani nuclear situation to reduce the likelihood of surprises. But any consideration of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal does bring home (once again) the folly of US policy in the 1980s, when stopping the Pakistani nuclear program was put on a back burner in order to prosecute the Cold War against the Soviets in Afghanistan (which ultimately led to the establishment of Al Qaeda). Some of the loudest voices expressing concern about nuclear terrorism belong to former senior government officials who supported US assistance to the mujahideen and the accompanying diminution of US opposition to Pakistan’s nuclear activities.

Acquiring nukes as a gift. Following the shock of 9/11, government officials and the media imagined many scenarios in which terrorists obtain nuclear weapons; one of those scenarios involves a weapon state using a terrorist group for delivery of a nuclear weapon. There are at least two reasons why this scenario is unlikely: First, once a weapon state loses control of a weapon, it cannot be sure the weapon will be used by the terrorist group as intended. Second, the state cannot be sure that the transfer of the weapon has been undetected either before or after the fact of its detonation (see Lieber and Press, 2013). The use of the weapon by a terrorist group will ultimately result in the transferring nation becoming a nuclear target just as if it had itself detonated the device. This is a powerful deterrent to such a transfer, making the transfer a low-probability event.

Although these first two ways in which terrorists might obtain a nuclear weapon have very small probabilities of occurring (there is no available data suggesting that terrorist groups have produced plans for stealing a weapon, nor has there been any public information suggesting that any nuclear weapon state has seriously considered providing a nuclear weapon to a sub-national group), the probabilities cannot be said to be zero as long as nuclear weapons exist.

Manufacturing a nuclear weapon. To accomplish this, a terrorist group would have to obtain an appropriate amount of one of the two most popular materials for nuclear weapons, highly enriched uranium (HEU) or plutonium separated from fuel used in a production reactor or a power reactor. Weapon-grade plutonium is found in weapon manufacturing facilities in nuclear weapon states and is very highly protected until it is inserted in a weapon. Reactor-grade plutonium, although still capable of being weaponized, is less protected, and in that sense is a more attractive target for a terrorist, especially since it has been produced and stored in prodigious quantities in a number of nuclear weapon states and non-weapon states, particularly Japan.

But terrorist use of plutonium for a nuclear explosive device would require the construction of an implosion weapon, requiring the fashioning of an appropriate explosive lens of TNT, a notoriously difficult technical problem. And if a high nuclear yield (much greater than 1 kiloton) is desired, the use of reactor-grade plutonium would require a still more sophisticated design. Moreover, if the plutonium is only available through chemical separation from some (presumably stolen) spent fuel rods, additional technical complications present themselves. There is at least one study showing that a small team of people with the appropriate technical skills and equipment could, in principle, build a plutonium-based nuclear explosive device (Mark et al., 1986). But even if one discounts the high probability that the plan would be discovered at some stage (missing plutonium or spent fuel rods would put the authorities and intelligence operations under high alert), translating this into a real-world situation suggests an extremely low probability of technical success. More likely, according to one well-known weapon designer,⁴ would be the death of the person or persons in the attempt to build the device.

There is the possibility of an insider threat; in one example, a team of people working at a reactor or reprocessing site could conspire to steal some material and try to hide the diversion as MUF (materials unaccounted for) within the nuclear safeguards system. But this scenario would require intimate knowledge of the materials accounting system on which safeguards in that state are based and adds another layer of complexity to an operation with low probability of success.

The situation is different in the case of using highly enriched uranium, which presents fewer technical challenges. Here an implosion design is not necessary, and a “gun type” design is the more likely approach. Fear of this scenario has sometimes been promoted in the literature via the quotation of a famous statement by nuclear physicist Luis Alvarez that dropping a subcritical amount of HEU onto another subcritical amount from a distance of five feet could result in a nuclear yield. The probability of such a yield (and its size) would depend on the geometry of the HEU components and the amount of material. More likely than a substantial nuclear explosion from such a scenario would be a criticality accident that would release an intense burst of radiation, killing persons in the immediate vicinity, or (even less likely) a low-yield nuclear “fizzle” that could be quite damaging locally (like a large TNT explosion) but also carry a psychological effect because of its nuclear dimension.

In any case, since the critical mass of a bare metal perfect sphere of pure U-235 is approximately 56 kilograms, stealing that much highly enriched material (and getting away without detection, an armed fight, or a criticality accident) is a major problem for any thief and one significantly greater than the stealing of small amounts of HEU and lower-enriched material that has been reported from time to time over the past two decades, mostly from former Soviet sites that have since had their security greatly strengthened. Moreover, fashioning the material into a form more useful or convenient for explosive purposes could likely mean a need for still more material than suggested above, plus a means for machining it, as would be the case for HEU fuel assemblies from a research reactor. In a recent paper, physics professor B. C. Reed discusses the feasibility of terrorists building a low-yield, gun-type fission weapon, but admittedly avoids the issue of whether the terrorists would likely have the technical ability to carry feasibility to realization and whether the terrorists are likely to be successful in stealing the needed material and hiding their project as it proceeds (Reed, 2014). But this is the crux of the nuclear terrorism issue. There is no argument about feasibility, which has been accepted for decades, even for plutonium-based weapons, ever since Ted Taylor first raised it in the early 1970s⁵ and a Senate subcommittee held hearings in the late 1970s on a weapon design created by a Harvard dropout from information he obtained from the public section of the Los Alamos National Laboratory library (Fialka, 1978). Likewise, no one can deny the terrible consequences of a nuclear explosion. The question is the level of risk, and what steps are acceptable in a democracy for reducing it.

Although the attention in the literature given to nuclear terrorism scenarios involving HEU would suggest major attempts to obtain such material by terrorist groups, there is only one known case of a major theft of HEU. It involves a US government contractor processing HEU for the US Navy in Apollo, Pennsylvania in the 1970s at a time when security and materials accounting were extremely lax. The theft was almost surely carried out by agents of the Israeli government with the probable involvement of a person or persons working for the contractor, not a sub-national terrorist group intent on making its own weapons (Gilinsky and Mattson, 2010). The circumstances under which this theft occurred were unique, and there was significant information about the contractor’s relationship to Israel that should have rung alarm bells and would do so today. Although it involved a government and not a sub-national group, the theft underscores the importance of security and accounting of nuclear materials, especially because the technical requirements for making an HEU weapon are less daunting than for a plutonium weapon, and the probability of success by a terrorist group, though low, is certainly greater than zero. Over the past two decades, there has been a significant effort to increase protection of such materials, particularly in recent years through the efforts of nongovernmental organizations like the International Panel on Fissile Materials⁶ and advocates like Matthew Bunn working within the Obama administration (Bunn and Newman, 2008), though the administration has apparently not seen the need to make the materials as secure as the weapons themselves.

Are terrorists even interested in making their own nuclear weapons?

A recent paper (Friedman and Lewis, 2014) postulates a scenario by which terrorists might seize nuclear materials in Pakistan for fashioning a weapon. While jihadist sympathizers are known to have worked within the Pakistani nuclear establishment, there is little to no evidence that terrorist groups in or outside the region are seriously trying to obtain a nuclear capability. And Pakistan has been operating a uranium enrichment plant for its weapons program for nearly 30 years with no credible reports of diversion of HEU from the plant.

There is one stark example of a terrorist organization that actually started a nuclear effort: the Aum Shinrikyo group. At its peak, this religious cult had a membership estimated in the tens of thousands spread over a variety of countries, including Japan; its members had scientific expertise in many areas; and the group was well funded. Aum Shinrikyo obtained access to natural uranium supplies, but the nuclear weapon effort stalled and was abandoned. The group was also interested in chemical weapons and did produce sarin nerve gas with which they attacked the Tokyo subway system, killing 13 persons. Aum Shinrikyo is now a small organization under continuing close surveillance.

What about highly organized groups, designated appropriately as terrorist, that have acquired enough territory to enable them to operate in a quasi-governmental fashion, like the Islamic State (IS)? Such organizations are certainly dangerous, but how would nuclear terrorism fit in with a program for building and sustaining a new caliphate that would restore past glories of Islamic society, especially since, like any organized government, the Islamic State would itself be vulnerable to nuclear attack? Building a new Islamic state out of radioactive ashes is an unlikely ambition for such groups. However, now that it has become notorious, apocalyptic pronouncements in Western media may begin at any time, warning of the possible acquisition and use of nuclear weapons by IS.

Even if a terror group were to achieve technical nuclear proficiency, the time, money, and infrastructure needed to build nuclear weapons creates significant risks of discovery that would put the group at risk of attack. Given the ease of obtaining conventional explosives and the ability to deploy them, a terrorist group is unlikely to exchange a big part of its operational program to engage in a risky nuclear development effort with such doubtful prospects. And, of course, 9/11 has heightened sensitivity to the need for protection, lowering further the probability of a successful effort.

The consequences of nuclear fears

For nearly two decades, predictions of nuclear catastrophe at the hands of terrorists have become an accepted part of the national security debate, overshadowing to some extent the concerns about proliferation of national nuclear programs. It appears that a belief in the effectiveness of deterrence has assuaged the fears of many people about nuclear war waged by countries (whether justified or not), while at the same time the belief that terrorists cannot be deterred has raised nuclear terrorism fears more than ever. These fears have been fanned in published predictions of nuclear terror attacks (within a given 10-year period) by prominent persons in nuclear security circles, or by informal polls, such as the one issued nine years ago by Sen. Richard Lugar when he chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The poll asked persons working in nuclear policy areas what they thought the risk was of a nuclear terrorist attack over a 10-year period, with guesses suggesting a high threat but based on no hard data that was provided or referenced.

Much has been written about the horrific consequences of a successful nuclear terrorist attack. Less has been written about the horrific consequences of excessive fear of nuclear terrorism. Here is a partial listing of negative policy initiatives that have flowed from overblown fears of terror by atomic weaponry.

The war in Iraq. On October 7, 2002, President George W. Bush gave a national address in which he said:

The evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program. Saddam Hussein has held numerous meetings with Iraqi nuclear scientists, a group he calls his “nuclear mujahideen”—his nuclear holy warriors … If the Iraqi regime is able to produce, buy, or steal an amount of highly enriched uranium a little larger than a single softball, it could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year. And if we allow that to happen, a terrible line would be crossed. Saddam Hussein would be in a position to blackmail anyone who opposes his aggression. He would be in a position to dominate the Middle East. He would be in a position to threaten America. And Saddam Hussein would be in a position to pass nuclear technology to terrorists. (White House, 2002)

Insiders in the George W. Bush administration have revealed that when the administration was seeking internal support for the decision to attack Saddam’s Iraq, there were disagreements over how the decision should be framed. Saddam had been tagged as a supporter of terrorism, and he had begun a nuclear program that was halted as a result of the Desert Shield campaign in 1991 but whose status of dismantlement required more verification following 9/11, a task being carried out by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). In a 2003 Vanity Fair telephone interview conducted by Sam Tannenhaus with Paul Wolfowitz, transcribed by the Defense Department, in which the reasons for going to war again with Iraq were raised, Wolfowitz states: “The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the US government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on, which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason.” He then elaborates, saying that among “fundamental concerns” the “overriding” one was the connection between weapons of mass destruction and support for terrorism (Defense Department, 2009). Recall also Condoleezza Rice’s comment of not waiting for a “mushroom cloud” as a threat warning. So the IAEA investigation was shoved aside, President Bush made his speech, and the war was launched, ostensibly to prevent Saddam from manufacturing nuclear weapons that he might turn over to terrorists. The war has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians, exceeding the number who died at Hiroshima or Nagasaki, and has spawned the rise of offshoots of Al Qaeda like the Islamic State, whose brutality matches or exceeds that of the original. All this has occurred even though—as revealed by the failure to find weapons of mass destruction following the war—Saddam’s nuclear program had been completely shut down in the wake of the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

The rise of the national surveillance state. Lowering the risk of terrorism, particularly the nuclear kind, is the quintessential reason that the mandarins of the national security state have given for employing the most invasive national surveillance system in history. “Finding the needle in the haystack” is how some describe the effort to discern terrorist plots from telephone metadata and intercepted communications. But the haystack keeps expanding, and large elements of the American population appear willing to allow significant encroachments on the constitutional protections provided by the Fourth Amendment. The fear of terrorism has produced this change in the American psyche even though there is no evidence that the collection of such data has resulted in the discovery of terrorist plots beyond those found by traditional police and intelligence methods. It is doubtful that we shall soon (if ever) see a return to the status quo ante regarding constitutional protections. This reduction in the freedom of Americans from the prying eyes of the state is a major consequence of the hyping of terrorism, especially nuclear terrorism. This is exemplified by the blithe conclusion in the previously referenced paper by Friedman and Lewis (2014), in which readers are advised to “be more proactive in supporting our government’s actions to ameliorate potential risks.” The National Security Agency should love this.

Another obstacle on the path to nuclear disarmament. One might expect that fear of nuclear terrorism would have the effect of making production of nuclear weapons by states more difficult politically. In fact, the opposite is the case. Since nuclear deterrence is deemed inoperable when it comes to terrorists, using nukes to threaten their enablers or suppliers becomes a logical alternative policy choice. In that case, a weapon state’s obligation under Article VI of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to move toward disarmament is trumped by what is deemed a more immediate national security need to prevent nuclear terrorism.

Distortion of national politics and government spending. When nuclear safety became subject to government regulation, a question frequently raised during public and private debates about regulation was formulated as: “How safe is safe enough?” Although the risk of nuclear terrorism is very low, there is no public debate on the issue of “acceptable risk.” No politician will publicly allow that we are or will ever be “safe enough” from a nuclear terrorist attack. Indeed, reputations have been made and enhanced in the public and private spheres by loud proclamations that we are not safe enough and that more needs to be done if we are to avoid catastrophe. There is no surer way for the national labs or the intelligence agencies to receive more money from the Treasury than by hyping the terrorist threat, particularly if the word “nuclear” can be attached to it, and by claiming that one’s work is directly applicable to mitigating the threat. And there is no surer way for politicians to give themselves immunity from a charge of supporting wasteful spending than by citing their votes as protecting the country from terrorism, nuclear or otherwise.

The bottom line on the risk of nuclear terrorism

There is clearly some risk of nuclear terrorism via theft of weapons, but the risk is low, and a successful theft of a nuclear weapon would likely require a team of insiders working within an otherwise highly secure environment. There is also some risk that a nuclear-armed country might use a terrorist group to launch a nuclear attack on an adversary. This possibility is also of low probability, because the sponsor country would almost inevitably risk nuclear annihilation itself.

Finally, a terrorist group might try to design and build its own weapon, possibly with the help of disaffected persons from a weapon state who might provide them with nuclear know-how and/or materials. Given all the steps needed to achieve a weapon that is workable with high probability—without being discovered and without suffering an accident—this scenario is also fraught with risk for the terrorists. As a result, terrorists are much more likely to try to achieve their aims using conventional weapons, which are cheaper, safer, and technically more reliable. Thus, while no one can discount completely the acquisition by a terrorist group of a nuclear explosive weapon, such an event appears to be of very low probability over the next decade at least, and can be made still lower using techniques or policies that do not require constitutionally problematic steps by the federal government or an optional war whose death rate could match or exceed what the terrorists are capable of.

There is a tendency on the part of security policy advocates to hype security threats to obtain support for their desired policy outcomes. They are free to do so in a democratic society, and most come by their advocacy through genuine conviction that a real security threat is receiving insufficient attention. But there is now enough evidence of how such advocacy has been distorted for the purpose of overcoming political opposition to policies stemming from ideology that careful public exposure and examination of data on claimed threats should be part of any such debate. Until this happens, the most appropriate attitude toward claimed threats of nuclear terrorism, especially when accompanied by advocacy of policies intruding on individual freedom, should be one of skepticism.

Interestingly, while all this attention to nuclear terrorism goes on, the United States and other nuclear nations have no problem promoting the use of nuclear power and national nuclear programs (only for friends, of course) that end up creating more nuclear materials that can be used for weapons. The use of civilian nuclear programs to disguise national weapon ambitions has been a hallmark of proliferation history ever since the Atoms for Peace program (Sokolski, 2001), suggesting that the real nuclear threat resides where it always has resided—in national nuclear programs; but placing the threat where it properly belongs does not carry the public-relations frisson currently attached to the word “terrorism.”

Footnotes

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

Author biography

Leonard Weiss is a visiting scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University, USA, and a member of the National Advisory Board of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation in Washington, DC. For more than two decades, he was staff director of the US Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs and its Subcommittee on Energy and Nuclear Proliferation, during which time he wrote major legislation on nuclear nonproliferation and led investigations of nuclear programs of other countries. He is a former professor of applied mathematics and engineering at Brown University and the University of Maryland.

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On fear and nuclear terrorism