Robin M. Frost - Nuclear Terrorism after 9/11

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Nuclear Terrorism After 9/11

RobinM.Frost

First published 2005 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, US A

First issued in hardback 2017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright 2005 by The International Institute for Strategic Studies

ISBN 13: 978-0-4153-9992-0 (pbk)
ISBN 13: 978-1-1384-6662-3 (hbk)

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguingin Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data

ISBN 0-415-39992-0
ISSN 0567-932X

Contents

Guide

'If a 10-kiloton nuclear weapon, a midget even smaller than the one that destroyed Hiroshima, exploded in Times Square, the fireball would reach tens of millions of degrees Fahrenheit. It would vaporize or destroy the theater district, Madison Square Garden, the Empire State Building, Grand Central Terminal and Carnegie Hall ... The blast would partly destroy a much larger area, including the United Nations. On a weekday some 500,000 people would be killed. Could this happen? Unfortunately, it could-and many experts believe that such an attack, somezuhere, is likely.'

Nicholas D. Kristof, 'An American Hiroshima', Nezv York Times, 11 August 2004.

'The bottom line is this: For the foreseeable future, the United States and other nations will face an existential threat from the intersection of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction' [emphasis added].

Senator Richard Lugar, 'Lugar Releases New Report on WMD Threats and Responses', press release, Office of Senator Richard Lugar, 22 June 2005.

'Sometimes it seems as if the source of newly announced dangers must be the basement of the White House or a back room at a Washington think tank, where the thousands of monkeys who have yet to type out exact copies of the works of Shakespeare are nonetheless producing dozens of netv ideas for attacks on America, to be trotted out on the news at 10.'

Linda Rothstein, Catherine Auer and Jonas Siegel, 'Rethinking Doomsday', Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, November-December 2004, pp. 36-41.

This paper takes a position that runs counter to the views on nuclear terrorism expressed by many politicians and academics, as well as the media. It argues that the risk of nuclear terrorism, especially true nuclear terrorism employing bombs powered by nuclear fission, is overstated, and that popular wisdom on the topic is significantly flawed. There are technical, psychological and strategic grounds for this assertion, and the paper will deal with each of these categories in turn. At the same time, there are good reasons for concern about the state of nuclear security worldwide, and nothing in this paper should be read as suggesting that there is any cause for complacency. Far from it: serious efforts are required to improve the situation. Radioactive materials, and potential targets of nuclear terrorism, such as reactor complexes, must be better protected.

A set of implicit or explicit assumptions about nuclear terrorism underlies a good deal of the current discourse on the topic. Some of the key assumptions are given below. All of these assumptions are questionable, and several are simply false. The point Karl-Heinz Kamp made nine years ago applies just as well today: if all these assumptions were true, why is that terrorists still do not possess nuclear explosive devices?

• The Russian nuclear arsenal, inherited from the Soviet Union, is so poorly secured that it has become an enormous 'Nukes-R-Us', staffed by a corrupt, demoralised and underpaid military, and patronised by terrorists and their criminal henchmen.
• There is a thriving international black market in nuclear weapons and materials.
• The plans and technical information necessary to build a functional nuclear weapon are widely available.
• Some so-called rogue states, especially Pakistan and North Korea (or entities within them), are willing to give or sell nuclear weapons to terrorists, if they have not already done so.
• The greatest potential threat is from terrorists using true nuclear weapons, but 'dirty bombs' could also be extremely dangerous, especially if they use substances such as uranium or plutonium.
• All terrorists, but most especially the anti-Western jihadist Islamist groups generically known as al-Qaeda, are irrational, mentally-ill killers who engage in terrorism to satisfy their bloodlust.
• As a corollary to the above, terrorists are uniformly eager to obtain, and willing to use, any and all weapons of mass destruction (WMD), including nuclear weapons.
• Nuclear terrorism constitutes an 'existential threat' to the United States and other potential target states.

In brief, the rebuttals to these assumptions can be put as follows.

• Russian nuclear weapons. Russian nuclear weapons appear to be under the generally good control of elite troops. There is no evidence in open-source material that a single nuclear warhead, from any national arsenal or another source, has ever made its way into the world's illegal arms bazaars, let alone into terrorist hands. No actual or aspiring nuclear-weapon state has ever claimed to have nuclear weapons without also having all of the technical infrastructure necessary to produce them ab initio, although they could, if the 'loose nukes' arguments were sound, easily have bought a few on the black market. Even the extravagant sums sometimes mentioned as the alleged asking price for stolen weapons would be tiny fractions of the amount required to develop an indigenous nuclear-weapon capability, yet circumstances seem to have compelled states to choose the more expensive course.
• The nuclear black market. There is no evidence in the open-source literature of a true international black market in nuclear materials. Virtually all known cases of nuclear theft or smuggling have involved amateurs hoping for rich returns, despite the seeming absence of anyone interested in buying the material. To the extent that a market exists, it is almost entirely driven by supply; there appears to be no true demand, except where the buyers were government agents running a sting. Organised crime, with one known exception, has not been involved in nuclear trafficking. Even the notorious A.Q. Khan network concentrated on nuclear technology, especially centrifuge uranium enrichment, rather than fissile materials, although there have been suggestions that Khan, a Pakistani nuclear engineer, sold uranium hexafluoride, the feedstock for enrichment, to Libya.
• 'Do-it-yourself' nuclear weapons. It is most improbable that any terrorist group could become a do-it-yourself nuclear power: unlike rou gh conceptual outlines, the detailed plans and engineering drawings necessary to build a bomb are not easily available. It would also be very difficult, if not effectively impossible, to acquire sufficient quantities of suitable fissile materials. The expertise and facilities required to build a functional bomb, even a crude one, are of a higher order than those possessed by any known terrorist organisation. Developing nuclear weapons requires state-level resources, and the process takes years.

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