Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 4, No. 1 | Nuclear Doomsday: Is the Clock Still Ticking? page 5

Consider the risk of being injured while driving your car. Potential consequences include personal injuries, perhaps fatalities, and property damage. But the potential likelihood of injury are affected by a fairly extensive list of factors over which you may have some control: condition of your vehicle, time of day, the weather, traffic, speed, seatbelts, your age, your health or your state of mind.

We have a pretty good idea of the consequences resulting from a nuclear blast. Richard Garwin has done the math predicated on a minimal 1-kiloton HEU-based device and a 10-kiloton plutonium device: in the aftermath of a 1 kiloton explosion in mid-Manhattan on a typical weekday, “Some 210,000 people would die, mostly from prompt radiation within a week or so. Of these, 30,000 would have died [immediately] from the blast, and about 100,000 from burns…For the 10-kiloton explosion, about a million people will die from burns.”

Charles Ferguson concurs: “In an area like Washington or New York, it would probably kill tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people in a very short period of time and lead to massive destruction, have global economic effects, and leave radiation from nuclear materials.”

Arguably, the enormity of the consequences is so great that unless the likelihood is nil, the risk is prohibitive.

What, then, is the likelihood? A view shared to varying degrees by many experts is that, while the consequences demand every effort be made to lock down HEU and plutonium, the likelihood that terrorists will detonate a nuclear device in a large city is relatively slim.

Robin Frost, author of a controversial report, Nuclear Terrorism After 9/11 a recent publication of the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), argues, based upon “technical, psychological and strategic grounds…the risk of nuclear terrorism, especially the risk of true nuclear terrorism employing bombs powered by nuclear fission, is overstated, and that the popular wisdom on the topic is significantly flawed.”

An important underlying argument for Frost’s assertion is the taboo surrounding first-strike use of nuclear weapons. He argues that use of a nuclear weapon would create a furious backlash, including among some who are nominal backers of terrorist causes.

“All over the world, from Indonesia to Saudi Arabia, there are people who support al-Qaeda and its ideals,” he says. “But that support would evaporate overnight if they were to nuke a city. It would fall to a very small hard core of extremists who would actually support that kind of action. There is in Islam the notion of protected people—women, children, men too old for combat—and I think any kind of large-scale slaughter of people like that simply would reach the unacceptable limits even for fairly hard-core extremists.”

“I most strongly disagree,” says Allison, having skimmed Frost’s book. “For a terrorist, if you’re trying to do shock and awe and dread, breaking a taboo in the way that 9/11 did is a plus factor rather than a minus.”

But Frost rejects the first premise of nuclear terrorism, “that nuclear weapons themselves are at significant risk of theft anywhere in the world,” pointing to the fact that, fifteen years after the Russians’ withdrawal of tactical nuclear weapons from former Soviet states, none has turned up outside government control. He adds, “Although there is obviously always a very small chance that insiders—it would have to involve several people, possibly in different locations—could be suborned or spontaneously turn traitor.” Continuing, Frost writes, “No state that possessed them, whether established or ‘rogue,’ would be likely to hand over such weapons to terrorists unless they were acting as mercenary agents of the state itself. The threat of nuclear retaliation, even if the possibility of tracing the weapon back to its source were thought to be low, should be enough to deter any rational state from using a nuclear weapon against another nuclear-weapon state, or a country under the protection of one.” Even if an intact device was obtained, he argues, built-in security measures and technical knowledge required would likely prevent any detonation.

But what about terrorists building their own nuclear weapon? While acknowledging expert opinions that constructing a nuclear device is within the realm of possibility, Frost argues that the myriad difficulties involved lower the likelihood substantially, saying, “Assembling enough fissile material for even the crudest nuclear device…would be very difficult and probably extremely expensive for a terrorist organization. The theoretical knowledge and practical skills required to design and build a nuclear weapon are of a higher order, while setting up, equipping and successfully operating an undetectable clandestine weapons laboratory would be difficult and expensive, even for the best-funded terrorist organization.”

“We find this too complacent,” write Anna M. Pluta and Peter D. Zimmerman in a detailed rebuttal to Frost published by Survival, the journal of the IISS. “The fissile material is available, or could become available, from a Russian nuclear stockpile that remains dangerously insecure,” the authors say. “An improvised nuclear device would be difficult, but not too difficult, to build. And there are terrorist groups that have already demonstrated technical abilities and organizational reach to make us very worried.”

As evidence, Pluta and Zimmerman cite a December 1998 incident in which Russian authorities thwarted an attempt to steal 18.5 kilograms of HEU, nearly enough for a nuclear bomb. The theft involved an organized group of facility employees. Frost dismisses the incident on the grounds that the Russian Special Forces intercepted the thieves before they left the facility. However, in a sweeping rejection of Frost, Pluta and Zimmerman conclude, “There are few psychological barriers to true mass-casualty terrorism still standing; fissile material is or can become available if the price is right, and some organizations can probably pay any price; the technical barriers to constructing an improvised nuclear device are far lower than Frost indicates.”

A scene from the Nuclear Threat Initiative’s film, the “Last Best Chance.”

Courtesy the Nuclear Threat Initiative

Yet, a strong school of thought holds that we imbue terrorists with too much sophistication, believing them capable of greater feats of corruption and technology than they have thus far demonstrated. For terrorist purposes, the cost and effort involved in obtaining and deploying complex weapons might be more properly applied to more conventional means of destruction.

“The main trend (in international terrorism) is the trend away from state involvement and state sponsorship,” as compared to 10 or 20 years ago when Syria, Libya, Iraq and Iran were directly involved, writes Paul Pillar, a former Deputy Chief of the CIA's Counter-terrorist Center, in National Journal. “The specter of terrorists, especially international terrorists, using chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear means has...diverted our attention from what...will continue to be the main threat, which is the infliction of loss of life through conventional means.”

Pillar notes that there were two attacks against targets in the United States in 2001: “The one that used box cutters and aircraft hijacking is the one that killed almost 4,000 people; the one that used anthrax spores … killed five. We ought to reflect on that; I can assure you the terrorists will reflect on that.”

In a more recent example, it should be noted that the terrorist plot thwarted by the British authorities in August 2006 allegedly involved plans for multiple explosions on multiple airplanes in flight, using liquid explosives.

John Parachini of the Rand Corporation, generally concurs with Pillar, saying, “The empirical record suggests that [terrorist groups] go for the easiest and safest means that will accomplish [their] objectives.” But, he continues, “Does that mean there’s no threat? No. I think there’s an enduring danger of either non-state actors or non-state actors in partnership with a rogue faction of a state to wield the mightiest weapons against us. But can you say, ‘In the next ten years it is likely a city in America will be struck with a nuclear weapon’? There’s no basis for that. It’s possible, but based on the data set about the best we can say is that the probability is not zero. We cannot compute a probability.”

Frost says he finds a reminiscent shrillness in the discussion of nuclear terrorism. “There seems to be a political and almost a psychological need to transfer the same level of threat assessment from the Cold War and the Cold War enemy to the new environment of the terrorist enemy, and they simply aren’t comparable.”

But some of what Frost sees as alarmist others see as a reasonable call for public attention to a potential, imminent danger; one person’s charged rhetoric can be another’s sincere expression of concern for society.

Last Best Chance, a feature film produced by NTI with Carnegie Corporation support, provides a realistic glimpse of how a nuclear terrorist attack could be mounted against the United States using HEU stolen from a Russian facility, expert support from corrupt scientists, and an old fishing boat out of Mexico delivering the package to a waiting truck in a sleepy Gulf Coast bayou.

There’s already been one missed opportunity—the fall of the Soviet Union—to avert today’s problems. “It’s hard to believe that it could be mismanaged as much as it has been,” Garwin says of the end of the Cold War. “Initially, there was a lot of reluctance to grant that the Soviet Union had truly disappeared as a feared competitor. There was a lot of reluctance to spend the money … to help democracy there, and … actually to get rid of their nuclear weapons.”

As things stand today, “the Russians and the U.S. military command are talking to each other much less than they were during the Cold War days,” says Kennette Benedict of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which is conducting a series of meetings with U.S. and Russian authorities to ascertain the twenty-first-century concerns of nuclear relations. “Each doesn’t know what each other is really thinking,” she notes. “They’re not visiting, there are no military exchanges, there’s just no conversation.”

She too sees a need to engage with media, to educate the public about critical issues. “Many of us have to start working hard to make this understandable to people so they aren’t just frightened,” she says. “After all, ‘Duck and Cover’ has another meaning: you just get out of the way of everything, including knowledge. We need to make a U-turn and head in the other direction. Educating people is how you solve problems, and that’s what we have to start doing.”

M.J. Zuckerman is a Washington, DC-based veteran journalist, author, newspaper reporter and editor, who has written extensively about the intersection of technology, security, democracy and justice for more than 20 years.