The Four Faces of Nuclear Terrorism

Charles D. Ferguson, William C. Potter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781135086398
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política

The Four Faces of Nuclear Terrorism, a new book from the Center for Nonproliferation Studies, assesses the motivations and capabilities of terrorist organizations to acquire and use nuclear weapons, to fabricate and and detonate crude nuclear explosives, to strike nuclear power plants and other nuclear facilities, and to build and employ radiological weapons or "dirty bombs."

1

THE GROWING THREAT

The United States has faced the threat of nuclear terrorism for many years, but this peril looms larger today than ever before. Terrorist organizations have escalated the destructiveness of their acts, as the events of September 11, 2001, the bombing in Bali in October 2002, and the Madrid bombings of March 2004 so tragically showed. Controls over nuclear and radioactive materials remain fragmentary and uncertain in many states where terrorist groups operate, often with popular support. And the list of incidents demonstrating terrorist interest in unleashing nuclear mayhem is growing more frightening by the month.

Certain nuclear arms within at least two states may be at heightened risk for terrorist seizure. Russia continues to deploy a number of its most por nuclear weapons on its front lines, where security controls are weakest—weapons Senator Richard Lugar, Chairman of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and former Senator Sam Nunn have emphasized are the most attractive to terrorists.¹ Russia, however, is unwilling to relocate all of its tactical nuclear weapons to central storage or to implement fully and expeditiously the 1991-1992 Presidential Nuclear Initiatives, and the United States has neither pressed the matter nor provided assistance to enhance the security of these weapons. In Pakistan, where President Pervez Musharraf survived two assassination attempts in December 2003, new investigations have revealed unauthorized sales of sensitive nuclear technology by Pakistani nuclear scientists supportive of a fundamentalist Islamic agenda, developments that raise questions about the security of that country’s nuclear arsenal. The new revelations echo earlier disclosures in November 2001 that Pakistani nuclear scientists provided aid of unknown dimensions to al Qaeda.

Nuclear materials suitable for nuclear arms are perhaps at even greater risk than the nuclear weapons themselves. Hundreds of tons of pluto-nium and weapons-usable uranium in Russia have yet to receive even rudimentary security improvements, while stocks of Soviet-origin, weapons-usable uranium remain vulnerable at research centers in other former Soviet states and elsewhere around the globe. Comparable U.S.-origin material in certain foreign locations may also be at risk. Even fissile material stocks in the United States, where security is considered far stronger than in the former Soviet Union, may be vulnerable to attack because of flaws in protective measures.²

Although protective measures have been increased at many nuclear power plants throughout the world, these installations remain alluring targets for terrorists. The August 2003 arrest in Ontario, Canada, of nineteen individuals (the same number of attackers involved in 9/11) on charges of conspiring to destroy a nuclear power plant on the shore of Lake Ontario was a chilling reminder of the interest of terrorist organizations in exploiting nuclear facilities to cause grievous harm to the United States and its friends.³

Meanwhile, criminal activities involving radioactive materials are on the rise. In Ecuador in December 2002, thieves held five stolen radioactive sources ransom but returned only three, after the ransom was paid, suggesting the other two are now available on the black market, perhaps accessible to terrorist buyers or their intermediaries. In another recent case, a radioactive source stolen in a carefully planned operation in Nigeria later turned up in Western Europe, again highlighting the growing scale of illicit trafficking in these materials. Most dangerous of all the cases that have come to light, however, was the theft in 2003 of three of the world’s most potent radioactive sources—Russian “nuclear batteries”—each potentially containing enough radioactivity to make an urban area the size of the District of Columbia uninhabitable.⁴ Fortunately, the thieves discarded the radioactive materials, retaining the pure metal container housing them, which they planned to sell as scrap.

These disturbing developments highlight the four “faces” of nuclear terrorism. Terrorists have essentially four mechanisms by which they can exploit military and civilian nuclear assets around the globe to serve their destructive ends:

• The theft and detonation of an intact nuclear weapon
• The theft or purchase of fissile material leading to the fabrication and detonation of a crude nuclear weapon—an improvised nuclear device (IND)
• Attacks against and sabotage of nuclear facilities, in particular nuclear power plants, causing the release of large amounts of radioactivity
• The unauthorized acquisition of radioactive materials contributing to the fabrication and detonation of a radiological dispersion device (RDD)—a “dirty bomb”—or radiation emission device (RED).

The first two classes of incidents would involve nuclear explosions, the most horrific form of nuclear terrorism. Hundreds of thousands of lives could be lost from the blast, immediate property damage could run to many billions of dollars, and radioactive contamination could cause tens to hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of lost economic activity, property damage, and long-term health effects. Total costs, in monetary terms, could soar to several trillion dollars.⁵

Consequences stemming from a terrorist-detonated nuclear weapon in an American city would emanate beyond the immediate tens or hundreds of thousands of fatalities and the massive property and financial damage. Americans who were not killed or injured by the explosion would live in fear that they could die from future nuclear terrorist attacks. Such fear would erode public confidence in the government and could spark the downfall of the administration in power. The tightly interconnected economies of the United States and the rest of the world could sink into a depression as a result of a crude nuclear weapon destroying the heart of a city.

The destruction of a nuclear power plant would probably cause considerably less damage. However, loss of the plant itself and permanent or temporary loss of use of any co-located nuclear power reactors would still run into many billions of dollars, and widespread radioactive contamination could lead to tens to hundreds of billions of dollars in lost economic activity, property damage, or long-term health effects. The consequences of use of an RDD in the form of a dirty bomb are scenario dependent. Under certain circumstances, use of an RDD in the form of a dirty bomb could result in hundreds of prompt casualties and tens of billions of dollars’ worth of lost economic activity, property damage, and long-term health effects.⁶ The costs of panic and evacuation must also be added to the toll in each of these cases.

While the probability of nuclear terrorism remains much smaller than the likelihood of terrorism involving conventional means of violence, the danger of high-end terrorism is growing. The February 2003 U.S. National Strategy for Combating Terrorism, for example, warned that, “The probability of a terrorist organization using a chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear weapon, or high-yield explosives, has increased significantly during the past decade.”⁷ The strategy reflects anxieties at the highest levels of the U.S. government. Indeed, it has been reliably reported that within a few weeks of September 11, 2001, President Bush “ordered his national security team to give nuclear terrorism priority over every other threat to the United States.”⁸ More recently, Vice President Cheney was reported as warning that “‘the major threat’ facing the nation is the possibility that terrorists could detonate a biological or nuclear weapon in a U.S. city.”⁹

Despite these statements of concern, there is little evidence that the U.S. government has developed a comprehensive plan that effectively prioritizes how the United States and its allies should combat the threat of nuclear terrorism. Addressing the Vice President’s fear of biological terrorism, the White House was reportedly, as of mid-December 2003, “nearing completion of a classified ‘Biodefense End-to-End Assessment’ that systematically catalogues the gaps in the nation’s safeguards against biological attack and begins to develop strategies for filling them.”¹⁰ But no such thorough effort has been announced to assess defenses and other strategies to combat nuclear terrorism. In particular, the U.S. government has neither undertaken a comparative assessment of the risks of the principal types of nuclear terrorism nor sought to prioritize strategies for addressing them.

A starting point for developing such a plan is a comprehensive understanding of the nature of nuclear terrorism, beginning with an appreciation of the relative risks posed by its principal forms. Risk can be defined as the probability of an event multiplied by its consequences. Thus, the greater the probability or the greater the consequences, the higher the overall risk. Quantifying risk presents many difficulties, especially when there is a paucity of information about the occurrence or likelihood of an event. Fortunately, to date, no detonations of illicitly obtained nuclear weapons or INDs have occurred, nor have there been any dirty bomb attacks. Nuclear facilities have experienced some terrorist attacks, but none of these has resulted in off-site releases of radioactivity. However, from the perspective of risk analysis, this minimal data set significantly constrains the ability to perform a quantitative risk assessment. Consequently, decision makers must rely upon the qualitative examination of the risks of the different faces of nuclear terror.

Nuclear terrorism experts generally agree that the nuclear terror acts with the highest consequences are the least likely to occur because they are the most difficult to accomplish.¹¹ Conversely, those acts with the least damaging consequences are the most likely to take place because they are the easiest to carry out. Constructing and detonating an improvised nuclear device, for example, is far more challenging than building and setting off a radiological dispersal device, because the former weapon is far more complex technologically and the necessary materials are far more difficult to obtain. Thus, an IND presents a less likely threat than does an RDD. In contrast, the consequences from an IND explosion are orders of magnitude more devastating than the damage from use of an RDD. Taking into account both the magnitude of potential consequences and the relative difficulty of execution, all four faces of nuclear terrorism pose potentially grave and imminent dangers, and the United States and other concerned states must work to address all of them.

Striving for maximum risk reduction demands a rigorous examination of both the probability and consequence factors of the risk equation. If national and international efforts can shrink the probability of an event, the risk is reduced. Similarly, if the consequences of a nuclear terrorist attack can be reduced to a low level, terrorists potentially can be dissuaded from launching such an attack because it would be less likely that they could achieve their goals of inflicting massive damage and terror.

Knowing where and how to apply efforts to reduce risk requires understanding the chain of necessary conditions for a nuclear terror act to occur.¹² In the case of the detonation of an intact nuclear weapon or an IND, this chain of events consists of the following steps:

1. A terrorist group with extreme objectives and the necessary technical and financial resources must organize itself.
2. The group must then choose to engage in an act of nuclear terrorism.
3. These terrorists must seize an intact nuclear weapon or acquire fissile material (either highly enriched uranium or plutonium) to make an IND.
4. They must determine how to bypass or defeat any safeguards in an intact nuclear weapon or how to assemble an IND from the fissile material.
5. Then the terrorist group must be able to transport the IND (or its parts) or the intact nuclear weapon to a high-value target.
6. Finally, the terrorists must detonate the IND or intact nuclear weapon to complete their plan.

Should any link in this chain be severed, the nuclear terrorist plan would be thwarted. Thus countermeasures can be effective at many different points in the evolution of a nuclear terror act, and multiple countermeasures, even if individually imperfect, can combine into an increasingly effective system. The global war on terrorism, for example, has disrupted some terrorist organizations, removed certain safe havens, and interfered with terrorist financing activities. The United States is also moving to improve port and border security against the illicit introduction of nuclear and radioactive materials into this country, initiatives that will require years of additional work to complete.¹³ New radiation sensors are being installed around certain cities considered likely terrorist targets, and commercial air travel security has been significantly tightened to reduce the chances that a commercial aircraft might be used as an instrument of a terrorist attack.

The benefits from these initiatives and those directed more specifically at protecting nuclear assets are cumulative and mutually reinforcing, and in time, they will combine into a “multilayered defense” to reduce the overall danger of nuclear terrorism to acceptable levels. For now, however, the most rapid advances can be made by focusing on the nuclear dimension of the problem, in particular improving security over nuclear assets and preparing for nuclear terror incidents in order to mitigate their consequences. Indeed, an overall strategy of risk reduction should strive to reduce the probability of nuclear terror acts with the highest consequences and mitigate the consequences of the nuclear terror acts that are the most probable.

The following chapters of this book will review these issues in depth, beginning with an examination of the motivations and capabilities of the terrorist organizations that might seek to escalate their agenda for destruction into the nuclear realm. Subsequent chapters will scrutinize each of the four faces of nuclear terrorism to provide a technical understanding of the dangers they pose, the steps terrorists must take to accomplish them, and the key strategies needed to reduce the risks they pose. The concluding chapter will summarize findings and will make recommendations for both immediate and longer-term action by the United States and other concerned nations.

As will be seen, averting the mo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Chapter 1: The Growing Threat
• Chapter 2: The Nuclear Terrorists: Who, Why, and How Capable?
• Chapter 3: Seizing the Bomb: Theft, Diversion, and Instability
• Chapter 4: Making the Bomb: Loose Materials and Know-How
• Chapter 5: Releasing Radiation: Power Plants and Other Facilities
• Chapter 6: Dispersing Radiation: The Dirty Bomb and Other Devices
• Chapter 7: Meeting the Challenge: A Plan for Urgent Action against Nuclear Terrorism
• Selected Bibliography
• Index
• About the Authors