Thinking about Nuclear Terrorism

Abstract

Sometime in the 1980s an that is not a national government may acquire a few nuclear weapons. If not in the 1980s then in the 1990s. The likelihood will grow as more and more national governments acquire fissionable material from their own weapon programs, their research programs, their reactor-fuel programs, or from the waste products of their electric power reactors. By organization I mean a political movement, a government in exile, a separatist or secessionist party, a military rebellion, adventurers from the underground or the underworld, or even some group of people merely bent on showing that it can be done. My list is not a definition, just a sample of the possibilities. Two decades of concern about the proliferation of weapons have generated a familiar list of national governments that may have motive and opportunity to possess weapons-grade fissionable material, and some ideas about how they might behave if they had it and what they might use it for. But there is also a possibility that somebody other than a government may possess the stuff. Who they might be and how they might acquire it are related questions. While not impossible, it is unlikely that an entity not subject to nationalgovernment regulation could independently obtain and enrich uranium for use in explosives or could produce plutonium as a reactor product and refine it for weapons use. There are undoubtedly corporations technically and financially able to do it, but not many with both the motive and the opportunity to do it without being apprehended by an adversely interested party. Access to weapons or a weapon program, or to an authorized nuclear fuel cycle, or to an official research establishment licensed and authorized by some national government is currently the only way to do it. Identifying the opportunities and the access to those opportunities generates some answers to the question Who? Theft of weapons is an obvious possibility. As far as we know, it hasn't happened. Despite the thousands in existence, including the thousands on