Recommendations from Confronting the Specter of Nuclear Terrorism

Click on each author's name to read a pdf of the Annals article

• The need for a greater sense of urgency. Guest Editor Graham Allison stresses that nuclear terrorism represents “today’s gravest national security challenge” and former Senator Sam Nunn maintains that reducing the threat of nuclear terrorism needs to be a top priority of the United States. “With the rise of global terrorism, with poorly secured nuclear weapons and materials around the globe, with our economies so tightly intertwined,” Nunn writes, “it is possible that a small group of terrorists could acquire nuclear weapons in one nation, launch a nuclear attack in another nation, and stagger the security and the economy of every nation. The United States and its partners must be as focused on fighting the nuclear threat in this century as they were in fighting the communist threat in the last century.” To Former Defense Secretary William Perry terrorists setting off a nuclear bomb on U.S. soil would be “the single worst catastrophe this country has ever suffered. Just one bomb could result in more than 100,000 deaths … the direct economic losses from the blast would be hundreds of billions of dollars, but the indirect economic impact would be even greater, as worldwide financial markets collapsed in a way that would make the market setback after 9/11 seem mild.” And Matthew Bunn and Anthony Wier show that “while the danger should not be exaggerated, a nuclear terrorist attack is potentially within the capabilities of a well-organized and sophisticated terrorist group.”
• The United States needs to use a mix of economic and political inducements, including sanctions, to convince nations to control or eliminate their fissile material stockpiles and adequately secure their nuclear weapons, agree many of the authors. Turning to specific countries, the United States is urged to:
• Increase funding for the Cooperative Threat Reduction Initiative (CTR) to help secure nuclear materials and scientists in Russia. Stephen Van Evera claims that “Enough nuclear materials remain unsecured in Russia to make tens of thousands of Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs” and that “many Soviet nuclear and biological-weapons scientists also remain underpaid or unemployed, ripe for hiring by terrorists.” He suggests that the President appoint a strong visible leader to take charge of the CTR program, and that that person be empowered to use the full array of American carrots and sticks to persuade Russian President Vladimir Putin to agree to and implement a deal on nuclear security.
• Help Pakistan secure its nuclear materials: Siegfried S. Hecker believes Pakistan represents one of the greatest security threats because it has “all the technical prerequisites: Highly Enriched Uranium (HEU) and plutonium; enrichment, reactor and reprocessing facilities; a complete infrastructure for nuclear technologies and nuclear weapons; largely unknown, but questionable nuclear materials security; and missiles and other delivery systems. It views itself as threatened by a nuclear India. It has a history of political instability; the presence of fundamental Islamic terrorists in the country and in the region; uncertain loyalties of civilian (including scientific) and military officials; and it is home to A.Q. Khan, the world’s most notorious nuclear black marketer.”
• Take back all the HEU in research reactors in some 40 countries around the world. During the Cold War, Van Evera notes, the United States dispersed “enough nuclear material to make perhaps one thousand nuclear bombs to forty-three countries around the world, starting in the 1950s and ending in 1988. The U.S. government has since made only lackadaisical efforts to recover these immensely dangerous materials, which are ripe for theft or illicit purchase by terrorists. These materials must be secured immediately.” Hecker acknowledges that the Department of Energy Global Threat Reduction Initiative has “increased the pace of these efforts of the past two years.” However, he stresses that "so long as any HEU exists in inadequately safeguarded facilities, it presents an unacceptable risk." He suggests the solution lies in “an accelerated U.S.-Russian led effort to take back all HEU, backed by G-8 financing.”
• In North Korea and Iran, as Nunn suggests, “use a combination of carrots and sticks to develop an urgent, coordinated, and direct diplomatic effort to end nuclear weapons programs.” Perry points up the possibility that that a North Korean nuclear bomb could “end up in one of our cities, not delivered by a missile, but by a truck or freighter.” Hecker points out that North Korea, having withdrawn from the NPT, must be kept from exporting not just a weapon but some of its roughly 40 to 50 kilograms of plutonium to terrorist groups. At the same time, he says we must secure Russian and Chinese support for current European and U.S. efforts to prevent Iran from the completion of enrichment capabilities and the development of other troublesome nuclear technologies.
• Secure any vulnerable nuclear materials that have been left behind by the Soviets in Kazakhstan and other former Soviet Union countries. Hecker notes that although Kazakhstan returned Soviet nuclear weapons to Russia under the Nunn-Lugar program, weapons-usable material remains in HEU-fueled reactors. Kazakhstan also inherited a former Soviet nuclear test site where security “has declined dramatically since the days of Soviet ownership, raising concerns about vulnerable materials that may have been left behind by the Soviets.”
• Develop intelligence to detect illicit nuclear activities at exactly the right time—and design a military strategy to mount a counter-nuclear mission. Michael V. Hynes, John E. Peters, and Joel Kvitky suggest that new purpose-built sensors should be added to the U.S. intelligence gathering assets to “increase the likelihood of discovering illicit nuclear weapons programs before they bear fruit—when they are mature enough so that little ambiguity surrounds their purpose but immature enough so that a deployable weapon has not been produced.” Because detection may necessitate direct military action, they note, “the U.S. must develop the right sized, trained, and equipped forces to prevail over potential nuclear adversaries.”
• Consider the option of “expanded deterrence” to obtain the cooperation needed to stop the transfer or leakage of fissile material. Robert Gallucci suggests that if countries with nuclear weapons and fissile material do not cooperate with efforts to secure their materials, we consider conveying our intent to treat a nuclear attack on the United States as an attack by the perpetrator and the country from which the material was obtained. Such a threat, he says, “would remain even if the transfer was not authorized, but only if that government had failed to be fully cooperative in controlling its fissile material and weapons.” He adds, “It may be that, by threatening unacceptable consequences we can deter that which we cannot physically prevent.”
• Do more to develop methods to analyze debris after a detonation so as to confidently identify the source of the weapon or materials. Gallucci proposes that this effort involve working with countries that are potential sources of fissile material (who might be willing to cooperate in order to be excluded from the American retaliatory target list). This cooperation, he says, could range from “a quiet bilateral sharing of the relevant nuclear signatures from a country of concern to the establishment of an open database with such signatures.”
• Develop response plans that integrate efforts at the local, state, and federal level and implement a serious public education program, suggests Nunn, in order to mitigate the consequences of a dirty bomb attack.
• Conduct a war of ideas to counter the hatred felt by Islamist terrorists and dampen the demand for nuclear weapons. Charles Curtis recommends using public diplomacy to counter the perception that U.S. policies are hostile to the Muslim world, and work through existing media outlets that Muslims trust. He suggests providing aid to pivotal Muslim states “to improve the freedom and opportunity in those states and to show Muslims that American wealth and power can make their lives better, not worse.” He adds, “It is admittedly beyond U.S. capacity to be universally loved, but we should and must do much more to counter the hatred directed against us.”