The Four Faces of Nuclear Terrorism

"The Four Faces of Nuclear Terrorism is the most sober and serious of the books I’m going to talk about. It’s about something that everybody in the world ought to be aware of and worried about. It’s not super-technical in a scientific sense, but there are a lot of policy wonk issues in it. The book was written by some people who would have been colleagues of mine, because the Center for Nonproliferation Studies, which is in Monterey, California, is now a part of Middlebury College—but it wasn’t at the time. The book is a bit dated because it was written in 2004. I think it was inspired by the 2001 9/11 attacks and the worry that terrorist groups might be after nuclear weapons or going to crash airplanes into nuclear power plants and so on. “Any move to increase nuclear weapons …is very unfortunate and destabilizing to the world” There’s something very historical and sad about this book, in that there is a foreword by Senator Sam Nunn, a Democrat of Georgia, and Senator Richard Lugar, a Republican of Indiana. They started the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program to help reduce the danger of nuclear threats—not only nuclear war, but also nuclear terrorism. This was a Republican and a Democrat working together. It’s so sad to me to see that we don’t have that kind of cooperation anymore. But it was there in 2004, only 17 years ago. One of the most fascinating things to me, as an energy geek, was the Megatons to Megawatts Program, which existed for 20 years, from 1993 to 2013. The goal was to turn 500 tons of highly enriched uranium from Russia into fuel for American nuclear power plants. There was a time during those 20 years, at the peak of the program, when 10 per cent of the average American’s electricity was coming from recycled Soviet nuclear weapons. What a wonderful swords-into-plowshares thing! The program ended in 2013 because it succeeded—it used up the 500 tons of uranium. One is terrorists seizing nuclear weapons through theft, through diversion with insider help, or through political instability in a country that has nuclear weapons. In a way that’s the quickest way for a terrorist group to get nuclear weapons. The second face is terrorists making nuclear weapons from materials they get hold of. As the book points out over and over again, the only serious impediment is getting hold of fissile materials, the highly enriched uranium or plutonium. Most people think of plutonium, but the real danger is the enriched uranium, of which there is a huge amount available in the world. We heard in April about the attack on Iranian centrifuges. Now Iran is going to enrich to 60%. There’s absolutely no reason for that, other than to make weapons. In our book, we have a little box that explains why once you get to about 20% enrichment, it’s trivial to get to almost pure, weapons-grade uranium. That’s the big issue. The third face of nuclear terrorism is releasing radiation through attacks on power plants and other facilities. I think that’s less of a worry, but it’s still a concern. The fourth face is making so-called dirty bombs, which would disperse radioactive materials, not through nuclear explosions, but using conventional explosives to disperse them. We’ve tended not to worry about these four faces of nuclear terrorism so much in the last decade. But it’s good that there are people out there worrying about them because they still present serious threats. As someone who teaches about climate change and worries about it a lot, I occasionally find myself reminding my colleagues in the environmental movement that there are worse things that could happen to the world and a nuclear war is one of them. And it’s still entirely possible, given the arsenals out there. This is something we ought to be worried about. Although this book is more for policy people, it’s certainly readable by anyone, and you ought to be aware of it as a citizen. The book mentions North Korea only as a state that might, in extreme circumstances, consider selling nuclear materials or nuclear weapons to others, but no, it’s not about state nuclear weapons."