The notion that al-Qaida could secure, let alone detonate such a weapon, remains a terrifying prospect for the public and controversial among those who track the nexus between terrorism and nuclear proliferation.
Osama bin Laden, al-Qaida’s founder and their leader until his death in May, as well as others tied to the terrorist organization, said publicly both before and since the 9/11 attacks that the group wanted nuclear weapons and claimed a religious right to use them.
Scott Stewart, a terrorism analyst with STRATFOR, a private intelligence firm based in Austin, Texas, in a recent report said his firm judges that, if al-Qaida had a nuclear weapon, the group “would have used it by now rather than sitting on it and running the risk of it being seized.”
Charles Blair directs the Terrorism Analysis Program for the Federation of American Scientists, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank that monitors security policy. Like other experts, Blair said he considers the odds of al-Qaida building its own nuclear device small because of challenges such as gaining nuclear material and constructing a weapon.
Nuclear threat remains
But the possibility should not be dismissed, he said.
“I think serious people need to be thinking about it because the consequences are so great, although it’s highly unlikely right now,” he said.
He worries the instability in nuclear-armed Pakistan could put that country’s weapons at risk. Particularly worrisome he said is that militants from the Pakistani Taliban have attacked military facilities associated with the country’s nuclear program and that the attacks have happened with greater frequency.
“It’s as if somebody conducted a terrorist attack five miles outside Los Alamos,” he said. “We would probably be pretty concerned. The other thing is these terrorist attacks worked. They were not thwarted attacks.
“I’m not saying the Pakistani neo-Taliban is on the verge of getting nuclear weapons,” he said. “But, if there ever was a country that should give us concern, I think it should be Pakistan right now.”
Few groups have the desire to acquire chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear weapons, said Jeffrey Bale, director of the Monterey Terrorism Research and Education Program at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. Most instead choose to focus on more conventional methods that have worked in the past, he said.
U.S. military thwart efforts
Of those actually interested in the weapons — such groups as al-Qaida, Aum Shinrikyo and Jemaah Islamiyah — an even smaller number have the resources necessary to get them, he said.
“But even amongst the Jihadist groups, they haven’t been obsessed with it,” he said. “They haven’t really devoted huge amounts of time, attention and resources to developing these things.”
Bale said the prospect of spectacular and catastrophic attacks often grab the most attention and generate the most worry. Attacks using chemical or biological agents or dirty bombs — explosives used to spread radioactive material — take less technical sophistication to build. But he thinks terrorists might turn to them because of their capacity to scare people, he said.
“I would argue that a kind of crude attack with a chemical agent in a New York subway, even if it killed three people, would actually be more psychologically traumatic than a conventional explosive that blew up and killed 50,” he said.
Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, former director of intelligence and counterintelligence for the U.S. Energy Dept., told a U.S. Senate committee in 2008 that the war in Afghanistan had produced new information about al-Qaida’s desire to acquire nuclear weapons.
Officials found that the group “wants weapons to use, not a program to sustain and build a stockpile, as most states would,” Mowatt-Larssen said in prepared comments to the U.S. Senate’s Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
The former CIA officer called the acquisition of nuclear materials a “chokepoint” in any effort to develop a nuclear device.
“It is impossible to build a nuclear weapon without fissile material,” said Mowatt-Larssen, now a senior fellow at Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. “A state has the time and resources to build the large infrastructure required to make its own nuclear material. A terrorist group needs to steal it or buy it.”
He said the acquisition of a nuclear weapon “would be an event of unprecedented significance. It would give them a weapon genuinely capable of producing mass casualties.”
John Mueller, a political science professor with the Ohio State University, is skeptical that al-Qaida ever could pull off a nuclear strike. Aside from the technical challenges, the group’s lack of funding and the constant pressure it faces from U.S.-led drone strikes probably have made acquiring nuclear, chemical or biological weapons unlikely for the terrorist group, he said.
“Once you start putting together all the difficulties there are for the terrorist, they look really monumental,” he said.
Mueller, who co-wrote the book, Terror, Security and Money: Balancing the Risks, Benefits and Costs of Homeland Security, said security measures such as an effort to scan cargo coming into the U.S. for nuclear materials cost a lot of money and he questions the benefits of such a detection system.
Measures such as proper storage and tracking of nuclear materials and using sting operations to foil people shopping for nuclear materials would suffice, said Mueller, OSU’s Woody Hayes Chair for National Security Studies.
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