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Blocking the Terrorist Pathway to the Bomb
A Tutorial on Nuclear Weapons and Nuclear-Explosive Materials
 Nuclear
Basics |
Material
Production |
| Nuclear
Weapons Design & Materials |
Weapons
& Material Detection & Protection |
| Nuclear-Weapon
Effects |
Related
Links |
To understand the urgency of the threat posed by insecure nuclear warheads and materials around the world, it helps to understand the technical realities that determine how hard it is to make a nuclear bomb, and where the greatest leverage lies in preventing terrorists from being able to get such a bomb and set it off in a city.
This page provides the basic information about the science and technology of nuclear materials and nuclear weapons that is needed to answer the following questions:
- What materials, in what quantities, are needed in order to generate a nuclear explosion?
- How difficult is it to produce these materials?
- How difficult is it to handle them, transport them, and conceal them?
- How difficult is it to fashion them into an effective nuclear weapon?
- How big might such a weapon be, and how could it be delivered?
- How much destruction would ensue from the detonation of such a weapon?
- What means are available for detecting such a weapon, or the material to make one, in the course of its being smuggled into or out of a country, or once hidden in a city?
- What technologies are used to secure and account for nuclear materials?
Links
| Nuclear Weapons Design & Materials | |
 |
Office of Technology Assessment, Technologies Underlying Weapons of Mass Destruction (Washington, D.C.: OTA, December 1993) |
| This report provides an unclassified official summary of the technologies relevant to producing nuclear weapons and the materials for them, along with similar information for chemical and biological weapons. Perhaps the best available introductory primer. | |
|
Carey Sublette, Nuclear Weapons Frequently Asked Questions, August 2001 |
| This document, compiled from public sources by a researcher who has never had access to classified nuclear weapons design information, provides a summary of what is known at the unclassified level concerning nuclear weapon design, nuclear weapons effects, and related topics. Appendices include useful data on the nuclear properties of a range of relevant isotopes. | |
|
J. Carson Mark, Theodore Taylor, Eugene Eyster, William Maraman, and Jacob Wechsler, "Can Terrorists Build Nuclear Weapons?" in Paul Leventhal and Yonah Alexander, Preventing Nuclear Terrorism (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books for the Nuclear Control Institute, 1987). |
| This chapter, authored by a group of U.S. nuclear weapon designers with a spectrum of views on the subject, is the most authoritative available unclassified treatment. Unfortunately, the answer the authors offer is yes, it is possible that some particularly well-organized terrorist groups could make a nuclear explosive. | |
|
National Research Council,
Committee on Science and Technology for Countering
Terrorism, "Nuclear and Radiological Threats," in Making the
Nation Safer: The Role of Science and Technology in
Countering Terrorism (Washington, D.C.: National
Academies Press, June 2002). Download 299K PDF |
| This report warns that a "technically competent" terrorist group would be able to make a nuclear bomb from stolen plutonium or HEU, and concludes that "the first challenge, then, for the United States and its allies to improve security for weapons and special nuclear material wherever they exist, but especially in Russia." | |
|
U.S. Department of Defense, "Nuclear
Weapons Technology," from Office of the
Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition and Technology, The
Militarily Critical Technologies List: Part II:
Weapons of Mass
Destruction (Washington, D.C.: Department of Defense,
February 1998). Download 1.0M PDF |
| This official report includes detailed unclassified discussions of the technologies that go into making nuclear weapons and producing the materials for them. | |
|
Owen R. Coté, "A Primer on Fissile Materials and Nuclear Weapons Design," Appendix B in Graham T. Allison, Owen Coté, Jr., Richard A. Falkenrath, and Steven E. Miller, Avoiding Nuclear Anarchy: Containing the Threat of Loose Russian Nuclear Weapons and Fissile Material (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996) |
|
Office of Declassification, U.S. Department of Energy, Restricted Data Declassification Decisions: 1946 To the Present RDD-7 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Energy, January 2001). |
| This document is an official compilation of the individual facts about nuclear weapons design and production that have been declassified in the United States over the decades of the nuclear age. | |
| Nuclear-Weapon Effects | |
|
Office of Technology Assessment, The Effects of Nuclear War (Washington, D.C.: OTA, 1979) |
| Detailed official summary of the devastating power of nuclear weapons and the effects nuclear explosions in cities would have. | |
|
Samuel Glasstone and Phillip J. Dolan, The Effects of Nuclear Weapons (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1977) |
| The official textbook on the effects of nuclear weapons. Only a small portion of the total is yet available on the web. | |
|
U.S. Departments of the Army, Navy, and the Air Force, Field Manual 8-9: NATO Handbook on the Medical Aspects of NBC Defensive Operations, AmeDP-6(B) (Washington, D.C.: February 1996) |
| Comprehensive official summary of the effects of nuclear weapons (as well as chemical and biological weapons) on troops in the field. | |
| Material Protection & Detection | |
|
Peter Beck, project manager, Final
Report: ITRAP: Illicit Trafficking Radiation Detection
Assessment Program (Seibersdorf, Austria: Austrian
Research Centers, 2000) Download 689K PDF |
|
Provides the results of an extensive program to test available equipment for detecting nuclear material at borders. |
|
Office of Technology Assessment, Nuclear
Safeguards and the International Atomic Energy
Agency (Washington, D.C.: OTA, 1995). Download 36K PDF |
| Good overview of physical protection technologies, with photographs | |
|
Material Protection, Control, and Accounting Seminar |
| These presentation slides, from presentations at a seminar organized by the University of Georgia, with participation from several U.S. nuclear laboratories, provide an introduction to the technologies of control, accounting, and protection for nuclear materials. | |
|
Canberra Safeguards Technology Papers |
| Canberra, a leading provider of safeguards technologies, offers this page of technical papers on their products—ranging from portal monitors to detect nuclear material leaving a facility to technologies for measuring the concentration of Pu-239 or U-235 in a sample. Ortec, another leading supplier, offers a similar page. | |
|
Seals Homepage |
| Run by Sandia National Laboratories for the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Safeguards and Security, this page provides descriptions of the different types of seals and tags that can be used to identify individual items or containers with nuclear material, and provide an indication of whether they have been tampered with. | |
|
Argonne National Laboratory, Vulnerability Assessment Team |
| This group has posted a variety of papers warning that many commonly used tamper-indicating seals are more vulnerable to being overcome—so that material could be removed without detection—than is often understood. | |
Written by John Holdren and Matthew Bunn. Last updated on November 25, 2002.
The Securing the Bomb section of the NTI website is produced by the Project on Managing the Atom (MTA) for NTI, and does not necessarily reflect the opinions of and has not been independently verified by NTI or its directors, officers, employees, agents. MTA welcomes comments and suggestions at atom@harvard.edu. Copyright 2007 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.