Introduction

The possibility that terrorists might acquire and use nuclear weapons is an urgent and potentially catastrophic challenge to global security. Nuclear weapons, the most powerful weapons of mass destruction (WMD), use the energy produced by reactions within and between atomic nuclei to generate tremendous explosive force, heat, radiation, and other harmful effects. This tutorial provides an overview of the threat of terrorism using nuclear explosives and options for preventing that occurrence.

From the late 1940s until the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s, the world lived with the constant threat of nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union. The end of the Cold War offered hope that the nuclear arsenals built by the United States, Russia, China, and other countries would never be used and might eventually be completely dismantled. But a new nuclear threat quickly arose. In the final years of the 20th century and in the early years of the 21st, international terrorist organizations have repeatedly demonstrated their willingness to kill large numbers of innocent civilians to achieve their objectives. They have also made efforts to gain access to WMD, including nuclear weapons, by contacting nuclear weapon scientists and casing nuclear facilities.

Other NTI tutorials examine the motivations that inspire terrorists to acquire and use chemical, biological, and radiological weapons. While the potential of these weapons to cause injury is extremely serious (indeed a large-scale biological attack could cause more fatalities or as many fatalities as a nuclear detonation), that of nuclear weapons can be far greater, with some powerful nuclear weapons able to destroy the core of a major city.

Nuclear weapons cannot be manufactured directly from the key raw material found in nature, uranium. Natural uranium must be "enriched" before it becomes nuclear-weapons usable, an extremely complex and costly task that only nations or large-scale commercial enterprises have the resources to undertake. Plutonium, the other nuclear-weapons-usable material, does not exist in nature and must be produced in a nuclear reactor, another complex and costly project that only nations or large-scale commercial or scientific enterprises can perform. For this reason, a terrorist organization can acquire a nuclear explosive only (1) by obtaining an intact nuclear weapon from a national stockpile or (2) by obtaining fissile material from stocks that were produced in highly advanced industrial facilities and then making the fissile material into a nuclear explosive. The most important and effective steps for reducing the threat of nuclear terrorism are therefore to secure, consolidate, reduce, and, where possible, eliminate nuclear weapons and fissile material. Programs to implement such measures are under way in many countries but are far from reaching their goals.

In this tutorial, we will focus on the threat of nuclear terrorism by investigating four key questions: What are nuclear weapons? How could terrorists acquire or build nuclear weapons? Why would terrorists use nuclear weapons? How should the world respond to the threat of nuclear terrorism?

This tutorial was designed as a companion piece to Last Best Chance, a nuclear terrorism docudrama, produced by the Nuclear Threat Initiative. Click to download a discussion guide.

This material is produced independently for NTI by the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies and does not necessarily reflect the opinions of and has not been independently verified by NTI or its directors, officers, employees, agents.
Copyright © 2009 by MIIS.