Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON -- There is an "almost vanishingly small" likelihood that terrorists would ever be able to acquire and detonate a nuclear weapon, one expert said here yesterday (see GSN, Dec. 2, 2008).

In even the most likely scenario of nuclear terrorism, there are 20 barriers between extremists and a successful nuclear strike on a major city, said John Mueller, a political science professor at Ohio State University.

The process itself is seemingly straightforward but exceedingly difficult -- buy or steal highly enriched uranium, manufacture a weapon, take the bomb to the target site and blow it up. Meanwhile, variables strewn across the path to an attack would increase the complexity of the effort, Mueller argued.

Terrorists would have to bribe officials in a state nuclear program to acquire the material, while avoiding a sting by authorities or a scam by the sellers. The material itself could also turn out to be bad.

"Once the purloined material is purloined, [police are] going to be chasing after you. They are also going to put on a high reward, extremely high reward, on getting the weapon back or getting the fissile material back," Mueller said during a panel discussion at a two-day Cato Institute conference on counterterrorism issues facing the incoming Obama administration.

Smuggling the material out of a country would mean relying on criminals who "are very good at extortion" and might have to be killed to avoid a double-cross, Mueller said. The terrorists would then have to find scientists and engineers willing to give up their normal lives to manufacture a bomb, which would require an expensive and sophisticated machine shop.

Finally, further technological expertise would be needed to sneak the weapon across national borders to its destination point and conduct a successful detonation, Mueller said.

Every obstacle is "difficult but not impossible" to overcome, Mueller said, putting the chance of success at no less than one in three for each. The likelihood of successfully passing through each obstacle, in sequence, would be roughly one in 3 1/2 billion, he said, but for argument's sake dropped it to 3 1/2 million.

"It's a total gamble. This is a very expensive and difficult thing to do," said Mueller, who addresses the issue at greater length in an upcoming book, Atomic Obsession. "So unlike buying a ticket to the lottery ... you're basically putting everything, including your life, at stake for a gamble that's maybe one in 3 1/2 million or 3 1/2 billion."

Other scenarios are even less probable, Mueller said.

A nuclear-armed state is "exceedingly unlikely" to hand a weapon to a terrorist group, he argued: "States just simply won't give it to somebody they can't control."

Terrorists are also not likely to be able to steal a whole weapon, Mueller asserted, dismissing the idea of "loose nukes." Even Pakistan, which today is perhaps the nation of greatest concern regarding nuclear security, keeps its bombs in two segments that are stored at different locations, he said (see GSN, Jan. 12).

Fear of an "extremely improbable event" such as nuclear terrorism produces support for a wide range of homeland security activities, Mueller said. He argued that there has been a major and costly overreaction to the terrorism threat -- noting that the Sept. 11 attacks helped to precipitate the invasion of Iraq, which has led to far more deaths than the original event.

Panel moderator Benjamin Friedman, a research fellow at the Cato Institute, said academic and governmental discussions of acts of nuclear or biological terrorism have tended to focus on "worst-case assumptions about terrorists' ability to use these weapons to kill us." There is need for consideration for what is probable rather than simply what is possible, he said.

Friedman took issue with the finding late last year of an experts' report that an act of WMD terrorism would "more likely than not" occur in the next half decade unless the international community takes greater action. "I would say that the report, if you read it, actually offers no analysis to justify that claim, which seems to have been made to change policy by generating alarm in headlines."

One panel speaker offered a partial rebuttal to Mueller's presentation. Jim Walsh, principal research scientist for the Security Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said he agreed that nations would almost certainly not give a nuclear weapon to a nonstate group, that most terrorist organizations have no interest in seeking out the bomb, and that it would be difficult to build a weapon or use one that has been stolen.

However, he disputed Mueller's assertion that nations can be trusted to secure their atomic weapons and materials. "I don't think the historical record shows that at all," Walsh said.

Black-market networks such as the organization once operated by former top Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan remain a problem and should not be assumed to be easily defeated by international intelligence services, Walsh said (see GSN, Jan. 13). It is also reasonable to worry about extremists gaining access to nuclear blueprints or poorly secured stocks of highly enriched uranium, he said.

"I worry about al-Qaeda 4.0, kids in Europe who go to good schools 20 years from now. Or types of terrorists we don't even imagine," Walsh said.

Greater consideration must be given to exactly how much risk is tolerable and what actions must be taken to reduce the threat, he added.

"For all the alarmism, we haven't done that much about the problem," Walsh said. "We've done a lot in the name of nuclear terrorism, the attack on Iraq, these other things, but we have moved ever so modestly to lock down nuclear materials."

Biological Terrorism

Another two analysts offered a similar debate on the potential for terrorists to carry out an attack using infectious disease material.

Milton Leitenberg, a senior research scholar at the Center for International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland, played down the threat in comparison to other health risks. Bioterrorism has killed five U.S. citizens in the 21st century -- the victims of the 2001 anthrax attacks, he said. Meanwhile, at least 400,000 deaths are linked each year to obesity in this country.

The United States has authorized $57 billion in spending since the anthrax mailings for biological prevention and defense activities, Leitenberg said. Much of the money would have been better used to prepare for pandemic flu, he argued.

"Mistaken threat assessments make mistaken policy and make mistaken allocation of financial resources," Leitenberg said.

The number of states with offensive biological weapons programs appears to have stabilized at six beginning in the mid-1970s, despite subsequent intelligence estimates that once indicated an increasing number of efforts, Leitenberg said. Caveats in present analyses of those states make it near-impossible to determine the extent to which their activities remain offensive in nature, he added.

There has been minimal proliferation of biological expertise or technology to nations of concern in recent decades, Leitenberg said. He identified roughly 12 Russian scientists who ended up in Iran and shipments of technology and pathogen strains to Iraq from France, Germany, the former Soviet Union and the United States between 1980 and 1990.

No evidence exists of state assistance to nonstate groups in this sector. Two prominent extremist organizations, al-Qaeda and Aum Shinrikyo in Japan, failed to produce pathogenic disease strains that could be used in an attack, according to Leitenberg.

Terrorists would have to acquire the correct disease strain, handle it safely, correctly reproduce and store the material and then disperse it properly, Leitenberg said. He dismissed their ability to do so.

"What we've found so far is that those people have been totally abysmally ignorant of how to read the technical, professional literature," Leitenberg said. "What's on the jihadi Web sites comes from American poisoners' handbooks sold here at gun shows. Which can't make anything and what it would make is just garbage."

Randall Larsen, national security adviser to the University of Pittsburgh's Center for Biosecurity, expressed less confidence in terrorists' incompetence.

Scientific and technological advances could enable the production of a dangerous biological agent using technology purchased through the Internet, he said.

"This is what you can do that took superpower technology in the '60s that graduate students can do in laboratories and universities ... around the world today," according to Larsen.

He also took issue with Leitenberg's assertion regarding the biological capabilities of Aum Shinrikyo, the cult best known for the 1995 sarin nerve agent attack on the Tokyo subway system (see GSN, Nov. 11, 2008). Recent interviews with personnel from the cult's biological program indicated they succeeded in producing a pathogenic disease strain, but that the material was "screwed up" during mass production, Larsen said.

"It is a very, very difficult challenge for the intelligence community to find out if a terrorist organization is developing a biological weapon in a room smaller than this," he said.