The attacks of September 11, 2001 have provided a wake-up call for facing the threat of nuclear terrorism. The Nuclear Control Institute, since its inception in 1981, has been analyzing the risks of nuclear terrorism and seeking to alert policymakers and the public to the danger. There was a solid basis for concern long before the attacks of September 11.

Quick Links to Key Documents

"Can Terrorists Build    Nuclear Weapons?" (J. Carson Mark, Theodore Taylor, Eugene Eyster, William Maraman, and Jacob Wechsler, Paper Prepared for the International Task Force on the Prevention of Nuclear Terrorism, 1986) Nuclear Power Reactors are   Inadequately Protected Against   Terrorist Attack (Testimony of Paul Leventhal, NCI President, on behalf of Nuclear Control Institute and Committee to Bridge the Gap before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, December 5, 2001) Petition to the U.S. Nuclear   Regulatory Commission NCI/Hudson Riverkeeper Press Rel. (NCI, Environmentalists and Elected Officials Call for Shutdown of Indian Point Plant, November 8, 2001) Press Conference on the   Vulnerability of Nuclear   Reactors to Terrorist Attack (NCI and Committee to Bridge the Gap, National Press Club, Washington, DC, September 25, 2001) "The Explosive Properties of   Reactor-Grade Plutonium" (J. Carson Mark, Paper Prepared for Nuclear Control Institute, August 1990) Are IAEA Safeguards on Plutonium   Bulk-Handling Facilities Effective? (Marvin Miller, MIT, Paper Prepared for NCI, August 1990) The NRC: What, Me Worry? (Daniel Hirsch, Committee to Bridge the Gap, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, January/February 2002) Testimony of Paul Leventhal on behalf of the Nuclear Control Institute on the Recommendations of the NRC Safeguards Performance Task Force (Presented to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, May 5, 1999) Radiological Sabotage at Nuclear   Power Plants: A Moving Target Set (Dr. Edwin Lyman, NCI Scientific Director, and Paul Leventhal, NCI President, Presented to the 41st Annual Meeting of the Institute of Nuclear Materials Management (INMM), New Orleans, LA, July 2000) "Severe Accidents and Terrorist   Threats at Nuclear Reactors" (Gerald L. Pollack, Paper Prepared for the International Task Force on the Prevention of Nuclear Terrorism, 1986) Report of the NCI/SUNY   International Task Force on   Prevention of Nuclear Terrorism (June 25, 1986)

Iran threatened attacks against U.S. reactors as early as 1987. Trial testimony has revealed that Osama bin Ladens al Qaeda training camps offered instruction in urban warfare against enemies installations including power plants. It is prudent to assume, especially after the highly coordinated, surprise attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, that bin Ladens soldiers have done their homework and are fully capable of attacking nuclear plants for maximum effect. It is also clear that bin Laden was seeking nuclear explosive materials (plutonium or highly enriched uranium) and know-how for building atomic bombs, and other dangerous nuclear materials for use in "dirty bombs" to spread radioactive contamination with conventional high explosives.

In 1986, the Nuclear Control Institute, in cooperation with the Institute for Studies in International Terrorism of the State University of New York, convened the International Task Force on Prevention of Nuclear Terrorism, comprised of 26 nuclear scientists and industrialists, current and former government officials, and experts on terrorism from nine countries. The report issued by the Task Force, along with more than 20 commissioned studies, remains the most definitive examination of nuclear terrorism in the unclassified literature. (The report and a number of the studies are reproduced at the end of this section.)

The Task Force warned that the "probability of nuclear terrorism is increasing" because of a number of factors including "the growing incidence, sophistication and lethality of conventional forms of terrorism," as well as the vulnerability of nuclear power and research reactors to sabotage and of weapons-usable nuclear materials to theft. The Task Force's warnings and its recommendations for reducing vulnerabilities, many of which went unheeded, are all the more relevant in today's threat environment of sophisticated and suicidal terrorists dedicated to mass killing and destruction.

Recent Developments There is now intense national and international attention to the risks of nuclear terrorism. The possibilities that al Qaeda might acquire the materials and the knowledge for building nuclear weapons or "dirty bombs" or might attack commercial nuclear-power facilities to trigger a nuclear meltdown, are of particular concern. The Nuclear Control Institute has been alerting the public and policymakers to these risks, seeking emergency measures to reduce the vulnerabilites, and monitoring and assessing the responses of industry, governments and international agencies.

Click here for recent documents and developments, listed in reverse chronological order, relating to the threat of nuclear terrorism and the efforts to prevent it.


What follows are some of the key issues pertaining to the risks of nuclear terrorism:

Are reactors adequately protected against attack? For nearly 20 years, the Nuclear Control Institute has pressed the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission to upgrade security at nuclear power plants. In 1994, we and the California-based Committee to Bridge the Gap finally succeeded in getting NRC to require nuclear-power plant operators to install defenses against truck bombs, although we remain concerned that these protective measures are inadequate to defend against the larger bombs used by terrorists since the 1993 truck-bomb attack against the World Trade Center.

Current NRC security regulations do not address the magnitude of threat demonstrated by the September 11 attacks. NRC standards require that nuclear plant operators protect against a much smaller number of attackers than involved in these attacks. Yet, even under the current weak standards, the armed guards at nearly half of the nuclear plants tested in NRC-supervised security exercises have failed to repel mock terrorist attacks or prevent simulated destruction of redundant safety systems that in real attacks could cause severe core damage, meltdown, and catastrophic radioactive releases.

This outcome is all the more worrisome because the NRCs mock terrorist exercises severely limit the tactics, weapons and explosives used by the adversary, do not test plant defenses against attacks from the air or from the water, and do not test whether guards could repel an attack on the spent-fuel pools at plant sites that contain many times more deadly radioactivity than the reactor cores. In addition, in response to industry complaints that the exercises are unfairly severe, the NRC is now preparing to shift responsibility for supervising the exercises to the plant operators themselves. Current events clearly demonstrate that nuclear power plant security is too important to be left to industry self-assessment or to the level of protection that industry is willing to pay for. The heightened security at nuclear plants since 9/11 still falls far short of the military-type protection we have recommended. The NRC is undertaking a "top to bottom" review of plant security with no indication of how long it will take to complete and implement or what additional measures will be required.

Despite nuclear industry claims to the contrary, it is highly unlikely that nuclear-power reactor containment domes are robust enough to withstand a direct hit from a jumbo jetliner. Dr. Edwin Lyman, NCIs scientific director, has calculated that a direct, high-speed hit by a large commercial passenger jet "would in fact have a high likelihood a penetrating a containment building" that houses a power reactor. "Following such an assault," Dr. Lyman said, "the possibility of an unmitigated loss-of-coolant accident and significant release of radiation into the environment is a very real one." Such a release, whether caused by an air strike, or by a ground or water assault, or by insider sabotage could result in tens of thousands of cancer deaths.

Click here for documents on the protection of nuclear reactors against attack.

Could terrorists build nuclear weapons? A study prepared for Nuclear Control Institute by five former U.S. nuclear weapons designers concluded that a sophisticated terrorist group would be capable of designing and building a workable nuclear bomb from stolen plutonium or highly enriched uranium, with potential yields in the kiloton range. This risk must be taken seriously, particularly in light of documented attempts by al Qaeda to acquire nuclear material and nuclear-weapon design information. Despite claims to the contrary from plutonium-fuel advocates in the nuclear power industry, effective and devastating weapons could be made using "reactor-grade" plutonium, hundreds of tons of which are processed, stored and circulated around the world in civilian nuclear commerce.

Click here for documents that examine the ability of terrorists to construct nuclear weapons with materials now used in civilian nuclear commerce.

Would we know if fissile materials were stolen? Less than 18 pounds of plutonium or 55 pounds of highly enriched uranium are sufficient to make a nuclear bomb, but these materials circulate in civilian nuclear commerce by the ton. A crucial defense against nuclear terrorism and nuclear proliferation is to end civilian commerce in plutonium and highly enriched uranium and to convert military stocks of these nuclear explosives into non-weapon-usable forms as soon as possible. Even the International Atomic Energy Agency, a staunch promoter of nuclear power, has acknowledged an urgent need to improve protection of civilian and military nuclear materials at plant sites as well as in transit.

Nuclear Control Institute has long been a critic of the inability of IAEA inspections and other "safeguards" measures to detect large process losses of plutonium and highly enriched uranium or to ensure adequate protection against thefts of these materials in transit and in storage. IAEA physical-security standards now only apply to international shipments of nuclear materials, not to the facilities where these materials are processed, stored and used. Because of these shortcomings, we may not even know if materials that could be used in nuclear weapons is missing.

The vulnerabilities of Russian nuclear installations have been well documented, but protection of many Western facilities is also inadequate. Shortcomings in security of materials and warheads have even been documented in the U.S. nuclear-weapons complex. The situation in such emerging nuclear-weapon states as India and Pakistan is even more troubling. Contingency responses to theft and smuggling of materials or warheads must be further developed, and technical capabilities for finding and disarming terrorist bombs must be improved.

Click here for documents on nuclear safeguards and on physical protection of nuclear materials.

Are Nuclear Weapons Vulnerable to Theft? Although generally better secured than nuclear materials, there is still a possibility that nuclear weapons could be stolen by terrorists. In 1986, the NCI\SUNY International Task Force on the Prevention of Nuclear Terrorism raised concerns about the vulnerability of tactical nuclear weapons to theft. Since the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States and Russia have removed nearly all their tactical nuclear weapons from overseas deployment. However, there has been continued speculation that some number of Soviet "suitcase bombs" (small portable nuclear weapons) remain unaccounted for, with unconfirmed reports that they have been obtained by al Qaeda. Also, security weaknesses have been identified at nuclear weapons laboratories and other installations in both Russia and the United States. Further, the security of India and Pakistans embryonic nuclear arsenals is uncertain, as is the question of whether weapons in these states are secured by Permissive Action Link (PAL) systems (coded, electronic locks). In the United States, the Nuclear Emergency Search Team (NEST) is a highly secretive federal inter-agency group that has had the responsibility for more than 20 years for locating and deactivating terrorist nuclear weapons, but its technical ability to fulfill this daunting mission if the need arose remains uncertain.

Click here for documents examining the risk that terrorists could steal nuclear weapons.

How Vulnerable are Russian Weapons, Fissile Materials, and Reactors? Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the uncertain status of nuclear weapons, fissile materials and nuclear scientists in Russia and other former Soviet republics are widely regarded as posing perhaps the most immediate threat of nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism. Despite significant assistance from the United States over the last ten years, many of Russias nuclear facilities seem poorly secured, and there is still no comprehensive, verifiable system of nuclear materials accountancy. No one even knows for certain how much nuclear weapons material the Soviet Union produced. With confirmed incidents of Russian-origin fissile materials turning up for sale on the black market, this danger is more than hypothetical.

Controversy also rages over how to dispose of plutonium recovered from dismantled Russian warheads. The Russian government and the Bush Administration plan to fabricate excess Russian and U.S. plutonium into mixed-oxide fuel (MOX) for irradiation in nuclear-power reactors (including Russias BN-600 prototype fast breeder reactor). However, a safer, less costly and more secure alternative would be to combine the plutonium with highly radioactive waste in molten glass. This immobilized plutonium, embedded in massive, highly radioactive glass blocks, could be directly disposed of in a geologic repository, and would prevent the circulation of tens of tons of plutonium in civilian commerce throughout Russia (as well as the United States) that
the MOX-fuel approach would necessitate. (More information on plutonium
disposition is available at www.nci.org/nci-wpu.htm)

NCI has supported U.S. assistance to secure Russias nuclear weapons, materials and facilities under the Defense Departments Cooperative Threat Reduction Program (Nunn-Lugar) since its inception in 1991.  NCI has played a leading role in advocating the shutdown of Russias military plutonium production reactors, and has strongly and successfully opposed Russian proposals to convert these reactors to bomb-usable HEU fuel rather than closing them or converting to low-enriched uranium fuel.

Click here for documents on nuclear vulnerabilities in Russia.

Are "Dirty Bombs" a Major Terrorism Risk? "Dirty bombs," known also as radiation dispersal devices (RDDs), are weapons that use conventional explosives to disperse radioactive materials, thereby augmenting the injury and property damage caused by the explosion. The capability of an RDD to cause significant harm is strongly dependent on the type of radioactive material used and the means used to disperse it. Other important variables include location of the device and prevailing weather conditions.

Radioactive materials that could be employed in RDDs range from radiation sources used in medicine or industry to spent nuclear fuel from nuclear power plants. In general, the physical protection requirements for radioactive sources widely used in commerce are quite lax; however, the largest radiotherapy sources typically contain no more than a few hundred curies of gamma-emitters like cesium-137 or cobalt-60. Sources of this size, if removed from their shielded containers, could present an acute hazard to individuals within the vicinity (tens of meters) of the source. However, an effective dispersal of the material would tend to dilute the concentration downwind of the site of detonation to relatively low levels quickly. Acute radiation hazard would probably be confined to an area of a few hundred meters radius around the site for a ground-level release. However, the occurrence of localized areas of contamination further downwind would be a possibility, depending on the meteorology.

Standard modeling of these events in the midst of densely populated urban areas indicates no acute fatalities from radiation exposure and few cancer deaths. However, these models do not take into account the additional consequences that might occur from radioactive contamination of wounds suffered by people injured during the blast, which could cause additional internal contamination, or direct radiation exposure, which could impair the immune systems of burn victims and thwart their recovery.

The most concentrated sources of large quantities of radioactive isotopes are contained in spent nuclear fuel from power plants, but these sources are relatively inaccessible due to their size (several meters in height), weight (half a metric ton) and radiation barrier (thousands to tens of thousands of rem per hour surface dose). A single spent fuel assembly typically can be transported only in a shielded shipping cask weighing many tons. However, if such a package, usually containing radioactive inventories hundreds or thousands of times greater than those of the medical sources, could be acquired by terrorists or sabotaged during transport in an urban area, severe consequences could result, including thousands of latent cancer fatalities.

Click here for documents on dangers associated with "dirty bombs."

The International Task Force on the Prevention of Nuclear Terrorism
(The report is described above.) The volume in which the report and associated studies were published is unfortunately out of print. Amazon.com or other used-book dealers may be able to find it for you.

Click here for the Task Force report.

Click here for selected studies commissioned by the Task Force.

"Nuclear Terrorism: Defining the Threat" Studies from NCIs 1985 international conference that provided the basis and outlined the issues for the Task Force are published in this volume, now unfortunately out of print. Amazon.com or other used-book dealers may be able to find it for you.

Click here for table of contents.

Other key nuclear terrorism documents and web sites are catalogued to provide you with additional information and perspectives. (These resources do not necessarily reflect the positions of the Nuclear Control Institute.)

Click here for links to other documents on nuclear terrorism.

Click here for a list of nuclear terrorism web sites.

What you can do. A collection of e-mail addresses for U.S. and international policymakers is provided. Make your opinion known in order to make it count!

Click here to e-mail your opinions on nuclear terrorism to
federal and international policymakers.

"Can Terrorists Build Nuclear Weapons?"
   (J. Carson Mark, Theodore Taylor, Eugene Eyster,
   William Maraman, and Jacob Wechsler, Paper
   Prepared for the International Task Force on
   the Prevention of Nuclear Terrorism, 1986)
"Severe Accidents and Terrorist Threats at
    Nuclear Reactors" (Gerald L. Pollack, Paper
    Prepared for the International Task Force
    on the Prevention of Nuclear Terrorism, 1986)
   
Selected chapters from the NCI book
"Preventing Nuclear Terrorism":
Clandestine Nuclear Trade and the Threat
   of Nuclear Terrorism / PDF (Leonard Spector)
Prospects for Nuclear Terrorism:
   Psychological Motivations and Constraints / PDF
   (Jerrold Post)
Nuclear Weapons Security and Control / PDF
   (Thomas Julian)
Physical Security of Nuclear Facilities / PDF
   (Herbert Dixon)
The Truck Bomb and Insider Threats to
   Nuclear Facilities / PDF (Daniel Hirsch)
International Safeguards and Nuclear
  Terrorism / PDF (Sidney Moglewer)
European Nuclear Safeguards and Terrorism:
  A Personal Perspective / PDF (Enrico Jacchia)
Intelligence and the Prevention of Nuclear
  Terrorism / PDF (John Despres)
Mobilizing Intelligence Against Nuclear
  Terrorism: A Personal Perspective / PDF
  (Yuval Ne'eman)
U.S.-Soviet Cooperation in Countering
  Nuclear Terrorism: The Role of Risk
  Reduction Centers / PDF
  (Sam Nunn & John Warner)
The Nuclear Emergency Search Team / PDF
  (Mahlon Gates)
Civil Liberties and Nuclear Terrorism / PDF
  (Steven Goldberg)
About the Task Force Members & Authors