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11. Preventing Nuclear Terrorism: A Progress Update

Author:
Matthew Bunn
Publication Date:
10-2003
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard University
Abstract:
In the past year, there has been notable progress in ensuring that stockpiles of the essential ingredients of nuclear weapons around the world are secured from theft and transfer to terrorists. But there remains a dangerous gap between the pace of progress and the scope and urgency of the threat – a gap that, if left unfilled, could lead to unparalleled catastrophe. We must close the gap – to take action now that, within a few years, could reduce the danger that terrorists might turn the heart of a U.S. city into a new Hiroshima to a fraction of what it is today. This paper is intended to outline the continuing threat; summarize the progress made in addressing it in the past year, and the gaps that still remain; and recommend steps to close the gap between threat and response. The terrorists who have sworn to kill Americans wherever they can be found have undertaken an intensive effort to get a nuclear bomb, or the materials and expertise needed to make one. We need to be racing as fast as we can to stop them before they succeed. This paper is about steps to win that race.
Topic:
Security, Nuclear Weapons, Terrorism, and Weapons of Mass Destruction
Political Geography:
United States, America, and Hiroshima

12. The Next Wave: Urgently Needed New Steps to Control Warheads and Fissile Material

Author:
Matthew Bunn
Publication Date:
03-2000
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
Abstract:
Nothing could be more central to U.S. and world security than ensuring that nuclear warheads and their essential ingredients—plutonium and highly enriched uranium (HEU)—do not fall into the hands of terrorists or proliferating states. If plutonium and HEU become regularly available on a nuclear black market, nothing else we do to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons will succeed. Similarly, unless stockpiles of nuclear warheads and fissile materials can be secured, monitored, and verifiably reduced, it will be impossible to achieve deep, transparent, and irreversible reductions in nuclear arms. Measures to control warheads and fissile materials, therefore, are central to the entire global effort to reduce nuclear arms and stem their spread. The tens of thousands of nuclear weapons and hundreds of tons of plutonium and HEU that remain in the U.S. and Russian nuclear stockpiles represent a deadly legacy of the Cold War, and managing them securely must be a top U.S. security policy priority.
Topic:
Security, Arms Control and Proliferation, Nuclear Weapons, and Terrorism
Political Geography:
Russia, United States, Europe, and Asia