On October 11, 2001, exactly a month after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre, President George W Bush was informed by his CIA director, George Tenet, about the presence of al Qaeda-linked terrorists in New York City with a 10-kiloton nuclear bomb. Overwhelmed by paralysing fear that terrorists could have smuggled another nuclear weapon into Washington DC as well, President Bush ordered Vice President Dick Cheney, along with several hundred federal employees from almost a dozen government agencies, to leave for some undisclosed location outside the capital where they could ensure the continuity of government in case of a nuclear explosion in Washington DC. Although, after subsequent investigations, the CIA’s report turned out to be false, this incident showed that even a false alarm signalling a nuclear attack could lead to a much higher probability of disaster. A nuclear attack in downtown Washington DC has the potential to kill hundreds of thousands of people immediately and wipe the White House, the State Department and many other buildings off the face of the earth, making the 9/11 attacks a ‘historical footnote’.
It is evident that the spectre of a terrorist-controlled nuclear weapon is a real threat and is global in scope. Given the potentially disastrous consequences, even a small possibility of terrorists obtaining and detonating a nuclear device justifies urgent action. The most urgent security threat to the world today is the possibility of the stealing of weapons or fissile materials by terrorists. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, hundreds of confirmed cases of successful theft of nuclear materials were reported in Russia. In 1997, General Alexander Lebed, assistant for national security affairs to Boris Yeltsin, revealed that 84 out of 132 special KGB ‘suitcase nuclear weapons’ were unaccounted for in Russia. There are also widespread apprehensions expressed by the international community that militants could steal Pakistan’s nuclear weapons or fissile material. Unfortunately, some incidents of jihadi penetration of Pakistan’s armed forces have further fuelled this perception.
In 2001, US officials discovered that Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al Zawahiri, were in contact with two retired Pakistani nuclear scientists for assistance in making a small nuclear device. Later in 2003, some junior Pakistani army and air force officers colluded with al Qaeda terrorists to attempt to assassinate President Musharraf and enforce sharia in Pakistan. Notwithstanding that the dangers about the security of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons might be highly exaggerated; some genuine concerns arising due to links between terrorists and government authorities must be immediately addressed. Umar Khalid Khurasani, the ameer (head) of the Mohmand Agency chapter of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), also wants to seize nuclear weapons and overthrow the government of Pakistan. Another potential source for the theft of fissile material is more than 130 civilian research reactors worldwide operating with Highly Enriched Uranium (HEU). Most of these facilities have very modest security – in many cases, no more than a night watchman.
Unlike the Cold War period, when both the US and the Soviet Union knew that a nuclear attack from either side would be met with a massive retaliatory strike, conventional deterrence does not work against the terrorist groups. In a famous 2007 Wall Street Journal article by Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, William Perry and Sam Nunn (together known as the ‘four horsemen’), it was claimed that, “Most alarmingly, the likelihood that non-state terrorists will get their hands on nuclear weaponry is increasing. In today’s war waged on world order by terrorists, nuclear weapons are the ultimate means of mass destruction…unless urgent new actions are taken, the US soon will be compelled to enter a new nuclear era that will be more precarious, psychologically disorienting, and economically even more costly than was the Cold War.”
Any effort by the international community to combat nuclear terrorism should be based on achieving three fundamental objectives: (a) securing all vulnerable stockpiles of nuclear weapons and materials from such risks of falling into terrorist hands,;(b) preventing the spread of nuclear weapons to other countries, and (c) replacing all HEU in civilian research reactors worldwide with Low Enriched Uranium (LEU), which cannot be used in making bombs. Countries where the dangers of terrorists stealing nuclear weapons are very high cannot afford to remain in a state of denial for too long. On the international front, immediate steps are needed to be taken to institute a ‘standardised noncompliance mechanism’ to enforce the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)/International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) framework.
In the 2015 NPT Review Conference, Article X of the NPT, which allows states to withdraw from the treaty with minimal sanctions, must also be re-examined. According to some nuclear experts, these steps should be accomplished through the UN Security Council. The Security Council must issue a ‘binding resolution’ declaring noncompliance with or withdrawal from the NPT to be a threat to international peace, thus attracting enforcement action by the Security Council under UN Charter Chapter VII. By reducing the number of countries with nuclear weapons or weapons-usable nuclear materials, terrorist groups will have less places to buy or steal these critical components of nuclear terrorism. However, the credibility of these steps will be established only if the NPT Nuclear Weapon States (NWS) go beyond paying lip service to their commitment to Article VI of the NPT, which binds them to pursue efforts towards complete nuclear disarmament.
Though some modest gains have been made, the NWS have failed to take practical steps collectively to fulfil their obligations under the NPT. Such attitude results in undermining the legitimacy of the NPT/IAEA framework, and is detrimental to the cause of containing nuclear materials. As a significant step towards securing existing stockpiles of nuclear materials, the international community should implement the 2005 amendment to the Convention on the Physical Protection of Nuclear Material (CPPNM), as well as the International Convention of the Suppression of Acts of Nuclear Terrorism. The enforcement of these two conventions would help establish common standards for domestic nuclear security and enhance international cooperation in the realm of preventing nuclear terrorism.
Last but not least, enhancing ‘nuclear attribution’ capabilities can make states with nuclear weapons more accountable. Every nuclear device has certain chemical, physical and isotopic properties that can help determine the weapon’s age and clues about its origins. These properties also give some information about the type of nuclear reactors from which the plutonium came or suggest the nature of the enrichment process used to make the uranium. In this way, the process of nuclear attribution will enable the international community to hold countries more accountable for the security of their nuclear materials.
The writer is a research scholar and a former visiting fellow at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, California. He can be reached at [email protected]