The Washington Post
VIENNA, Austria — A crude nuclear device could be detonated by some terrorist group, including Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida, which would have no qualms about using a weapon of mass destruction, weapons experts told the U.N. atomic agency at a conference here Friday.
Following the Sept. 11 attacks, Western countries, particularly the United States, must accelerate efforts to protect inadequately housed nuclear material that could easily — and may already have — fallen into the hands of terrorists, speakers at the conference said.
"The only strategy is to protect the material where it is," said Morten Bremer Maerli, a researcher at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs. But implementation of that strategy "doesn’t exist."
While building and setting off a nuclear device is technically difficult, those hurdles should not be overestimated because suicidal extremists bent on mass destruction may be indifferent to the safety standards that mark government weapons programs.
One speaker quoted the late Manhattan Project researcher, Luis Alvarez, who said, "Most people seem unaware that if (highly enriched uranium) is at hand, it’s a trivial job to set off a nuclear explosion … even a high school kid could make a bomb in short order."
The Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency, which organized Friday’s conference, reports 175 cases of trafficking in nuclear material since 1993, including 18 cases that involved small amounts of highly enriched uranium or plutonium. What is unknown is whether these numbers represent the extent or just the tip of the problem.
In these cases, the material was seized by law enforcement agencies, but records at the facilities, most of them Russian, from which the uranium or plutonium was stolen showed that nothing was missing, officials said.
"The controls on nuclear material and radioactive sources are uneven," said Mohamed El Baradei, director general of the agency. "Security is as good as its weakest link, and loose nuclear material in any country is a potential threat to the entire world."
The conference was also warned that terrorists may seek to cause widespread death and panic by dusting a conventional bomb with radioactive material widely in use in civilian life, and that nuclear power plants are not prepared for the kind of multipronged attack employed by the terrorists on Sept. 11.
"Suppose that these 19 (hijackers) had formed into teams to drive four vans with large high-explosive bombs into the power reactors and spent fuel ponds for a large nuclear facility," said George Bunn, a professor at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation. "Does any civilian facility’s design … suggest protection against such threats?"
The answer, Bunn said, is no.
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