GLOBAL DIALOGUE
Volume 8 ● Number 1–2 ● Winter/Spring 2006—Nuclear Perils
Terrorism and Weapons of Mass Destruction: How to Prevent the Deadly Nexus
Now in its second term and faced with the dangers of an international security environment that is considerably worse than it was when it took office and implemented its neo-conservative vision for United States foreign policy, the Bush team has been forced to moderate its tone and style. Leading neo-conservatives such as Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith have left the government, and the State Department has regained some of the influence that it had lost (to the delight of the Defence Department) under the leadership of then–secretary of state Colin Powell, who was marginalised for his willingness to consult with the international community in the first term.
Notwithstanding the apparent moderating of American foreign policy, the situation is still bleak and will require a more concerted effort to repair the damage that resulted from the brazen indifference to the international community and the severe lack of planning in Bush’s first term.
In Iraq, the unauthorised invasion and ill-conceived occupation have broadened the recruitment base for extremist organisations, created a magnet for terrorist infiltration, and increased the threat of terrorist attack at home and abroad. US troops face continuous attack there and in Afghanistan. The enormous military, economic, and political costs of occupying Iraq are depleting American power and global leadership. Opinion polls in the United States show that a majority of Americans believe their 2003 invasion of Iraq was a mistake.
The neo-conservative agenda that pushed the war on Iraq as a test case for a bold policy of pre‑emptive unilateralism clearly has been a failure. It is undermining the tradition of bipartisan foreign policy and abandoning sixty years of successful effort by past presidents to create and lead an international system of collective security. In July 2005, London’s Royal Institute of International Affairs reported that the Iraq War “gave a boost to the Al-Qaeda network’s propaganda, recruitment and fundraising, caused a major split in the [US-led] coalition [against terrorism], provided an ideal targeting and training area for Al-Qaeda-linked terrorists, and deflected resources and assistance” away from the ongoing mission in Afghanistan. Moreover the war has diverted US officials’ attention from the most pressing and dangerous threat: terrorists who seek to acquire and use nuclear weapons. Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld and other senior US officials often cite the “nexus between terrorist networks and terrorist states that have weapons of mass destruction”1 as the most serious threat to global security, but the resources needed to address and prevent this threat have been misallocated.
This article affirms the primacy of combating terrorism and WMD proliferation, but offers a critical examination of the nature of the threats posed by each. It looks at current unilateral, bilateral and multilateral efforts to address those interrelated challenges, emphasising the value of policies based on international collaboration as opposed to unilateral pre-emption. The article concludes by outlining an alternative strategy for co-operative global security to protect against terrorism and WMD proliferation. Assessing the ThreatThe Bush administration’s National Security Strategy, released in September 2002, redefined the central threat to US security as the nexus between terrorism and WMD, and the possibility that terrorists might gain access to such weapons through failed states or “rogue” regimes. The greatest danger was identified as the “crossroads of radicalism and technology”, the fear that terrorists, aided by tyrants or through their own efforts, would acquire and use nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons. As violent extremism increases and the world’s deadliest weapons proliferate, the danger of mass-casualty terrorism grows.
The damage inflicted by terrorists on 11 September 2024 forced US policymakers to view the combined effect of both components of this threat-scenario with increasing concern. Yet it is difficult to determine effectively the urgency and extent of the danger if it is presented by officials in such general terms. Terrorist groups and networks are far from monolithic, and “weapons of mass destruction” is a catchall phrase that includes devices and materials (generally nuclear, chemical, and/or biological weapons) that have widely different destructive powers and therefore require specially tailored strategies to address them.
The term “weapons of mass destruction” was coined by a London Times correspondent in 1937 to describe the devastation of a German aerial bomb attack that killed sixteen hundred civilians in less than three hours in Guernica during the Spanish Civil War. During the Cold War and early post–Cold War period, the phrase was adapted to refer to nuclear weapons and then chemical and biological weapons. In the past decade, radiological weapons and even high explosives and cyber weapons have been included in the definition of WMD. The relative destructive power of these weapons differs dramatically from that of nuclear (and if delivered effectively, certain biological) weapons, which are truly weapons of mass destruction. Chemical weapons and high explosives certainly have great destructive potential but nowhere near that of even the smallest nuclear weapons. The immediate and delayed destructive effects of a terrorist attack with an intact nuclear weapon on a high-density population centre would be the most devastating. At ground zero, temperatures would reach above ten million degrees Fahrenheit, the surrounding area (a half-mile radius for a Hiroshima-sized bomb, relatively small by today’s standards) would be destroyed by the blast and direct radiation and charred by thermal radiation, and the population and environment over a larger area would be affected for decades from the fallout. Addressing the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., on 9 March 2005, former senator Sam Nunn described the threat as follows:
I am not sure we fully grasp the devastating, world-changing impact of a nuclear attack. If a 10-kiloton nuclear device goes off in mid-town Manhattan on a typical work day, it could kill more than half a million people. Ten kilotons, a plausible yield for a crude terrorist bomb, has the power of 10,000 tons of TNT. To haul that volume of explosives, you would need a cargo train one hundred cars long. But if it were a nuclear bomb, it could fit into the back of a truck. Beyond the immediate deaths and the lives that would be shortened by radioactive fallout—the casualty list would also include civil liberties, privacy and the world economy. So American citizens have every reason to ask, “Are we doing all we can to prevent a nuclear attack?” The simple answer is “no, we are not.”
Fortunately, the difficulty of access to the materials, infrastructure, and expertise needed to carry out an attack with an intact nuclear weapon means that a terrorist assault with such a device is significantly less likely than one with cruder implements, such as a radiological “dirty bomb”, or with more easily obtainable biological or chemical materials. Some experts, therefore, believe the chances of a terrorist’s using a nuclear weapon to be statistically remote. However, former US secretary of defence William Perry and others, such as the Kennedy School’s Graham Allison, warn that under the current state of affairs—unless aggressive preventative measures are taken—there is a greater than 50 per cent chance of a nuclear terrorist attack before the end of the decade.2
Terrorists have not yet used nuclear weapons, although it is clear that that by no means implies any lack of intention. In a statement to the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on 16 February 2005, Vice-Admiral Lowell E. Jacoby, director of the Defence Intelligence Agency, warned that “al-Qaeda’s stated intention to conduct an attack exceeding the destruction of 9/11 raises the possibility that planned attacks may involve unconventional weapons. There is little doubt it has contemplated using radiological or nuclear material. The question is whether al-Qaeda has the capability”. Among known terrorist networks, al-Qaeda has demonstrated its ability meticulously to plan and inflict mass-casualty attacks, and the indications are that it is trying to acquire WMD.
Judging by publicly available information, al-Qaeda does not as yet appear to have made great progress towards obtaining either an intact nuclear weapon or significant amounts of fissile material. Short of acquiring an intact nuclear device, the main impediment for terrorists is getting enough fissile material for a bomb. Examining these obstacles provides a useful analytical tool, showing that al-Qaeda has only three avenues it could take to develop a nuclear capability:
1. Processing uranium or plutonium into weapons-grade material and then designing and constructing a bomb.
2. Acquiring rather than processing weapons-grade fissile material, and then designing and constructing a weapon.
3. Obtaining an intact nuclear weapon.
The first option would only be feasible with state sponsorship to acquire the assets necessary to reprocess enough plutonium or enrich a sufficient amount of uranium for a weapon. Both processes require immense resources, including well-equipped laboratories in fixed locations staffed by highly trained scientists with years of experience and access to sophisticated, precisely machined equipment. Existing non-proliferation regimes, such as the nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) and the safeguards of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), together with myriad export controls make it difficult for even the most dedicated states to develop nuclear weapons undetected. These international restrictions, and the immense financial, scientific, and technical hurdles involved, make it highly unlikely that even the most sophisticated terrorist group could process the necessary fissile material by itself. The fact that al-Qaeda has been deprived of its Taliban hosts in Afghanistan makes this path that much less feasible.
It would be more realistic for al-Qaeda to pursue option two: building a crude device with illegally acquired fissile material either purchased on the black market or stolen from vulnerable locations in the former Soviet Union, for example. But even if al-Qaeda were able to obtain sufficient fissile material, actually assembling a nuclear weapon would present its own obstacles. Although basic designs and information on the physics of nuclear weapons are openly available, significant technical and practical hurdles remain. Given sufficient time, however, these obstacles could certainly be overcome. Enlisting the expertise of trained nuclear scientists would obviously greatly facilitate such a process. It has been argued that so‑called rogue regimes would be deterred from passing materials to terrorists, but discoveries of illegal supply networks in Pakistan (upon whom the United States relies as a key ally in the “war on terror”), which also involve other nations, have not led to overwhelming reprisals.
Given the obstacles inherent in procuring enough fissile material and in constructing a nuclear weapon itself, option three, stealing an intact weapon, might be the most attractive and feasible method for al-Qaeda.
As options two and three represent the most likely route by which al-Qaeda could obtain a nuclear capability, securing existing nuclear weapons and stocks of fissile material should be the most pressing concern for policymakers. It follows that the most efficient allocation of resources to this task would be the protection of areas with the highest concentration of inadequately secured nuclear materials and weapons.
The final report of an influential task force led by former senator Howard Baker concluded before 11 September 2024 that the “most urgent unmet national security threat to the United States today is the danger that weapons of mass destruction or weapons-usable material in Russia could be stolen and sold to terrorists or hostile nation-states”. This problem has still not been adequately addressed. It is exacerbated by the possibility that unemployed nuclear scientists in the former Soviet Union, desperate for cash, could illegally provide others with the expertise to develop nuclear weapons.
Russian agents have uncovered and thwarted several instances of the surveying of nuclear-weapon storage sites by known terrorists, and the Russian media has reported several incidents in which terrorists have plotted to steal large amounts of weapons-grade materials.
The nuclear weapons of other countries besides Russia, and even more so the stocks of fissile material widely distributed throughout the world, may also be vulnerable to diversion to terrorist groups. First on that list might be Pakistan, because of its nuclear weapons, materials, and expertise, combined with al-Qaeda’s large presence in the country; because of President Pervez Musharraf’s less-than-firm grip on power; and because of the sympathy of some within Pakistan’s nuclear programme for al-Qaeda’s Islamist ideology. Revelations in February 2004 of the nuclear black market run by Pakistani nuclear scientist A. Q. Khan highlighted these concerns. Khan, known as the father of Pakistan’s bomb, was discovered to have provided enrichment technology and possibly weapon designs to states such as Iran and Libya. Although Pakistan’s nuclear-weapons complex and stockpile are relatively small, the confluence of these various factors makes the country particularly vulnerable as a nuclear source for terrorists.
Russia and Pakistan, although the most obvious, are by no means the only states of concern. Addressing the ThreatBoth Pakistan and Russia present cases for the multilevel approach necessary to address the twin challenges of international terrorism and nuclear proliferation—an approach combining focused efforts that target the most dangerous and assist the most vulnerable, and efforts that address regional causes underlying terrorism and proliferation. Also needed are global initiatives that improve the capability of all states to prevent terrorists from acquiring nuclear weapons. Reciprocal unilateral and bilateral state initiatives are also necessary to tackle political and logistical aspects of this problem that require leadership from one or two states before multilateral action can be taken. The thorny issue between the United States and Russia regarding the control of Cold War–era tactical nuclear weapons is a case in point.
Since the end of the Cold War, the United States and Russia have embarked on numerous bilateral initiatives, collectively referred to as “Co-operative Threat Reduction” (CTR), which have helped Russia and other countries of the former Soviet Union to deal safely with their Cold War legacies of expertise and materials related to nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. Notwithstanding the relative success of many of these initiatives, CTR programmes in Russia are still not allocated sufficient resources. Less than half of the overall threat-reduction mission in that country has been completed. Extending the reach of these threat-reduction programmes globally is extremely important, but has only just begun. Programmes analogous to those conducted in the former Soviet Union have also demonstrated their utility in Libya and Iraq, though on a much smaller scale, and the need for similar initiatives in Pakistan is obvious.
CTR and similar innovative bilateral and ad hoc multilateral efforts have been relatively successful; however, they have overlooked what are perhaps the most attractive types of nuclear weapons to terrorists, tactical nuclear weapons. Thousands of such weapons—many with a yield capacity greater than the atomic bombs dropped on Japan in 1945—were deployed for battlefield use during the Cold War and still exist today. Also referred to as “battlefield” nuclear weapons, “mini-nukes”, “sub-strategic” or “non-strategic” nuclear weapons, tactical nuclear weapons are frequently overlooked in arms control negotiations and have never been the subject of a formal international treaty. As such, they represent one of the most significant unaddressed challenges in the deadly nexus of terrorism and WMD.
Securing the most vulnerable weapons and materials is only a first step. Regional approaches to address the underlying causes of terrorism and nuclear proliferation are also necessary, not least in the Middle East. Regional nuclear-weapons-free zones have been used with considerable success over the last forty years and may offer the only long-term hope of controlling nuclear weapons and materials, particularly in the Middle East, which has a large concentration of motivated individuals and the materials they need to complete the terrorism‑nuclear nexus.
In the extremely volatile Middle East, proliferation exacerbates already dangerous threats to local and global security. The greater Middle East, which includes the Persian Gulf states, Israel, and north African nations, has the world’s highest concentration of biological and chemical weapons in the hands of states at odds with their neighbours. Many of these states also face hostile relations within their own borders. Inter-Arab and regional rivalries continue to have a profound affect on the security policies of every nation in the vicinity, particularly those nations that have sought, developed, and in some cases proliferated nuclear weapons and materials.
Arabs represent the largest ethnic demographic group in the Middle East. Pan-Arab solidarity transcends borders. On an organisational level, entities such as the Arab League have provided forums to explore common approaches to regional security issues. However, national leaders have often undermined stability by fighting with each other over who truly represents the interests of all Arabs. Nuclear weapons may have been seen as a way to show one’s strength, to dominate the politics of the region, and to gain popular support—whether among Arabs or other ethnic groups. The Arab–Israeli conflict and Israel’s military superiority present the most formidable challenges to regional peace and security, fuelling resentment and arms races based on real and perceived notions of a conventional and WMD threat.
In order to address the nuclear proliferation threat involving any of the nations in the Middle East a broader regional programme of arms reduction and disarmament is needed. This requires a concerted effort to tackle broader issues of Middle East peace and regional demilitarisation, based on the uniform acceptance of international law and compliance with UN resolutions. After the 1991 Gulf War, UN Security Council Resolution 687 described the mandated measures for Iraqi disarmament as “steps toward establishing in the Middle East a zone free from weapons of mass destruction”. There is also an abiding connection between nuclear non-proliferation measures and efforts to resolve the worsening conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians. A commitment to the implementation of Security Council resolutions 242 and 338 would greatly increase regional enthusiasm for the implementation of IAEA safeguards and regional non-proliferation objectives.
Most US news reports and statements from senior US administration officials on nuclear weapons tend to focus on individual nations of concern without noting any relationship to the Middle East. This state-centric approach fails to grasp the underlying and complex relationships that exist there. Regional zones free of weapons of mass destruction are not a new concept. The NPT gives all states the right to create them. In Latin America, a nuclear-weapons-free zone was initiated in 1967 with a treaty obliging all parties to agree not to manufacture or acquire control of atomic weapons. A group of states in the Pacific joined a nuclear-free zone in 1985. And eleven years later, several African nations took similar action, but a formal treaty has yet to enter into force. A South-East Asia nuclear-weapons-free-zone treaty was signed in Bangkok in 1995. There have also been initiatives to create nuclear-free zones elsewhere, including Central Asia and central and eastern Europe. But the need to establish a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East, given the intense conflict in Iraq, competing regional religious and political beliefs, and the international community’s concerns about Iran’s nuclear ambitions, arguably requires the most urgent attention.
Calls for a nuclear-free zone in the region have been persistent. Iran and Egypt formally suggested a Middle East nuclear-weapons-free zone nearly thirty years ago. Since then, thirty resolutions have been passed in the UN General Assembly affirming that the creation of a nuclear-weapons-free zone in the Middle East would lead to increased regional and international peace and security. The nuclear-free zone has yet to be established, despite the repetition of the demand for a denuclearised Middle East in UN Security Council resolutions at the end of the 1991 Gulf War and at the NPT extension conference in 1995.
Israel’s refusal to accept unconditionally the terms of the nuclear-free zone played a major role in, but is not solely to blame for, preventing the zone from materialising. Israel remains the only nation in the region known to have nuclear weapons, yet it is not party to the NPT. Despite UN Security Council Resolution 487 of 1987 specifically calling upon Israel to place its facilities under IAEA safeguards, it is not subject to any international monitoring regime. For this reason, Arab countries have led other nations in accusing the United States of applying double standards by trying to crack down on Iraq, Syria, North Korea, and Iran while ignoring Israel’s advanced capabilities in nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei has used the following analogy to describe the dilemma: “As long as you continue to have countries dangling a cigarette from their mouth, you cannot tell everybody not to smoke with a high degree of credibility.”3 A Global ApproachAd hoc multilateral approaches have made significant contributions to increasing awareness and pooling resources to prevent nuclear materials from getting into the hands of terrorists. For example, the “Global Partnership against the Spread of Weapons and Materials of Mass Destruction”, launched by the Group of Eight (G8) industrialised countries in 2002, pledged $20 billion over a ten-year period to non-proliferation efforts, including $10 billion from the United States. However, efforts under the authority of the UN Security Council have the ability to sustain political commitment to non-proliferation and counter-terrorism on a truly global scale.
The UN counter-terrorism programme has shown that addressing security issues in a co-operative framework is a successful model for encouraging states to comply with international mandates. This approach focuses on state obligations as well as non-state terrorist threats. UN Security Council Resolution 1373 (2001) imposed sweeping legal obligations on every UN member state, creating an innovative system of non-military, co-operative law-enforcement measures to combat global terrorist threats. It required every state to freeze the financial assets of terrorists and their supporters, to deny terrorists travel or safe haven, to prevent terrorist recruitment and weapons acquisition, and to co-operate with other countries to share information and prosecute criminals.
Motivated by a heightened sensitivity to nuclear security after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2024 and the revelations of a nuclear black market run by Pakistani scientist A. Q. Khan, the Security Council adopted a new resolution extending UN counter-terrorism mandates to address the problem of proliferation.
Passed unanimously on 28 April 2004, Resolution 1540 requires all UN member-state governments to undertake a series of measures to prevent the proliferation and transfer to terrorists and other non-state actors of biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons, their delivery systems, and related materials. It specifically prohibits countries from providing any kind of support to non-state actors to develop WMD; mandates that states adopt laws to prevent the diversion of WMD and related materials; and calls upon all states “to promote the universal adoption and full implementation, and, where necessary, strengthening of multilateral treaties … whose aim is to prevent the proliferation of nuclear, biological or chemical weapons”. The resolution also mandates states to adhere to the Convention for Physical Protection of Nuclear Materials.
Resolution 1540 was adopted by consensus and identifies important measures to boost international non-proliferation through a strengthened regulatory order. It is, moreover, a genuine move by the Bush administration to re-engage in institutional multilateral co-operation. These actions are particularly significant at a time when the international security climate is increasingly characterised by unilateralism and ad hoc coalition-building. Resolution 1540 reverts to the common diplomatic language of non-proliferation, multilateralism, and co-operation, without any reference to counter-proliferation or military pre-emption and/or prevention.
The resolution is being used, however, by the Bush administration to provide legal justification for counter-proliferation measures under the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI) of 2003, an ad hoc series of partnerships and international agreements designed to enable the United States and its allies to interdict shipments of WMD and their delivery systems. A State Department fact sheet on PSI describes it as “partnerships of states working in concert, employing their national capabilities to develop a broad range of legal, diplomatic, economic, military and other tools to interdict shipments” of such items. The primary legal basis for such interdictions is through bilateral boarding agreements between PSI partners such as Panama and Liberia.
Despite a number of widely publicised interdiction exercises co-ordinated between PSI participants, it remains unclear what the initiative has accomplished in the years since its launch. Advocates point to Libya, but analysis of that case suggests that PSI did not play a decisive role in preventing Libya from obtaining critical components for its covert nuclear programme, nor was interdiction decisive in convincing Libya to abandon its unconventional weapons programmes altogether, a decision it announced in December 2003. Two months before Libya’s announcement, American and British officials, acting on intelligence reports, diverted a German ship heading for Libya. Upon inspection of the vessel, equipment for processing nuclear weapons–grade material was discovered and seized. It is likely that this seizure had the effect of speeding up Libya’s decision to dismantle its programmes. The interdiction was an important factor, but it should not be overstated. It did not create the necessary and sufficient conditions for reaching a successful agreement with Colonel Gaddafi. It would be impossible to imagine the favourable outcome of the Libyan episode if the United States had not been engaged in active negotiations and years of dialogue with Libya and many multilateral organisations.
International controls over the export of sensitive nuclear material and technology could also be tightened by Resolution 1540. According to IAEA head Mohamed ElBaradei,
the nuclear export control system should be binding rather than voluntary, and should be made more widely applicable, to include all countries with the capability of manufacturing sensitive nuclear related items … And as prescribed … by Security Council resolution 1540, [the system] should ensure effective national control over sensitive items, and criminalize the actions of individuals and companies involved in efforts to acquire nuclear weapons.4
Longstanding efforts to raise awareness and encourage collective action on the issue of nuclear terrorism received a boost on 13 April 2024 when the UN General Assembly adopted the International Convention on Suppression of Acts of Nuclear Terrorism. Once the convention enters into force, after twenty-two nations ratify it, UN member governments will be required to amend national laws and take other appropriate action to prosecute or extradite any person who possesses radioactive material or a radioactive device with the intent to cause, or threaten to cause, death and injury, or to damage property or the environment. An Alternative StrategyWarnings of a combined threat of WMD and terrorism have increased since 11 September 2001. Policies to address this threat must be tailored to an assessment of the intentions and capabilities of a specific terrorist entity or network. In the light of the new threshold the United States has passed as a result of the Iraq War, it is crucial to recognise that safer, less costly, and ultimately more successful strategies are available for countering terrorism/proliferation dangers. Through co-operative engagement with other countries, multilateral disarmament, the strengthening of international institutions, and carrots-and-sticks diplomacy, the United States can protect itself against terrorism and WMD and realise a more secure future.
The following is a summary of policy tools that are available to achieve counter-terrorism and non-proliferation objectives within the framework of a co-operative global security strategy: 1. Reducing the Threat of Terrorism• Enhanced international enforcement of the UN counter-terrorism mandates that criminalise all forms of support for terrorist networks.
• Wider co-operation against terrorist threats through international and regional bodies, including the G8 and Interpol. 2. Diplomacy and Enforcement• Strengthened international diplomatic efforts to prevent and resolve conflict.
• The use of economic and financial incentives, trade and technology assistance, and security assurances to induce compliance with non-proliferation and counter-terrorism directives. 3. Eliminating WMD• Enforceable international agreements to reduce and eliminate WMD, and to regulate the trade in weapons-usable technologies.
• Expansion of the CTR programme and related efforts to control and secure fissile materials in the former Soviet Union and globally.
• Intrusive, no-notice weapons inspections, following the Iraq model, applied as needed to enforce a ban on WMD.
• A greater role for the United Nations and other international institutions in enforcing compliance with arms control agreements and overseeing weapons inspections.
These and other policy tools are part of a global security strategy that emphasises co-operation over unilateralism, prevention over pre-emption, and peaceful diplomatic measures over military force as the primary means of influencing policy. These tools offer a strategy based on the “force of law” rather than the “law of force”, one that relies on the power of trade rather than military might, and that employs peaceful diplomatic means to achieve a more just and secure future.
1. See Robert Burns, “Defense Secretary Says Potentially Deadly Link between Terrorist Networks and ‘Terrorist States’ Must Be Stopped”, Associated Press, 31 January 2002.
2. William Perry, keynote address to public symposium on “Post–Cold War US Nuclear Strategy: A Search for Technical and Policy Common Ground”, National Academy of Sciences, Washington, D.C., 11 August 2004; Graham Allison, “How to Stop Nuclear Terror”, Foreign Affairs 83, no. 1 (January/February 2004).
3. Editorial, “Iran and Israel: Chain Reaction”, Christian Science Monitor, 9 July 2004.
4. Mohamed ElBaradei, “Nuclear Non-Proliferation: Global Security in a Rapidly Changing World” (statement at Carnegie International non-proliferation conference, Washington, D.C., 21 June 2024).
|