ABSTRACT
On December 1, 2001, CIA Director George Tenet made a hastily planned, clandestine trip to Pakistan. Tenet arrived in Islamabad deeply shaken by the news that less than three months earlier-just weeks before the attacks of September 11, 2001-al-Qa‘ida and Taliban leaders had met with two former Pakistani nuclear weapon scientists in a joint quest to acquire nuclear weapons. Captured documents the scientists abandoned as
Introduction 193 Improvised Nuclear Devices (INDs) 195
Fissile Materials 198 Weapons-Grade Uranium and Plutonium 199
Likely IND Construction 203 External Procurement of Intact Nuclear Weapons 204
State Acquisition of an Intact Nuclear Weapon 204 Nuclear Black Market 212 Incidents of Jihadist Interest in Nuclear Weapons and Weapons-Grade Nuclear Materials 213
Al-Qa‘ida 213 Russia’s Chechen-Led Jihadists 214 Nuclear-Related Threats and Attacks in India and Pakistan 215
Overall Likelihood of Jihadists Obtaining Nuclear Capability 215 Notes 216 Appendix: Toward a Nuclear Weapon: Principles of Nuclear Energy 232
Discovery of Radioactive Materials 232 Divisibility of the Atom 232 Atomic Nucleus 233 Discovery of Neutrons: A Pathway to the Nucleus 233 Fission 234 Chain Reactions 235 Notes 236
they fled Kabul from advancing anti-Taliban forces were evidence, in the minds of top U.S. officials, that a nuclear device was now “within reach” of al-Qa‘ida.1
