ABSTRACT
Alarm about the possibility that small groups could set off nuclear weapons have been repeatedly raised at least since 1946, when atomic bombmaker J. Robert Oppenheimer contended that if three or four men could smuggle in units for an atomic bomb, they could “destroy New York.” Some 30 years later, nuclear physicist Theodore Taylor proclaimed the problem to be “immediate,” and explained at length “how comparatively easy it would be to steal nuclear material and step by step make it into a bomb.” At the time he thought it variously already too late to “prevent the making of a few bombs, here and there, now and then,” or “in another ten or fifteen years, it will be too late.”2 Three decades after Taylor, we continue to wait for terrorists to carry out their “easy” task. In the wake of 9/11, concerns about the atomic terrorist surged even though the attacks of that day used no special weapons. By 2003, UN Ambassador John Negroponte judged there to be a “a high probability” that within two years alQaeda would attempt an attack using a nuclear or other weapon of mass destruction. It is in this spirit that Graham Allison in 2004 produced a thoughtful, influential, and well-argued book, Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe, relaying his “considered judgment” that “on the current path, a nuclear terrorist attack on America in the decade ahead is more likely than not.” He had presumably relied on the same inspirational mechanism in 1995 to predict that “In the absence of a determined program of action, we have every reason to anticipate acts of nuclear terrorism against American targets before this decade is out.”3 He has quite a bit of company in his perpetually alarming conclusions. However, thus far terrorist groups seem to have exhibited only limited desire and even less progress in going atomic. This may be because, after brief exploration of the possible routes, they, unlike generations of alarmists, have discovered that the tremendous effort required is scarcely likely to be successful.4
