ABSTRACT
In February 2001, Usama bin Ladin was tried in abstentia in the U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, for his role in the American embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. The revelations of the U.S. government’s star witness in this case, a Sudanese al-Qa‘ida defector named Jamal Ahmad al-Fadl, shocked the national security community. He testified that, as early as 1993, he was involved in al-Qa‘ida’s unsuccessful attempts to purchase uranium in Sudan. According to al-Fadl, al-Qa‘ida had been
Introduction 285 Choking Supply to Counter the Threat: A History of Nonproliferation Efforts 287 Fraying Forces of Moderation 289 Road Ahead: Keeping WMD Out of the Hands of Jihadists 290 Understanding the Jihadists’ Path to WMD 291
Nuclear Weapons 291 Pathways to Chemical Terrorism 293 Pathways to Biological Terrorism 294 Pathways to Radiological Terrorism 294
Surveying the Prevention Toolkit: Global and Multilateral Nonproliferation Efforts 296 Global and Multilateral Efforts to Prevent CBRN Terrorism 296 Evaluation Global and Multilateral Efforts to Prevent WMD Terrorism 298 Coalitional Efforts to Prevent CBRN Terrorism 298 Evaluating Coalitional Efforts to Prevent WMD Terrorism 299 National and Bilateral Efforts to Prevent CBRN Terrorism 300 Evaluating National and Bilateral Efforts to Prevent WMD Terrorism 301 Continued Challenges to Implementation of National Nonproliferation Efforts 301
Conclusion 303 Notes 304
willing to pay $1.5 million for an unknown quantity of bomb-grade material.1 Seven months later, three thousand people would die at the hands of that same terrorist organization in a coordinated series of attacks on the American homeland. The collective and historic sense of America’s imperviousness was shattered on that tragic September morning. Then, on October 11, 2001, just one month after the collapse of the twin towers, President Bush was notified that a covert CIA agent (code-named Dragonfire) had obtained evidence that al-Qa‘ida terrorists had acquired a ten-kiloton Russian nuclear warhead. Reportedly, the weapon already had been smuggled onto American soil and was awaiting use in New York City. Dragonfire’s intelligence tracked with a report from a Russian general who claimed that Moscow had lost a similarly sized weapon. A panicked search ensued that was led by the Department of Energy’s Nuclear Emergency Search Team (NEST). In the end, NEST teams found nothing.2 While investigators ultimately concluded that the intelligence provided by Dragonfire was incorrect, no one presumed that the scenario was implausible.
