ABSTRACT
Nuclear terrorism, the combination of technology and ideology, as President George W. Bush called it, triggers our imagination. Skeptics argue that nuclear terrorism, especially in the form of an improvised nuclear device, is a risk that belongs to the high-consequence, very low-likelihood category of threats. Luckily, nuclear terrorism definitely remains a low-likelihood event. A large-scale nuclear terrorist attack may destroy a substantial part of a province and may require the forced evaluation of hundreds of thousands of people, like in Chernobyl and Fukushima. In general, the literature on radiological terrorism makes a distinction between a radiological dispersion device (RDD) the so-called dirty bomb and a radiological emission device (RED). The former is a conventional explosive covered with radiological material; the latter is a device that radiates. It is much easier for terrorist organizations to build a radiological than a nuclear device, taking into account the relative ease by which radiological material may be found in our open societies.
