What are the risks? First, that terrorists could steal a complete nuclear weapon, like SPECTRE in the James Bond thriller, “Thunderball.” This is hard, but not impossible. The key risk is that the outside terrorists get insider help: For example, a radical jihadist working at a Pakistan weapon storage site. Or the Belgian base just outside Brussels where we still stash a half-dozen nuclear weapons left over from Cold War deployments. Or the Incirlik air base in Turkey where we keep an estimated 50 weapons just 200 miles from the Syrian border.
Second, terrorists could steal the “stuff” of a bomb, highly enriched uranium or plutonium. They cannot make this themselves — that requires huge, high-tech facilities that only nations can construct. But if they could get 50 or 100 pounds of uranium — about the size of a bag of sugar — they could construct a crude Hiroshima-style bomb. ISIS, with its money, territory and global networks, poses the greatest threat to do this that we have ever seen. Such a bomb brought by truck or ship or FedEx to an urban target could kill hundreds of thousands, destroy a city and put the world’s economy and politics into shock.
Third, there is the possibility of a dirty bomb. Frankly, many of us are surprised this has not happened already.
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