Pluta, Anna M., and Peter D. Zimmerman. "Nuclear Terrorism: A Disheartening Dissent". Survival, Vol.48, No.2 (2006): 55-69.

Pluta, Anna M., and Peter D. Zimmerman. "Nuclear Terrorism: A Disheartening Dissent". Survival, Vol.48, No.2 (2006): 55-69.

• The lethality of terrorism has steadily increased throughout the 1990s, from the 1993 World Trade Center bombing that killed 6 and injured over 1,000 more, to the 9/11 attacks that killed 2,986 people. Many have extrapolated this trend to claim that nuclear weapons will soon be used by terrorists (55).
• Others, particularly Robin Frost, have dismissed these claims as alarmist, noting the difficulty of constructing nuclear weapons. The authors, however, believe that fissile material is more easily accessible that presumed and that nuclear terrorism poses a real threat (55).
• It is foolish to think that terrorists would not use nuclear weapons if they became available or that terrorists would have some essential aversion to these weapons. Only access to appropriate materials should be seen as an issue (66).
• The basic necessity for a nuclear weapon is fissile material, usually any form of plutonium isolate or uranium-235. Both of these metals are extremely expensive, selling at over 10 times the price of gold. Almost all available sources of these materials are locked up in one of the seven nuclear countries (55-56).
• The authors speculate that Russia is a particularly likely place to acquire fissile materials. Although Russian nuclear stockpiles are supposed to be well-guarded, a history of thefts would indicate that weapons and fissile materials are often poorly secured. Only 26% of sites received full security measures and many remain poor guarded (56-57). Given poor economic conditions, the ability of Russia to safeguard its nuclear resources should not be taken for granted (60).
• Russia's closed 'nuclear cities' pose a particular threat of theft of nuclear materials. Economic collapse and government neglect following the dissolution of the USSR have left these cities poor, corrupt, and thick with organized crime. Criminals in these cities may have the connections and resources capable of selling nuclear materials to terrorist groups (58).
• Very little progress has been made trying to address the root economic and social causes of instability and corruption in Russian nuclear cities (59).
• There have been a number of incidents of theft or potential malfeasance in Russian nuclear facilities: In 1998, a group of scientists in Chelyabinsk oblast were arrested for trying to steal nuclear material; in 2000, the FSB arrested four sailors in Vilyuchinsk with nuclear material stolen from their submarine (58).
• Poor economic conditions in Russia mean that nuclear scientists are often impoverished and forced to take secondary jobs to pay their bills. This has resulted in a large number of Russian nuclear scientists willing to work on foreign nuclear projects, with around one-fifth willing to work on nuclear weapons in Syria, North Korea, Iraq, or Iran (59).
• "It seems certain that at some price nuclear explosive material is available to well-funded terrorists, even if there have been no documented incidents in which nuclear explosive material has been sold in useful quantities" (60).
• Many scientists, including Theodore Taylor, have suggested that with pre-existing plutonium or highly-enriched uranium, building a nuclear weapon would be relatively easy. The expertise required to create a nuclear bomb is now more widely disseminated, following the publication of public information on the topic in the 1950s and 1970s (60-61).
• Terrorists do not need to build weapons nearly as well as states do, since a military-grade nuclear weapon needs to be reliable, safe to store, and predictable in yield and effect, while terrorists would not need a nuclear bomb to be any of those things (61).
• The Office of Technology Assessment, a branch of US Congress, predicted in 1977 that with already enriched uranium, an improvised nuclear weapon could be constructed by a team of only a single mechanist and a single physicist. There are, however, additional requirements besides fissile material: between $100,000 and $1,000,000, a workshop with advanced equipment, krytron switches, and machining technologies capable of extremely complex and precise shapes (62-63).
• The equipment needed to construct a nuclear weapon is no longer in access of what could conceivably be accessed by non-state actors. Many university labs now have equipment that is more technically advanced that need to produce nuclear weapons (63).
• There remain a number of serious impediments to the construction of a nuclear weapon, particularly the brittleness of uranium and plutonium cake, the formation of a tamper, and design of electrical components capable of simultaneously delivering high current pulses of identical size to multiple components. These are all problems they were faced and overcome in 1945, however, and would be easier with the advanced technology now available (64).
• The author estimated that a committed terrorist group could probably build a nuclear weapon is around a year given all of the necessary material and equipment (64).
• Some terrorists are distinctly well funded and capable of complex operations, as demonstrated by Al-Qaeda's 9/11 attacks or Aum Shinrikyo's sarin gas attack in Tokyo. The threat is further increased by terrorist organizations that are sanctioned or funded by national governments (65).