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The “Would they? Could they?” debate in regard to nuclear terrorism is an old one. There has been a lot written about whether terrorists want to use nuclear weapons and, if they do, whether they have the technological capability to “make it so”.

A PhD student at King’s, Simen Ellingsen, has come up with what I think is a rather clever way of summarising this debate: in the form of a graph (or, more accurately, a scatter plot). He has given me permission to reproduce this graph here (thanks, Simen).

Obviously, it’s slightly tongue in cheek but what Simen points out (and is worth taking note of) is the reasonably strong correlation. Generally, authors who think terrorists could, think they would (May being the exception).

It’s interesting to speculate about why this is. My guess is that those “terrorism experts” who don’t believe that terrorists want nukes, selectively present evidence that building nukes is hard. In contrast, those “technical experts” who think that building nukes isn’t so hard, tend to assume intent.

Anyway, Simen has an article coming out in next month’s Defense and Security Analysis, about the application of game theory to measures to counter nuclear terrorism, and it’s well worth a read.

If a nuclear bomb were to go off in a U.S. city, how long would it take to get info on what kind it was and where it came from?

Los Angeles Times had an article about nuclear forensics and government teams who are working on detection. I appreciate the attempt to make it sound cool…elite teams with radiation-detecting helicopters!

About every three days, unknown to most Americans, an elite team of federal scientists hits the streets in the fight against nuclear terrorism.

An independent study (led by Michael May at Stanford) on forensics and policy approaches should be out next month. Jay C. Davis, a retired weapons scientist working on the forensics study, gives some goals for a forensics time:

Davis said it was hoped that nuclear forensics could determine the size of a detonation within one hour; the sophistication of the bomb design within six hours; how the fuel was enriched within 72 hours; and the peculiar details of national design — “Does this look like a Russian, a Chinese or a Pakistani device, or something we have never seen before?” — within a week.

It’s a pretty good article with some interesting details on how detections teams would work after locating a nuclear device.

(Also, despite all my hopes, I have not in fact moved a tropical island without internet. I am just in grad school. Happy Hour deserves a break from the books however, so hope to see you at Big Hunt on Wednesday!)

Sorry for the light posting — I almost finished a post on whether or not Pakistani nuclear weapons have permissive actions links, but just plain ran out of time.

Anyway, I need to strap on my tie, head over to Carnegie and give my talk on the Chinese ASAT test with Gregory Kulacki. Tomorrow I am in Dubai for the balance of the week talking nuclear proliferation. No idea how much I will be able to post.

If you really need to console yourself, I propose pre-ordering Mike Levi’s forthcoming book, On Nuclear Terrorism (right).

Once I get a copy, I suspect we’ll have Mike down to give a talk or something appropriate.

The other thing you can do is visit Delancey Place — edited by Richard Vague — and sign up for what he describes as eclectic little excerpts delivered to your inbox every day. The daily excerpt is often the highlight of my day.

Last night, Jill and I went up to New York to attend a gala hosted by the NYU Tisch School of Performing Arts honoring Richard, among others. Anyway, we had a blast — though I am very tired today.

Richard, on the other hand, seems to possess endless energy. In addition to editing Delancey Place, running a major corporation and generously supporting the arts, he is also a policy wonk. You might have seen his monograph, Terrorism: A Brief for Americans — Report Issued by a Concerned and Conservative CEO. You can watch Richard delivery a briefing on the monograph.

Given my prior obsession with the Litvinenko polonium-210 poisoning case, this op-ed in IHT, “How to Stop Radiation Terrorism” caught my attention. The authors, Peter D. Zimmerman, James M. Acton and M. Brooke Rogers, outline some of the dangerous radiological substances and how they could be used by terrorists. (The op-ed is a preview to a forthcoming article in Survival. There will be a discussion in London next week.)

I suppose a perpetrator of a radiological attack could be, as the authors describe, a terrorist. But given the opportunities for a sneaky, subtle, and highly malicious act, the perpetrators could just as well (and perhaps even more likely) be serial-killers, crazies, or hit-men.

The authors point out that radiological substances could be used in public way to kill only a few people but cause panic. Ok, this is in line with the concept that terrorists want a lot of people watching but not a lot of people dead.

But the example of the Litvinenko case and the point in the article that these attacks could also be “sneaky, unaccompanied by a flash and bang,” suggests another question. Who is the kind of terrorist who wants to hide an attack so that neither responsibility nor the goal is really known? In the Litvinenko case, there are no clear conclusions to be drawn from the fact that a radiological method was used over a conventional one. To make some point? As a publicity stunt? In favor of whom?

The recommendations in the article on protecting radiological sources do apply regardless of perpetrator, even if he is a KGB goon. I am just noticing how we all like to talk about terrorists so much. Clearly, they take away your PhD if you can’t manage to incorporate “terrorism” into your op-ed title.

Also, I can’t help but wonder… terrorism by ingestion, inhalation, or immersion is a lot of work. (Plus, as Litvinenko’s killers know, you have to be real careful touching that radioactive stuff.) Seems like there are so many other, and equally scary ways to terrorize a population.

The article has some great terms though, including “smoky bomb” and “I-cubed attack” (aka ingestion, inhalation, immersion). I only realized at the end that while reading it I had been saying “ice-cube attack” in my head. Yeah, the ice-cubes are coming to get you too.

Well, the NIE on terrorism is out.

The NIE confirms, in very broad language, that Al Qaeda would like to make the biggest boom:

We assess that al-Qa’ida will continue to try to acquire and employ chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear material in attacks and would not hesitate to use them if it develops what it deems is sufficient capability.

That confirms the basic worry at the core of my terror farm article that Peter Zimmerman and I wrote for Foreign Policy (“Bomb in the Backyard,” November/December 2006): Although making a nuclear weapons wouldn’t be easy, it isn’t hard enough for me to feel safe.

I had concluded—based on Al Qaeda’s past incompetence in acquiring nuclear material and information—that radicalized professionals, after fissile material, are the hardest component for Al Qaeda to find.

The involvement of a doctor and an engineer in the recent attacks in the UK, however, make me worry that Bin Laden might “find his Oppenheimer” after all.

“It’s not that surprising for doctors and engineers to be involved in political Islamist movements—both of the violent and the more moderate sort,” one professor who studies such things told Hassan Fattah of the New York Times, “Fundamentalist-type attitudes are relatively common among people in applied science in the Muslim world. The conception has been that modern science is developed outside, and we need to bring it into our societies without it corrupting our culture.”

Frickin’ great.

3 Pages Devoted to Tradecraft

I would also note that only two of the seven pages are dedicated to the key judgments. The remainder of the document is a valuable discussion of National Intelligence Estimates—what they are, how they are produced, etc.—and how to read estimative language.

I applaud the IC for attempting to educate policymakers and other intelligence consumers about how to read the estimate critically, if they read it at all.

Sadly, I have my doubts—now that Bob Graham has moved to greener pastures—that many in the US Congress will read the two pages of key judgments, let alone the really important stuff about process. (Intelsuss has an amazing fascination with who read the NIE, when, what the lighting conditions were …)

Mike Levi and Graham Allison are having a little throwdown over “How Likely is a Nuclear Terrorist Attack on the United States?” on the CFR website.

Oddly, both agree that the stated topic of discussion—the probability of an attack—is irrelevant:

• Levi: “How likely is a nuclear terrorist attack on the United States? I doubt anyone knows. I also suspect that the exact answer isn’t all that important—even a small chance of catastrophe is worth worrying about.”

• Allison: “Rather than quibble over percentage points, the bottom line is recognition that risk equals probability times consequences. Even skeptics who believe that experts overestimate the probability find it difficult to discount the risk.”

Right, so what are we arguing about, again?

It seems to me that probabilistic models are only useful to identify the optimal allocation of resources in deterring, preventing and responding to nuclear terrorist attacks. As Matt Bunn said in the comments on an earlier post:

... a systematic approach helps in focusing the discussion, identifying areas of disagreement, identifying areas where additional information would reduce the range of uncertainty, and, yes, offering an at least somewhat more focused approach to assessing which policy options might be most important.

I appreciate Mike’s effort to point out that the risk of failure might deter terrorist groups from investing seriously in nuclear weapons, but I wish this debate were about a particular policy that might be controversial—say, domestic nuclear detection efforts that some jerk called an “appeal to the instincts of defense thinkers who want to act boldly in the world but are also, at heart, isolationists.”

Just a thought.

Speaking of that ranch in Montana …

Dick Garwin tells Congress that, in his formidable opinion, the chance of a successful terrorist use of a nuclear weapon in the United States or Europe is twenty percent per year:

GARWIN: What we are missing is really the response to a terrorist nuclear explosion in a Western city. I think Senator Nunn alluded to this. We need to organize ourselves so that if we lose a couple hundred thousand people, which is less than a tenth percent of our population, it doesn’t destroy the country politically or economically.

But we need to have a way to survive such an attack, which I think is quite likely—maybe 20 percent per year probability, with American cities and European cities included. And we need to be able to survive that. We have no real planning to do it in the business community or in the government.

EDWARDS: I’m sorry. What did you say, Dr. Garwin, the probabilities were? Twenty percent?

GARWIN: Yes, to have a nuclear explosion—not just a contamination dirty bomb—in the next year, 20 percent in my estimation. Could be 10 percent, not 100 percent.

EDWARDS: If that doesn’t wake up this country, I don’t know what would.

[Full text in the comments]

As co-author (with Peter Zimmerman) of the “Bomb In the Backyard,” I am also worried, of course, about terrorists acquiring a nuclear device. But this is a bit much. Twenty percent change per year compounds to nearly 90 percent chance over ten years and 99 percent over twenty years.

In other words, a virtual certainty.

I would have said the probability was an order of magnitude lower—which is to unlikely but still very dangerous—given the evident difficulty of acquiring the fissile material.

My friend Matthew Bunn’s PhD dissertation, Guardians at the Gates of Hell: Estimating the Risk of Nuclear Theft and Terrorism, includes a detailed, plausible calculation that placed the annual risk at just over three percent. Although the model, as he concedes, isn’t definitive, it does “make explicit the assumptions about the key factors affecting the risk and provide a tool for assessing the effectiveness of alternative policies.”

The calculation also appears as an article, A Mathematical Model of the Risk of Nuclear Terrorism , in The Annals of the American Academy of Political Science 607, September 2006. I’ve stripped out the math, just to give you a little of the flavor:

Suppose, as one plausible estimate, that the factors in the equations for Pc and Rc have the following numerical values:

Number of plausible nuclear terrorist groups, Nn = 2
Yearly probability of an acquisition attempt by a particular group, Pa(j) = 0.3
Probability of choosing an acquisition attempt based on outsider theft, Po(j) = 0.2
Probability of choosing an acquisition attempt based on insider theft, Pi(j) = 0.3
Probability of choosing to attempt to purchase black market material, Pb(j) = 0.3
Probability of choosing to … convince a state to provide material, Ps(j) = 0.2
Probability that an outsider theft attempt will succeed, Pos(j,k) = 0.2
Probability that an insider theft attempt will succeed, Pis(j,k) = 0.3
Probability that a black market acquisition attempt will succeed, Pbs(j,k) = 0.2
Probability that an acquisition attempt from a state will succeed, Pss(j,k) = 0.05
Probability of … convert[ing] acquired items to nuclear capability, Pw(j,k) = 0.4
Probability of delivering and detonating bomb once acquired, Pd(j,k) = 0.7
Consequence of terrorist nuclear attack, Cc = $4 trillion

In this example, the number of plausible nuclear terrorist groups in the world is small, but greater than zero. For simplicity, assume for the sake of this example that the various probabilities are the same for all groups in the set Nn and for all acquisition attempts of a given type by those groups.

[snip]

With these values, one would expect a significant acquisition attempt roughly once every other year … The probability that such an acquisition attempt would be successful, and would lead to the detonation of a terrorist nuclear bomb somewhere in the world, would be in the range of 5 percent. ... The yearly probability of nuclear terrorism would be just over 3 percent. ... The probability of nuclear terrorism over a ten-year period, Pc(10), would be just under 30 percent.

Check out the real thing. The Σ won’t bite.

This is the second in a many part series based on my article with Peter Zimmerman in Foreign Policy entitled “Bomb in the backyard.” For previous posts click on the phrase terror farm .

I wanted to share my favorite moment from writing “Bomb in the Backyard” (aka Terror Farm).

Our scenario, like the novel Gadget calls for the terrorists to refurbish a recoilless rifle to slam the two masses of uranium together (hence “gun-type” device):

To detonate a nuclear bomb, terrorists do not need to fashion the right type of gun. “Team Gun” would likely consist of three or four people, at least one of whom is familiar with the interior ballistics of guns in the appropriate size range. Their principal task would be to find a surplus artillery piece of the correct size and to build a projectile. Such recoilless rifles are widely available in the United States and Canada as military surplus, though they require a license to purchase. A hobbyist could easily refurbish a recoilless rifle for just a few thousand dollars.

We needed, of course, a proof of principle for this statement.

Enter Destiny Densley.

Yes, that is her real name. In fact, that is a picture of her truck, with a refurbished 57 mm recoilless rifle sitting in the back.

She details the whole process in an online forum titled—what else?—My 57mm Recoilless Rifle Project.

A self-described “little old handicapped Lady in Utah,” Ms. Densley also refurbished a 77 mm recoilless rifle and signs her posts: I’m not really into needlepoint or quilting but I can do a nice Grenade Launcher..

Glad she’s on our side.

Apologies for mispelling Densley and misidentifying her occupation in the Beijing version of the post.

Peter Zimmerman and I have the cover article in Foreign Policy magazine (subscription only), arguing that nuclear weapons are a bargain for the large, sophisticated terrorist organization.

We basically asked, were we a terrorist group, how would we do it and how much would that cost?

Pete had previously collaborated with Nicolas Freeling to produce a novel about a would-be terrorist group building an HEU bomb, called Gadget. So, we spun out a similar scenario (with some important differences) at a ranch somewhere in Big Sky country, and then made some cost estimates.

I am pleased with the article, although anything written for a popular audience risks sounding a wee bit alarmist. The illustration of the ranch is titled “Terror Farm” which seems a little over the top, to me. (No, we didn’t write that.)

Overall, we tried to strike the tone of “This isn’t easy, but is also isn’t hard enough.”

The question of evaluating low-risk, high-impact scenarios like nuclear terrorism is always a difficult one. Bill Arkin has an essay in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists that is probably a necessary corrective to some of the more alarmist expressions of the threat. Still, I’d sleep better knowing that global stocks of fissile material were under tighter control.

Pete and I will post a longer, scholarly version of the article (which is quite different and contains footnotes) at some point down the road. In the interim, I will probably blog about some of the ideas in the article that did not make the cut.

This is the first in a many part series based on my article with Peter Zimmerman in Foreign Policy entitled “Bomb in the backyard.” For previous posts click on the phrase terror farm.