Imagine a crude terrorist nuclear bomb-containing a chunk of highly enriched uranium just under the size of a regulation bowling ball, or a much smaller chunk of plutonium-suddenly detonating inside a delivery van parked in the heart of a major city. Fortunately, since the early 1990s, countries around the world have significantly reduced the danger-but it remains very real, and there is more to do to ensure this nightmare never becomes reality.īrighter than a thousand suns.
Terrorist use of an actual nuclear bomb is a low-probability event-but the immensity of the consequences means that even a small chance is enough to justify an intensive effort to reduce the risk. And in the last quarter century, there have been some 20 seizures of stolen, weapons-usable nuclear material, and at least two terrorist groups have made significant efforts to acquire nuclear bombs. Numerous government studies have concluded that it is plausible that a sophisticated terrorist group could make a crude bomb if they got the needed nuclear material. The idea of terrorists accomplishing such a thing is, unfortunately, not out of the question it is far easier to make a crude, unsafe, unreliable nuclear explosive that might fit in the back of a truck than it is to make a safe, reliable weapon of known yield that can be delivered by missile or combat aircraft. The country attacked-and the world-would never be the same. A single terrorist nuclear bomb would change history.
Economic, political, and social aftershocks would ripple throughout the world. Vast areas would have to be evacuated and might be uninhabitable for years. Depending on where and when it was detonated, the blast, fire, initial radiation, and long-term radioactive fallout from such a bomb could leave the heart of a major city a smoldering radioactive ruin, killing tens or hundreds of thousands of people and wounding hundreds of thousands more. Perry put it, that could result even from the use of just a single terrorist nuclear bomb in the heart of a major city.Īt the risk of repeating the vast literature on the tragedies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki-and the substantial literature surrounding nuclear tests and simulations since then-we attempt to spell out here the likely consequences of the explosion of a single terrorist nuclear bomb on a major city, and its subsequent ripple effects on the rest of the planet. The escalating threats between North Korea and the United States make it easy to forget the “nuclear nightmare,” as former US Secretary of Defense William J.
0 kommentar(er)
