Al Jazeera America NewsDaily

Securing nuclear material poses a global challenge

If Al-Qaeda wanted nuclear weapons, it could steal material from poorly secured stocks, expert warns

March 24, 2014 10:26AM ET

by Sarah Kneezle

Leaders from 53 countries gathered in The Hague on Monday to discuss how to best secure the world’s stockpiles of nuclear material.

When President John F. Kennedy in 1961 spoke of “a nuclear sword of Damocles” hanging over the heads of “every man, woman and child” on the planet, he was referring to the danger of nuclear war among the great powers. Today’s threat is different. In 2009, President Barack Obama said “the most immediate threat to global security” was nuclear terrorism.

“In a strange turn of history, the threat of global nuclear war has gone down, but the risk of a nuclear attack has gone up,” Obama said, calling for renewed commitment to stopping the spread of nuclear weapons and move toward disarmament.

Robert Reardon, a nuclear proliferation expert at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, sat down with Al Jazeera America’s Jonathan Betz to discuss whether the world’s stockpiles pose the same risks they did during the Cold War, as part of the regular Sunday segment the Week Ahead.

Reardon warned against complacency and assuming that nonstate actors couldn’t muster the capability to build nuclear weapons. “We see that it took these enormous programs years,” he said. “It took billions of dollars, and scientists and we think, ‘How could something like Al-Qaeda or a terrorist organization possibly do something like this?’”

But realistically, he said, the most time-consuming process is procuring fissile material, which is stored in substantial amounts in different parts of the world, sometimes in places with little security. And while Iran’s nuclear program often dominates conversation, he said, nonstate actors could steal weapons-grade materials from countries deemed low security risks, such as Germany, Japan and even the United States.

A key material in constructing nuclear bombs, highly enriched uranium or HEU, is dangerously accessible, according to Reardon.

“Some of the HEU is stored in places that don’t have any armed guards,” he said. “There is HEU in lightly guarded places in the United States.”