The WMD threat

When former US President George W Bush was asked, "What is the single most serious threat to American national security?”, his answer was the possibility of nuclear weapons falling into the hands of Al-Qaeda linked terrorists. After coming into power, President Obama also declared nuclear terrorism the most urgent national security threat to his nation.
Robert Gates, the secretary of defence to have served under both President Obama and his predecessor, was asked in an interview, “What keeps you awake at night?” In his words, “It is the thought of a terrorist ending up with a weapon of mass destruction, especially nuclear.”
Despite a lot of scepticism regarding the capability and intent of terrorist organizations, the issue of nuclear terrorism has gradually emerged as a ‘defining threat of the 21st century’. After the 9/11 attacks, security experts have opined that a future strike on US soil by Al-Qaeda is likely to involve a nuclear weapon, which will inflict far greater damage than the 9/11 incident. This apocalyptic scenario has been the plot of many famous American novels and thriller movies.
Al-Qaeda is well aware that the use of conventional means such as aircraft hijacking or ordinary explosives cannot achieve desired results and only the use of nuclear weapons will create a political crisis of potentially unmanageable proportions. Over the past decades, Al-Qaeda’s top leadership has demonstrated a long-term and persistent commitment to steal, buy or manufacture a nuclear weapon.
In 1994, for the first time Al-Qaeda attempted to acquire uranium in Sudan to construct a crude nuclear weapon. Jamal al-Fadl, one of Al-Qaeda’s founding members, testified in a New York Court in 2001 that former Sudanese president Saleh Mobruk had helped Abu Khabab, Al-Qaeda’s chief bomb maker, in acquiring uranium from South Africa. He even gave information about payment of $1.5 million by Al-Qaeda in return

for getting a container full of nuclear material.
In 1998, Osama bin Laden issued a fatwa that acquiring and using nuclear weapons for the defence of Muslims is a religious duty. After the US-led military operation in Afghanistan dislodged Al-Qaeda from Afghanistan, the group continued its efforts to acquire a nuclear device through its sleeper cells in a number of other countries.
Ayman al-Zawahiri said in an interview that “If you have $30 million, go to the black market in Central Asia, contact any disgruntled Soviet scientist, and a lot of dozens of smart briefcase bombs are available. They have contacted us, we sent our people to Moscow, to Tashkent, to other central Asian states, and they negotiated and we purchased some suitcase bombs.”
A few months after this interview, Al-Qaeda released a video in which it made public its goal to kill four million Americans. In a 2007 video, Osama bin Laden repeated his intention to use nuclear weapons against the US and other European countries to pave way for the establishment of an Islamic caliphate.
Due to these repeated assertions, there are widespread apprehensions that Al-Qaeda might have succeeded in buying a nuclear weapon from disgruntled elements of the Russian nuclear establishment during the 1990s, when control over the security of all Russian weapons and nuclear materials was not very tight.
Another view propounded by some experts is that Al-Qaeda might have manufactured a nuclear device after stealing nuclear materials from different countries. Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, a senior Al-Qaeda operative, has even said that his group will try to use Pakistan’s stockpile to strike the US if it had the chance to steal nuclear weapons from Pakistan. But the Obama administration has expressed full confidence in Pakistan’s nuclear security apparatus. The international community acknowledges that Pakistan’s nuclear security establishment has stored its nuclear weapons in a way that stealing a nuclear weapon is extremely difficult for Al-Qaeda without ‘insider’ help which in itself is a distant possibility.
Many intelligence reports have indicated from time to time that wealthy and politically influential personalities of some Arab countries have been secretly funding Al-Qaeda.
According to Al-Qaeda’s claims, the use of nuclear weapons is essential to achieve its stated goal of ‘turning America into a shadow of itself’. All nuclear powers must rise above their selfish national interests and take concerted action to thwart the threat of nuclear terrorism.
The global nuclear security regime in its present state is not well-equipped to counter this kind of global threat. For example, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) failed to take action against Al-Qaeda’s nuclear activities during the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. Although Afghanistan is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the IAEA showed little motivation to inspect undeclared nuclear activities. IAEA inspectors have also miserably failed to detect secret and illegal nuclear activities in many other countries.
While the threat of Al-Qaeda using nuclear weapons in major American cities is taken seriously at the governmental level, this issue of human survival on this planet has not acquired considerable attention in countries like Pakistan and India. One thing is for sure; if Al-Qaeda successfully detonates a nuclear weapon in any major city in the US, the contemporary international order would cease to exist as we have known it so far.
Email: rizwanasghar5unm.edu