Nuclear Terrorism

Nuclear Agendas - Nuclear Terrorism

“The United States, to my knowledge, has never ruled out the use of nuclear weapons. We -- we have always said, if you'll think back to the Cold War, that we would not rule out the first use of nuclear weapons because there was overwhelming conventional capability that we felt that it would add to the deterrent, and so we have never done that.” – Donald Rumsfeld [1]

When analysing George Bush’s declaration of war on terrorism policy makers cannot but examine the dimension of nuclear weapons for three basic reasons that are intractably embodied into the philosophies driving conflict at the turn of the century.

First, nuclear weapons are an integral part of the war fighting doctrines and military structures of at least five of the countries involved directly in the conflict in Afghanistan, the US, Russia, Pakistan, the UK and France. Added to this there is no guarantee that the conflict will not spill over on the territories of two other concerned regional states that are plagued by indigenous terrorist activities and are also nuclear weapon states in their own rights – China and India. Each of these states can be expected to reconfigure their nuclear strategies in keeping with the dynamics of the conflict and threat perceptions. For the first time in the past half-century we see all nuclear weapon states closely engaged in a military conflict in a geo-strategic location that can appropriately be described as a ‘nuclear hornets nest.

Nuclear Agendas - Nuclear Terrorism

The first ever evidence of non-state players aspiring to attain nuclear weapons as instruments of terror came to light after the coalition forces in the war on terrorism broke the Taliban’s hold over Afghanistan in the closing months of 2001. The acquisition of this information came as a total surprise and therefore no clear cut plan for a systematic collection of evidence existed. David Albright’s examination of "Al Qaeda's Nuclear Program: Through the Window of Seized Documents" makes for interesting reading .