NUCLEAR BOMB SQUAD

Abstract

Defusing Armageddon: Inside NEST, America's Secret Nuclear Bomb Squad, by Jeffrey T. Richelson. W.W. Norton & Company, 2009. 318 pages, $27.95.

Keywords:

• Nuclear terrorism
• nuclear weapons
• nuclear security
• United States
• Department of Energy

Notes

1. Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, Report to the President (Washington, DC: WMD Commission, 2005), <www.gpoaccess.gov/wmd/index.html>, p. 276.

2. George Tenet, At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), pp. 259–80. The recently published paperback edition has an interesting epilogue focusing on Tenet's concerns that the U.S. government is still not doing enough to address the danger of nuclear terrorism.

3. Excerpts from the letter are reprinted in Michael Scheuer, “How Not to Catch a Terrorist: A Ten-Step Program, From the Files of the U.S. Intelligence Community,” Atlantic, December 2004, pp. 50–52.

4. For a recent analysis of global nuclear security and the progress of programs to improve it, see Matthew Bunn, Securing the Bomb 2008 (Cambridge, MA: Project on Managing the Atom, Harvard University, and Nuclear Threat Initiative, November 2008), <www.nti.org/securingthebomb>.

5. Office of Technology Assessment (OTA), Nuclear Proliferation and Safeguards (Washington, DC: OTA, 1977), <www.princeton.edu/~ota/disk3/1977/7705/7705.PDF>, p. 140. The OTA reached this conclusion long before the internet made a great deal of relevant information much more widely available.

6. For the IAEA's list of incidents confirmed by the states concerned, see IAEA, “IAEA Illicit Trafficking Database (ITDB),” fact sheet, September 2008, <www.iaea.org/NewsCenter/Features/RadSources/PDF/fact_figures2007.pdf>. Perhaps the best summary of the available data on nuclear and radiological smuggling is “Illicit Trafficking in Radioactive Materials,” in Mark Fitzpatrick, ed., Nuclear Black Markets: Pakistan, A.Q. Khan, and the Rise of Proliferation Networks: A Net Assessment (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2007), pp. 119–38.

7. Kofi Annan, “A Global Strategy for Fighting Terrorism,” keynote address to the Closing Plenary, International Summit on Democracy, Terrorism and Security, Madrid, 2005, <english.safe-democracy.org/keynotes/a-global-strategy-for-fighting-terrorism.html>.

8. See White House, Office of the Press Secretary, “Remarks by President Barack Obama,” Prague, Czech Republic, April 5, 2009, <www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Remarks-By-President-Barack-Obama-In-Prague-As-Delivered/>.