excerpted from the Introduction
If Al Qaeda was to rent a van to carry the ten-kiloton Russian weapon into the heart of Times Square and detonate it adjacent to the Morgan Stanley headquarters at 1585 Broadway, Times Square would vanish in the twinkling of an eye. The blast would generate temperatures reaching into the tens of millions of degrees Fahrenheit. The resulting fireball and blast wave would destroy instantaneously the theater district, The New York Times building, Grand Central Terminal, and every other structure within a third of a mile of the point of detonation. The ensuing firestorm would engulf Rockefeller Center, Carnegie Hall, the Empire State Building, and Madison Square Garden, leaving a landscape resembling the World Trade Center site. From the United Nations headquarters on the East River and the Lincoln Tunnel under the Hudson River, to the Metropolitan Museum in the eighties and the Flatiron Building in the twenties, structures would remind one of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Office Building following the Oklahoma City bombing.

On a normal workday, more than half a million people crowd the area within a half-mile radius of Times Square. A noon detonation in midtown Manhattan could kill them all. Hundreds of thousands of others would die from collapsing buildings, fire, and fallout in the ensuing hours. The electromagnetic pulse generated by the blast would fry cell phones, radios, and other electronic communications. Hospitals, doctors, and emergency services would be overwhelmed by the wounded. Firefighters would be battling an uncontrolled ring of fires for many days thereafter.

The threat of nuclear terrorism, moreover, is not limited to New York City. While New York is widely seen as the most likely target, it is clear that Al Qaeda is not only capable of, but also interested in, mounting attacks on other American cities, where people may be less prepared. Imagine the consequences of a ten-kiloton weapon exploding in San Francisco, Houston, Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles, or any other city Americans call home. From the epicenter of the blast to a distance of approximately a third of a mile, every structure and individual would vanish in a vaporous haze. A second circle of destruction, extending three-quarters of a mile from ground zero would leave buildings looking like the Murrah building in Oklahoma City. A third circle, reaching out one and one-half miles, would be ravaged by fires and radiation.

excerpted from Chapter Three: Where Could Terrorists Acquire a Nuclear Bomb?
If a nuclear terrorist attack occurs tomorrow morning, the first question will be Who did it?; the second question will be Where did they get the bomb, and are they likely to have more? Today there are more than two hundred addresses around the world from which terrorists could acquire a nuclear weapon or the fissile material from which one could be made. Some sites are clearly more dangerous than others, as a result of the quantity of weapons and material, the lack of physical protection of these items from criminal or terrorist raids, and the corruption and corruptibility of nuclear guardians. Russia is the most likely source. Not because the Russian government would intentionally sell or lose weapons or materials, but simply as an instance of the Willie Sutton principle. When asked why he robbed banks, Sutton answered: “Because that’s where the money is.” Russia’s eleven-time-zone expanse contains more nuclear weapons and materials than any other country in the world, much of it vulnerable to theft.

Pakistan is a close second. Intricate links between Pakistani security services and Al Qaeda magnify uncertainties about the chain of custody of its nuclear arsenal, and Pakistan’s top nuclear scientist has been caught red-handed as the kingpin of a black market in nuclear technology and materials stretching back for decades. The third most likely source is North Korea, already the world’s most promiscuous proliferator of delivery systems for weapons of mass destruction. Over the past decade, North Korea has sold long-range missiles to Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen — and to anyone else able to pay. In 2003 it abrogated
its 1994 agreement with the United States not to produce material for nuclear weapons, and it is currently producing additional fissile material and constructing production lines that will,
when completed, turn out enough HEU and plutonium for a dozen bombs a year. Fourth place goes to the twenty-odd research reactors in developing or transitional countries around the globe with quantities of HEU sufficient for one or more nuclear weapons. Most of these reactors, like Vinca, were provided by Minatom to clients and friends of the Soviet Union during the Cold War and remain in Ukraine, Uzbekistan, and a number of other countries today. Instinctively, Saddam’s Iraq would not have made the top twenty most likely suppliers of nuclear material.

excerpted from Chapter Seven: Where We Need to Be: A World of Three No’s
For all the dangers enumerated in the earlier chapters of this book, a simple fact remains: nuclear terrorism is, in fact, preventable. Only a fission chain reaction releases the vast blast of energy that is the hallmark of a nuclear bomb. No fissile material, no nuclear explosion, no nuclear terrorism. It is that simple.

All that the United States and its allies have to do to prevent nuclear terrorism is to prevent terrorists from acquiring highly enriched uranium or weapons-grade plutonium. This “all,” of course, will require a huge undertaking. But large as it is, this is a finite challenge, subject to a finite solution. The world’s stockpiles of nuclear weapons and weapons-usable materials are vast but not unlimited. Technologies for locking up superdangerous or valuable items are well developed. The United States does not lose gold from Fort Knox, nor does Russia lose treasures from the Kremlin Armory. Producing additional fissile material requires large, complex, expensive, and visible facilities, leaving such enterprises vulnerable to interruption by a watchful, determined international community. Keeping nuclear weapons and materials out of the hands of the world’s most dangerous people is thus a challenge to international will and determination, not to our technical capabilities.

The centerpiece of a strategy to prevent nuclear terrorism must be to deny terrorists access to nuclear weapons or materials. To do this, we must shape a new international security order according to a doctrine of “Three No’s”:
• No Loose Nukes
• No New Nascent Nukes
• No New Nuclear Weapons States

The first strand of this strategy — “No Loose Nukes” — begins with the recognition that insecure nuclear weapons or materials anywhere pose a grave threat to all nations everywhere. The international community can thus rightly insist that all weapons and materials — wherever they are — be protected to a standard sufficient to ensure the safety of citizens around the world. Russia, which holds the largest stockpile of actual and potential nuclear weapons, has been the principal focus of concern for the past decade, but in recent years a new, urgent test of this principle has come from Pakistan, where the developer of its nuclear establishment has been exposed as the kingpin in black-market sales of nuclear weapons technology.

Application of the second principle — “No New Nascent Nukes” — would prevent the construction of any national production facilities for enriching uranium or reprocessing plutonium. The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, now recognizes that the existing system under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) erred in allowing nonnuclear states to build uranium enrichment and plutonium production plants. In his words, “This is a different ball game, and we have to change the rules.” Closing this loophole will require deft diplomacy, imaginative inducements, and demonstrable readiness to employ sanctions, including use of military capabilities, to establish a new bright line. Iran is currently testing this line. The international community’s response will demonstrate the feasibility — or, alternatively, forfeit the possibility — of a world in which this principle holds.

The third element of this strategy draws a line under the current eight nuclear powers — the United States, Russia, Great Britain, France, China, India, Pakistan, and Israel — and declares unambiguously, “No more.” North Korea poses a decisive challenge for the “No New Nuclear Weapons States” policy. Unless its current plans are aborted, North Korea will soon have something like eight nuclear weapons and facilities for producing a dozen more each year. If North Korea becomes a nuclear weapons state, South Korea and Japan will almost certainly go nuclear in the decade thereafter, making Northeast Asia a far more dangerous place than it is today. More important, if North Korea successfully completes its nuclear weapons production line, it might well sell weapons to others, including terrorists. In that future, the prospects for preventing nuclear terrorism would plummet.