By TruePublica:
What do the the international experts on terrorism believe? The Central
Intelligence Agency in the USA has said for decades that terrorist
interest in weapons of mass destruction or WMD is growing. When former
Secretary of Defence Robert Gates was asked in 2010 by the media what
kept him up at night, Gates replied, “It’s the thought of a terrorist ending up with a weapon of mass destruction, especially nuclear.”
There’s a reason why Gates responded in such a way.
And yet, it has been over many years since such assessments about the
use of WMD by terrorists began to be publicised. There still has been
no major WMD attack by any terrorist group in the world to date. Still,
Gates knows what the threat really is.
The Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) was lanched specifically to
understand these potential threats. In the Nuclear Materials Security
Index (2014), its Co-Chairman and former US Senator Sam Nunn claimed,
“Today, nearly 2,000 metric tons of weapons-usable nuclear materials . .
. are stored at hundreds of sites around the world”. Some of those
materials, according to Nunn, are poorly secured and vulnerable to theft
or sale on the black market. Terrorist organisations have plainly
stated their desire to use nuclear weapons, and Nunn says that the
terrorists need not go where there is the most material; they will go
where the material is most vulnerable.
