Reports & Papers

Researchers from the United States and Russia have issued a joint assessment of the global threat of nuclear terrorism, warning of a persistent danger that terrorists could obtain or make a nuclear device and use it with catastrophic consequences. The first joint threat assessment by experts from the world’s two major nuclear powers concludes: “If current approaches toward eliminating the threat are not replaced with a sense of urgency and resolve, the question will become not if but when, and on what scale, the first act of nuclear terrorism occurs.”

"Proliferation of  nuclear technologies and the increasing threat that these technologies could be used by dictatorial regimes and forces of international terrorism add urgency to the goal of protecting the international community from the pending nuclear catastrophe," according to senior IMEMO researcher Stanislav Ivanov.

The possibility that terrorists could get and detonate a nuclear bomb poses a real and urgent risk to international security. No one knows the real probability of such an attack. But the evidence of terrorist efforts to get the nuclear materials and expertise needed to make a crude nuclear explosive is sufficiently troubling, and the consequences of such an event sufficiently grave, to justify urgent action to reduce the risk.