Nuclear Weapons-Grade Fissile Materials. The Most Serious Threat to US National Security Today?

The American public has generally recognized the dangers of weapons of mass destruction. Less understood or well known is the fact that the most important threat to US national security may be the growing stockpiles of nuclear weapons-grade fissile materials plutonium and highly enriched uranium HEU, much of which is uncontrolled and unsecured in the former Soviet Union. Fissile materials are the essential elements for nuclear bomb making. Access to these materials is the primary technical barrier to a nuclear weapons capability since the technological know-how for bomb making is publicly available. Given the already prevalent availability of technology and information associated with building nuclear weapons, the greatest threat and challenge to the nuclear nonproliferation regime, recently reaffirmed by the international community with the approval in May of 1995 of the indefinite extension of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty NPT, is controlling and limiting the spread of nuclear weapons-usable fissile materials. Controlling fissile materials is important because once these materials are acquired, construction of nuclear weapons is a relatively straightforward proposition for sophisticated terrorists or proliferant states. Even relatively unsophisticated terrorist groups could make a crude-but-workable nuclear bomb in the 10- to 100-kiloton range.