Al-Qaida able to build nuke weapon inside U.S.

Terrorists could assemble a small group of fewer than 20 to construct a Hiroshima-size nuclear bomb, purchase the fissionable uranium needed and transport it to the U.S. city of their choice for less than $10 million, says a new report published in the November-December issue of Foreign Policy. "The Bomb in the Backyard" was the result of the investigative work of Peter D. Zimmerman and Jeffrey G. Lewis. Zimmerman is professor of science and security in the Department of War Studies at King's College in London and previously served as chief scientist of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee and chief scientist of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. Lewis is executive director of the Managing the Atom Project at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. "To put it in strictly commercial terms, terrorists would likely find a nuclear attack cost effective," they write in the article. "The simple appeal of nuclear terrorism can be illustrated with a hypothetical situation. A failed nuclear detonation, one that produced only a few tens of tons in yield, could kill 10,000 people in just a few hours if the device exploded in a crowded financial center. Not only would 10,000 persons represent the upward limit of a conventional terrorist attack, but that figure would exceed the combined casualties in all of al-Qaida's attacks over the entire history of the organization." And that's the "worst-case" scenario for the terrorists, the authors point out. If "successful," the nuclear detonation would kill 10 times more people – 100,000. Without giving away any information about the assembling of such a device that cannot already be found easily on the Internet, Zimmerman and Lewis construct a scenario for building a nuclear bomb within the U.S. for a budget of less than $10 million – finding it can done with a small team of about 19, the same number of people involved in the Sept. 11 attacks.