Nuclear security

Martin Schram commentary: Belgium attack raises specter of nuke terrorism

And here’s what is most frightening: America’s leading experts, former Sens. Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar, the bipartisan partners who led the world’s quarter-century battle to keep loose nukes and nuclear fuel out of terrorist hands and repeatedly warned us to do more or we’d someday regret it, have never looked more prophetic.

This week, as the world’s leaders convened in Washington for the final Nuclear Security Summit of Barack Obama’s presidency, they spent days pouring over a literally terrifying choice of news articles and expert reports:

• The New York Times reported that “tons of materials that terrorists could use to make small nuclear devices or dirty bombs remain deeply vulnerable to theft” despite U.S.-led efforts to safeguard them.

• “Preventing Dirty Bombs, Fighting Weapons of Mass Disruption.” A report by the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a group founded by Nunn and philanthropist Ted Turner in early 2001 to monitor security of the world’s weapons of mass destruction, warned that the probability of terrorists exploding a dirty bomb with those materials was “much higher than that of an improvised nuclear device.”...