Nuclear security

Nuclear Terrorism: Fear vs. Reality

There is a popular misconception that inside every nuclear power plant lies a mushroom cloud waiting to happen. It follows that a 9/11-style terrorist attack on any of them would impose nuclear holocaust, spewing deadly radiation far and wide and ending life as we know it.

Major media certainly peddles such propaganda. In April the New York Times published an op-ed entitled “Could there be a terrorist Fukushima?,” which pointed to an al-Qaeda training manual that lists nuclear plants “as among the best targets for spreading fear in the United States.” It’s worth noting that the manual reads “spreading fear” rather than “spreading radiation.” Let’s look at an example of the policy in practice.

Al-Qaeda officials claimed to have considered nuclear targets in their 9/11 plot. Arrested as the principal architect of those attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed told Arabic television al-Jazeera that his cabal decided against striking nuclear facilities “for fear it would go out of control.” But in the next breath, the Islamic terrorist tipped his hand, explaining the attacks “were designed to cause as many deaths as possible.” Was he expecting us to believe that nuclear Armageddon would slay fewer people than crashing airliners into skyscrapers? Or was he laughing up his sleeve at public neurosis of radiation, knowing well that talk of targeting nuclear plants would wreak far more havoc than the act itself?