Many experts put the chances of terrorists using a nuclear bomb much lower than public fears would indicate, a leading expert argues in a new book.
“Will Terrorists Go Nuclear?” examines the history and psychology of nuclear terrorism, including whether or not terrorists could build a nuclear bomb, and if so, how bad it would be and how governments can prepare and avert disaster.
Author Brian Michael Jenkins is a senior adviser at the RAND Corp think tank who has written about nuclear terrorism since the 1970s. His new book was released this week by Prometheus Books.
Jenkins asked 180 experts, including intelligence officials, senior military officers, government officials and nuclear scientists, to rate the probability that terrorists would successfully detonate a nuclear bomb in the next 10 years.
Link
Here is a link to the book on Amazon: Will Terrorists Go Nuclear?
Sounds like an interesting book, I might just buy it
Although I think the title ‘Why haven’t terrorists used a nuclear weapon’ would have been better.
Along the same lines of ‘why haven’t they used suicide bombers in Mainland USA’ (Madrid and London have both had bombers) or ‘why haven’t terrorists just sent men armed with machine guns into 20 major cities at the same time to cause havoc?’.
That side of the psyche (why don’t terrorists use the simplest techniques) is something I’d love to read about.
And on the other side of the “Terrorist and Nuclear Weapons”…
I’m reading a book now called Physics for Future Presidents: The Science Behind the Headlines 
by Richard Muller, a professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley. Early in the book, he goes into quite some detail about the types of nuclear bombs, the physics behind the decay of atoms, the statistics behind the low probability of death caused by the spread of radioactive material, and the difficulty in making bombs that work. It is his contention, for instance, that the recent nuclear test by North Korea was a “fizzle” (p. 35). I haven’t read Jenkins’ book yet, but I highly recommend Muller’s book — for its review of nuclear weapons and a whole host of other issues (energy, global warming, space exploration) that “future presidents should know about”.
Seems to be a few things like this around atm
There was a tv show on the BBC called, (I think) A Presidents Guide to Science. Seems many people are worried about the direction the US’s national science funding will go in the future.
The North Korean’s nuke might have been a fizzle (I’m guessing that’s when it fails to initiate the larger explosion, as happen in the Tom Clancy book The Sum of All Fears) but a fizzle in the middle of Manhattan or on the National Mall would still be catastrophic.