The Threat of Nuclear Terrorism, With Stephen Flynn

LINDSAY:
Welcome to The President's Inbox, a CFR podcast about the foreign policy challenges facing the United States. I'm Jim Lindsay, director of Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. This week's topic is the threat of nuclear terrorism.

With me to discuss the steps the U.S. government should be taking to prevent and respond to nuclear terrorism is Dr. Stephen Flynn. Steve is a professor of political science and founding director of the Global Resilience Institute at Northeastern University. He was an active duty officer in the United States Coast Guard for twenty years, has served on numerous government commissions, and spent a decade as senior fellow for national security studies here at the Council on Foreign Relations. Steve is the chair of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine Committee on Assessing and Improving Strategies for Preventing, Countering, and Responding to Weapons of Mass Destruction, Terrorism, Nuclear threats, which has recently released a detailed report on the threat of nuclear terrorism. Steve, good to see you and thanks for coming on The President's Inbox.

FLYNN:
Yeah. Delighted to be back here with you, Jim, and a chance to chat with the Council.

LINDSAY:
Well, let's dive into the topic and maybe I should begin with sort of first questions, which is when your committee thought about nuclear terrorism, what did you mean by it?

FLYNN:
Yeah. Well, it was really to look at the risk associated with potentially a non-state actor or terrorist organization getting a hold of a nuclear weapon or improvised nuclear device or the more likely scenario, but still sobering, not quite as frightening, and that's the dirty bomb scenario, the radiation dispersal device. And finally, potentially attacking something like a nuclear power plant as a way to emit radiation by going after a fixed target that might pose a threat. So those were the range of nuclear threats that we were looking at.

LINDSAY:
And I would imagine the Russian invasion of Ukraine and its attacks in and around Ukrainian nuclear power plants has sort of upped the attention to the question of what might happen to any nuclear facility in a time of war or time of attack. Is that correct?

FLYNN:
Absolutely. And combined with Russia, it's just breaking nuclear norms in the way that it has since the invasion into Ukraine. The actual project started as a result of the National Defense Authorization Act language in 2021, and we get up and running in January of '22 and then watched Russia go into Ukraine shortly thereafter. So that certainly very much animated the work. But stepping back, there really hadn't been a comprehensive look at the overarching nuclear terrorism threat in a little over a decade. Of course in the media aftermath of 9/11, this was like the singular national security issue. Then, Vice President Dick Cheney said the number one national security challenge is a weapon of mass destruction going off in a major city in the U.S. We should wrap our mind around that. This was a really big focus, a big reason for going into Iraq with all its missteps was animated by this concern that somehow weapons of mass destruction might get into the wrong hands.

But as we fast forward to the 2024 timeframe and the time when we were looking at this, we got rather dozy about this. It's something that's kind of falling off the map. There's a lot of other mayhem in the world and this one seemed to have slid by. And so our committee took it on as basically important to step back and look at this more comprehensively as the mandate that Congress laid out for us, directed us to do, but also to try to do it in a way that maybe a more lay person could understand just what's going on. So rather than the more typical National Academies getting into the real technical weeds, we really kind of stepped back and looked at the overall landscape and we came up with a very sobering conclusion.

LINDSAY:
Well, let me hold you there. Before we jump into the conclusion, I want to do a couple more preliminary things if we could, Steve. One of the things is if you could just sort of explain a little bit more about what a dirty bomb is. We talk about a radiological dispersal device. But if you give people some sense of what that event might look like, what the consequences might look like, because I think everyone has a very good idea of what would happen if a nuclear device went off in a major American city. But what are we talking about in terms of dirty bombs?

FLYNN:
Dirty bombs is a much different threat and this is not the mushroom cloud. With a dirty bomb, we're talking basically about radioactive materials getting mixed into an explosive device, a conventional bomb and blasting that radioactive material around. It's essentially like a super hazmat problem, hazardous material problem. There's no mushroom cloud, there's no waves of radiation, electromagnetic pulse, those kinds of things. The scenario is often...you may not have that degree of impact like we imagine with a nuclear weapon. But if it's directed at something that's a critical infrastructure, then you contaminate that area for potentially a very, very long time. So it's a mix between a nuclear threat if we often think the huge life safety issue versus the targeting with a dirty bomb of an area in order to make it essentially to deny an adversary that critical infrastructure is used going forward.

LINDSAY:
And I think we should note that radiological material is used in a lot of industrial medical processes. So nuclear material is not just at weapons manufacturing plants, correct?

FLYNN:
Yeah, that's exactly right. These are the kinds of things that are actually part of our industrial environment. And one thing we realized and have taken a closer look at in the aftermath 9/11, there's a lot of what's called orphan materials. Not surprisingly, there's a lot of rules if you're dealing with radioactive materials because the risk posed. That means there's a lot of costs associated with abiding by those rules and some folks don't want to pay those costs. And so we end up with materials that once they reach the end of their useful life end up in places that we don't have a lot of control over. The fear is that some of those materials could get into the hands of non-state actors or terrorist organizations. They can mix them into a conventional explosive and turn it into this dirty bomb.

LINDSAY:
And obviously from the vantage point of the United States, you have to worry not just about how American firms and hospitals handle radioactive material in the course of their business, but you have to worry about how it's being handled in countries around the world because it could be diverted somewhere else and brought here to the United States.

FLYNN:
Yeah. That's very much an issue of concern is that most of these materials are increasingly in places in the U.S. and in Europe. There's a growing movement to try to get away from some of the more dangerous materials, use some alternatives, upgraded technology. But in the developing world, let's say for medical equipment, you're working with the older stuff and there's not resources to replace it. So in the places where it may be most challenging from a security control standpoint where the materials may end up most likely being.

LINDSAY:
Okay. Now as you noted, fear of nuclear terrorism is not new. It's been longstanding. A lot of attention was paid to it in immediate aftermath of September 11th, as you point out, for very obvious reasons. Yet so far we've been fortunate, and let me say fortunate, that we haven't seen the kind of nuclear terrorist attacks that we very much worried about in the shadow of 9/11. What do you think accounts for that, Steve?

FLYNN:
Well, there's a good news story in this in that a lot of effort has been put into trying to manage this risk over decades really. And it's been with a lot of, in the U.S. context, bipartisan support. It hasn't a missed the beat between going from a Democrat to Republican administration, and this is going back to the dawning of the atomic era. That's the sort of positive side. The other key piece is that particularly after 9/11, as we knew in the immediate aftermath, we weren't having agencies all talk and work together as well as they should to kind of connect the proverbial dots and so forth. And a lot of effort has been put in place to make sure that the alphabet soup of agencies who all have a role to play and a risk like this are on the same page.

What we found soberingly though in recent years is that some of the air coming out of that balloon in terms of the capability, and that's a real worry point. Because of the shift increasingly around great power competition, i.e. concern about Russia and China, more conventional war, those kinds of concerns, the non-state actor risk, the terrorism risk has just started to fade in lots of ways. And many of the efforts that we see as key to the success of managing those to date, those ingredients are starting to come undone.

LINDSAY:
So I take your point that the top-line finding is that U.S. efforts to counter nuclear and radiological terrorism have not kept pace with the evolving threat landscape, if I can use that phrase. And as I look at that, I guess my question is, to what extent is that because we've lost muscle memory? How much of it is because we've found other threats we have to worry about, and so that got put on the back shelf? How much of it really is about great power rivalry or other things that are going on?

FLYNN:
Yeah. You got that almost exactly right. I'll just put it in reverse. The shift in focus to great power rivalry and concern has become of course a dominant focus of our national security intelligence community to try to get out in front of. That in turn has started to erode some of the frontline capabilities for managing the terrorism threat. And you start to lose that muscle memory as you laid out here over time because it's just not on everybody's radar screen. We don't have the focus that we had on it.

And the other key piece is that the overwhelming approach to managing this risk has largely been supply-related. How could we reduce the number of weapons that are out there? And the ones we couldn't eliminate, how do we essentially get tight control over them? That of course is arms control and nonproliferation efforts that really were quite strong in the post-Cold-War era where our main partner was Russia.

And so a lot of the emphasis was, "Well, it's a real challenge to try to once these things get out and about to detect and intercept them. And ultimately we don't want to deal with an incident, so let's really focus on the supply side." Well, we go across the board: arms control basically is gone, New Start II just basically on vapors and no replacement in sight, China on the rise. The proliferation issue is really moving to the fore. And the other key piece we found is actually on this civil nuclear sector, and actually positive thing our committee thought that if we're going to meet to zero carbon goals, you really do want to make sure that nuclear is a part of that mix.

But it's going to places where it's never gone before and it's being led not by the United States that set all the rules. If you go back to the sixties and seventies, you want to be in the nuclear energy club, you play by very strict rules that the United States set because we were the king of that mountain. Fast forward to where we are in the 2020s, not so much. Russia, China are more in the lead, focus still on safety, not so much on security. The concern is-

LINDSAY:
Steve, can I just stop you right there? Can you explain that distinction between safety and security? Because I think it's a critical one, but I don't know that it's an obvious one.

FLYNN:
Yeah. Thank you for highlighting that because what we heard a lot of from folks who have issues around the safety, how do we make sure that things don't break and cause a nuclear nightmare or radiation-

LINDSAY:
Three Mile Island, Chernobyl.

FLYNN:
Exactly. And the difference here is of course when you're thinking about security, is what if somebody with malicious intent is actually going after your device? And that's a much different issue than thinking about failure as a result of a series of accidents or clumsy engineering or those kinds of things that go into safety. So the security really is somebody with malicious intent who has some understanding of what they're about targets what you have and or targets the materials that are moving. So they really aren't equivalent.

LINDSAY:
Steve, I think it's important to stress just how much the geopolitical environment has changed over the last three decades and how that is tied to concerns about nuclear terrorism. You mentioned supply-side strategies, and we're both old enough to remember when we had the cooperative threat reduction or Nunn Lugar approach. When you think of it, the United States was actually paying the Russians to mothball in a secure fashion all kinds of weapons and radiological materials. And now we are thirty years later, a time in which essentially Moscow in Washington are not speaking.

FLYNN:
Yeah, that's right. It was a tremendous success story in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War that the U.S. stepped out so directly. We had a lot of weapons out there and the Soviet Union, when they dissolved, had them spread around, including places like Ukraine that had those weapons. And so the real focused effort to go out and try to get as much as we could, eliminate them, and the U.S. paid for a lot of the process of dealing with essentially disarming those nuclear weapons and managing the radiation materials that go with that. And Russia was very much an ally in that process. They still wanted to make sure it was a pretty exclusive club, the U.S. and Russia and nobody else was in play. What we see now of course in the shift is that Russia is no longer adherent to the norms, is breaking the norms.

Meanwhile, China has really stepped up its game and really is expanding the number of nuclear weapons in its arsenal. And while we figured out by the end of the Cold War how to do arms control with two, in a binary sort of set, nobody really has a view of how that's going to work with a tri. And as that nervousness goes up, other powers of course see the potential value of these weapons. Ukraine was a non-nuclear weapon carrying...invaded by a nuclear weapon state. And how did that work out for Ukraine, giving up the nuclear weapons? So these are the messages that we're now dealing with.

The other key piece is that there's a tendency in the national security foreign policy to kind of divide the world between state actors and non-state actors. When it comes to the nuclear terrorism threat, that basically line doesn't work at all. The only way most of our terrorist organization is going to get access to a nuclear weapon is because either state complicity, a rather low probability, or state failure, a less than lower probability.

LINDSAY:
Well, when you look at several of the countries that have nuclear weapons, one can be rightly concerned about how secure those weapons are.

FLYNN:
Exactly. So if you're not monitoring both the state, non-state and the interplay between the two, similarly access to materials that could ultimately lead to the development of an improvised nuclear device, this is essentially a very crude nuclear weapon. The technical understanding to create one of those was pretty much out of reach of non-state actors for much of our recent history. But with the world of AI and machine learning and other kinds of tools that are now being out there, how much a state will have to play the role in a risk like this is something that the committee looked at and was quite concerned about relative to what we're hearing. So the environment has gotten quite dynamic. Other importantly here is a terrorism threat itself has really evolved in a way that is quite sobering.

We again in the U.S. government sort of set up a domestic versus international terrorism. And when we're talking about the radical Islamic threat, there wasn't a very big footprint at all in places like the United States. The real concern is as terrorism has evolved now, you're now moving with the far-right, kind of white supremacists, et al., it's become very transnational in that there's links back to Russia and the same sort of manifestos and want to copy by somebody else. And this is appealing to unfortunately to folks that can be recruited out of the military, out of law enforcement. In other words, folks that basically can blend in a lot easier and understand things like our critical infrastructure, like our power grid and understand how ports operate and those kinds of things.

And so one of the concerns that we also looked at here on the demand side is that many terrorists are still very interested in nukes and they're interested in nuclear power plants as targets and those kinds of things and the folks that now have increased capabilities to potentially target those facilities as well as potentially to get into this mix. So this morphing of the terrorism threat, we didn't win the war on terror. It just adapted itself. And especially again, this movement to the far right groups are a particular concern. If those are connected back to states, states use them as proxies, it's just a very messy world. And we try to divide it between state and non-state, domestic and international. And those create the various seams that we had pre 9/11 that blindsided us with the al-Qaeda threat, and our concern as a committee is it could hit us again and this time potentially with a much scarier outcome, that is with the risk of nuclear terrorism.

LINDSAY:
Okay. So Steve, we spent some time essentially doing diagnosis of the problem. Let's switch to prescription. As you and your colleagues are formulating this report, what are the major recommendations you have for the United States government to address essentially this change of landscape that we face as a country?

FLYNN:
Yeah. We have a whole series of recommendations built around these findings that we had. So some of them are direct with the supply side and they're not surprisingly very much oriented towards, "Hey, this is not something you do as a purely domestic effort or a U.S. alone effort. If we're dealing with nuclear terrorism, allies are really, really important and we have to make sure we really up our game on this. Even though it's hard and difficult to deal with the proliferation issues and to deal with arms control-related things, you can't afford to not keep working it."

And there are areas of, even as much dark disagreements as there are with Russia, there are some areas where there's alignment and we should seek those out, very much supporting NATO with our NATO allies around this set of issues here as well as their concerns are obviously going up too. So that's kind of in the typical foreign policy landscape. On the more machinery side of the federal government, there is no single agency in charge of this threat. Where's the belly button of nuclear terrorism? Again, it's very complexity means you're involving an alphabet soup of different agencies.

LINDSAY:
And why is that a problem?

FLYNN:
It's a problem because...There's sort of two levels here. One, no matter what, you're needing folks to play well with one another, and that's always a management, leadership challenge is given everybody's competing priorities, how to get them to focus and collaborate. And one that we again made significant progress in over the last twenty years and we have a lot of the bones are still there for doing that.

LINDSAY:
And that was one of the problems that in the run up to 9/11, right?

FLYNN:
Oh, absolutely. I mean you just had walls between FBI talking to CIA and other kinds of things that mean we are guaranteed almost to get blindsided. The other core issue is that many of the agencies that are associated with the Department of Homeland security, IO organizations like the U.S. Coast Guard for instance or Customs and Border Protection or the FBI, or because we're dealing with a radioactive event, agencies like FEMA or also with HHS, these agencies are all facing fiscal demands. They have already very full inboxes and Congress isn't sort of rolling over giving them extra resources to make sure they're on top of this threat. That's a problem because DOD has been largely used as a way to subsidize that lack of capability over the last decade. You could get agreement on both sides of the aisle that DOD should plus up. You could get no agreement across both sides of the aisle on everybody else.

So DOD basically was stepping in as a bit of the sugar daddy on this. And what's happened now is DOD says, "Can't do that anymore. We don't have the means because of the other competing missions." And DOD is backing out of providing, let's say some of the lubrication that keeps all this inner agency coordination going. That's a real concern the committee highlighted here because one of the challenges is not like Congress is going to go, "Oh, you're right, DOD. We shouldn't do that. We'll make sure we give the resources to the right places." That's not going to happen and our current political environment.

The other piece is when an agency like DHS or FBI goes, "Hey, this is really important," Congress kind of goes, "Well, if it was really important, DOD would tell us it's really important." So you get this sort of catch-22 here is that when the national security community basically goes, "Other stuff on our plate that are real competing priorities, we can't do the stuff we used to do. Other agencies need to step in." Those agencies can't get the resources to step in part because DOD is saying it's not so much of a priority anymore. So that is a real concern because you can really lose capability, that muscle memory you were referring earlier, lose it pretty quickly. Military contact...it's typically two tours of duty...four years, you could lose capability.

LINDSAY:
So help me think through this challenge that we face, Steve, because I take your point that this is partly a resource issue. And as you described, all the money went to DOD because we didn't want to give it to other agencies. But as you note, that problem may not be fixed given our current partisan politics anytime soon. What can any administration do about the other part of the problem, this coordination effort? Are there some basic lessons or recommendations about how to get organizations to work better in the sandbox or is there an obvious suggestion as to which agency should be charged to begin the lead?

FLYNN:
Yeah. There are two areas that we've reinforced. Ultimately the White House does have to be engaged and that happens too often. We often say the White House has to do this, but in this one, and to the Biden administration's credit, they really have stepped up to it. It was a recent national security memorandum that said, "Right, we got to really make sure we're on top of the weapons of mass destruction issue. Everybody needs to contribute and so forth here." That's important. You got to drive the agency heads to whack on the knuckles say, "This is important. I want to make sure you're focused on this."

Practically, a way you do it is by exercises, major exercises. You got to make sure you get the people at the top in the exercises. There's nothing like working your way through some of these challenges to go, "Is there any way we could kind of do this a little better and make this a little less sloppy than what we just went through?" It really helps to focus. And one of the things that we've lost in recent years is bringing principals to bear working through some of these scenarios. It tends to get delegated pretty far down and the result is we potentially got in the real world situation, people essentially operating without much knowledge or expertise.

But that experience again is one way in which that you keep the focus and the memory they have of what they learned through those exercises is important. So that's something. The president has to say, "We're going to do this. We're going to carve out some time," and whether it's a tabletop or another compact way. But you've got to get the principals involved in this to keep that onside.

Now we also had a number of recommendations as well that dealt with some of the challenges we saw around, "Okay. So you didn't stop the stuff at the source. So in the move, you can intercept them." And even more kind of soberingly, "We have an incident. How do we respond better and recover from it?" And I'm happy to speak to those as well.

LINDSAY:
Well, let's talk actually about what happens if, god forbid, we do have a nuclear terrorism event. And I understand if you're talking about an actual nuclear device, we're talking a challenge many magnitudes greater than let's say a dirty bomb. But as you note, a dirty bomb is the more likely one. So how well positioned are we to respond to an event in which a dirty bomb were used, let's say in a major city?

FLYNN:
Yeah. Unfortunately, in our surveying of this and talking to some frontline emergency responders, we're not very well prepared at all. There are a few spots of hope and capability in places like New York City and Los Angeles, Chicago. You can think of the big places. Part of the problem, and this is something we heard from the current deputy of the fire department of New York, Joe Pfeiffer, who was the battalion commander first on site on 9/11 when the World Trade Centers came down. But Joe talked to us about how when the towers came down, as good as the FDNY and NYPD were, we need a lot of help. And those resources came from around the country. By definition, if you have a nuclear event, the folks who may be best trained ate going to be part of the casualties. You're going to need people from outside to come in.

So what we see is we have these concentrated areas of capabilities which would be the most likely targets, but that's not often where the capability needs to be. So a big push the committee really looked at is, how do we up our game and our capability at the local and state level and have a wider geographic reach? The key is you can't make it, "Stop what you're doing, get a focus on nuclear terrorism." No governor is going to do that when there's an incoming hurricane, a wildfire. It really is, how do you build on existing focus around preparing for other disasters and incorporate and include the ability to manage that nuclear event as well? Exercises again are very important on this, but just providing some extra capacity so that the very unique qualities of handling a nuclear incident. A dirty bomb incident is a more relatively straightforward versus the nuclear device. But that information is there.

The other core thing we found that most concerns us, much different from 9/11 than we would today if we had a major terrorist incident, a nuclear terrorism incident, is we're doing it in a world of disinformation and misinformation. And the true life and death information you need to get out to the public about how to shelter and cope with what has happened, if you got 30, 40 percent of the population on day one kind of disbelieving anything that the U.S. government, federal government is saying, we got ourselves a real problem in terms of how we're going to respond and recover there. Our recommendation in that regard is you have to decentralize this process. If you get one that's built as it is now heavily around podiums in Washington saying, "This is what you need to do," it's probably not going to work, almost certainly won't work.

But instead, we need to get governors to have each an advisor for them that they could draw on that's kind of a local face, somebody who may be from a local university or even a local weatherman or somebody who's a trusted source that you're training and bringing up to speed so when you're trying to get those messages out, the public's more likely to take it on board because they're seeing it as a part of their lived experience. So there are ways to tackle this. It's funny to think, Jim, is we really have built a lot of the knowledge, the expertise, the capabilities to deal with this. But we're not investing as we should. It's still low likelihood, but not zero likelihood that this will happen so that we can bounce back quickly.

And there's deterrence value to being better prepared because an adversary is interested in potentially using these kinds of horrific scenarios if they think that really we're going to fall apart if they do this. If we're able to demonstrate, "We're on our game, you can try this. We'll manage it, we'll get through it and we'll get on," it starts to suck the motivation on some of the players at least to engaged with these kinds of weapons.

LINDSAY:
I take your point there, Steve. But as you also I think quite rightly note, there is this extra wild card of social media and disinformation that could greatly complicate any effort to respond even to what would be from a purely scientific point of view, a relatively minor attack because obviously people can get to distort the consequences of the attack, whether it's possible to go back into a center of a city and the rest of it. And of course that could have knock-on effects in terms of the way the community functions, the economy functions and what have you. So again, I do think when you start thinking about responses to attacks, it gets very complicated. And I take your point that it would be useful for governors and mayors to try to build this into their general mass casualty, mass challenge event planning. Probably easier said than done because if you're spending time doing this, you're spending less time focusing on some other thing that might happen.

But one of the interesting things I wonder about as you try to think through the issue of response is, how well are we coordinated on a federal, state and local level? Because obviously wherever you go there are different jurisdictions. We've all seen plenty of TV series in which the FBI bicker with the local cops and the rest of it, and I take that as basically a metaphor for the larger problem. Where do we stand in terms of getting sort of seamless coordination across the various divisions of government?

FLYNN:
We're a lot better than we certainly were a few years ago, and in part, this is one of the upsides of our efforts post-9/11 because all emergency response starts locally. As we know, mayors and governors are responsible for...If the feds come in, it has to that be at the request of a governor or mayor. So the first responders, emergency responders are almost always going to be state, local. And the feds coming in out of the cavalry that comes in afterwards here.
Because of the drive to create more regional coordination centers, more law enforcement sharing, information sharing, intelligence sharing, you have a lot more of that today than you certainly had a few years ago. You have a lot more of these command centers that are set up...and experience just because of the frequency as well of the disasters we have, there's a lot more folks who have figured out how to work on the mutual aid agreements and other kinds of things. So we have, again, good foundations for this to happen. But at its core, an event will first require that local state response. And we really have to reinvest in some of the capabilities that are there. We've lost some of that, the resources and some of that focus.

LINDSAY:
On that note, I'll close up The President's Inbox for this week. My guest has been Stephen Flynn. He's a professor of political science and founding director of the Global Resilience Institute at Northeastern University. He's also chair of the National Academy of Sciences Engineering and Medicine Committee on Assessing and Improving Strategies for Preventing, Countering and Responding to Weapons of Mass Destruction Nuclear Threats. Steve, it was a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you for coming on The President's Inbox.

FLYNN:
Thanks for having me, Jim.

LINDSAY:
Please subscribe to The President's Inbox on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify or wherever you listen and leave us a review. We love the feedback. You can email us at [email protected]. The publications mentioned in this episode and a transcript of our conversation are available on the podcast page for The President's Inbox on CFR.org. As always, opinions expressed on The President's Inbox are solely those of the host or our guests, not of CFR, which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.

Today's episode was produced by Ester Fang with Director of Podcasting Gabrielle Sierra. Special thanks go to Ethan Wickes for his editing assistance. This is Jim Lindsay. Thanks for listening.