Can Terrorists Build the Bomb?

STEP 2: EXTRACT URANIUM

If a terrorist does manage to acquire fuel from a research reactor, preparing it for use in a bomb requires expertise, chemicals, industrial equipment, explosives and a clandestine workspace. None of these, however, is beyond the reach of a well-organized and well-funded terrorist group such as Al Qaeda.


Assembling a bomb requires metallurgy and engineering skills, as well as some familiarity with conventional explosives. A terrorist group would surely love the help of a nuclear scientist, but such expertise is not a prerequisite. No stage of the process requires classified knowledge. The relevant chemistry formulas, for instance, are in graduate-school textbooks. It might not even take a big team. A study done by the federal Office of Technology Assessment in
1977 concluded that such a project could be done with “at a minimum, one person capable of researching the literature in several fields, and a jack- of-all-trades technician.”

The first step in building a bomb is to process reactor fuel—typically a uranium-aluminum alloy —into pure uranium. (Terrorists could skip this part if they managed to get hold of bomb-ready uranium from a military installation.) “You can use nitric acid,” Ferguson explains, which is cheap and available even in high-school labs. A terrorist chemist would cut up the fuel and dissolve it in a vat of boiling acid, then use an organic compound to isolate the uranium. Ferguson says the ideal compound for this is
tributyl phosphate (TBP), although other compounds may also do the job. TBP has commercial uses, such as the production of plastics and ink, which might provide cover for a
terrorist ordering large quantities (probably in the hundreds of gallons.)


If all goes well, the TBP should attach itself to the uranium and, like oil and water, separate from the acid. “You stir, and you have TBP and uranium floating on top. The bottom is acid and aluminum. So you basically just skim [the top] off,” Ferguson explains. All that’s left is to wash away the TBP. Given uranium’s low radioactivity, this work could be done in lab coats and goggles in a small warehouse.


Regulators can’t do much to make this step more difficult. One possibility is to restrict the sale of TBP. “Some countries track it, some don’t,” says Michael Levi, a nuclear-terrorism expert at King’s College at the University of London.


If a terrorist group obtained the necessary chemicals, extracting enough uranium for a bomb could take only a few weeks. The bomb-makers could then get down to the grunt work of construction. “I think the hardest step in the process is the extraction of uranium,” Ferguson says. “Once they do that, then it becomes very simple.”