Al Qaeda's quest for the bomb

Recently the directors of CIA, FBI, and National Intelligence told US Senator Dianne Feinstein that an attempted terrorist attack on the United States in the next few years was ‘a certainty’. If Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri have anything to do with it, the attack is not likely to be an amateurish effort similar to that of the pathetic underpants bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who tried to blow up an airliner on Christmas Day.

Nor will it be limited to blowing up buses and trains in London or Madrid. That may be good enough for European targets, but for the United States al-Qaeda seems determined to better 9/11 and do something really spectacular.
This is the view of Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, a former CIA official and director of Intelligence and Counterintelligence at the department of energy. In a paper, written for Harvard’s Belfer Centre, Mowatt-Larssen details al-Qaeda’s patient, decade-long effort to steal or construct an improvised nuclear device — the ultimate horror.

Why not ‘dirty bombs’
The quest explains why al-Qaeda has not sought “the production of tactical, more readily available weapons such as ‘dirty bombs,’ chemical agents, crude toxins and poisons” that might do damage and take lives, but cannot compare to “the benefits of producing the image of a mushroom cloud rising over a US city.”

Like 9/11, such an attack would alter “the course of history,” Mowatt-Larssen writes.
This could explain why Osama bin Laden’s deputy, Zawahiri, called off an attack on the New York subway system, holding out for ‘something better’. A relatively easy attack using tactical weapons would not achieve the goals that al-Qaeda leaders have set for themselves, Mowatt-Larssen argues. al-Qaeda may be holding out for a truly strategic blow.

Mowatt-Larssen details the efforts al-Qaeda has gone to get a nuclear weapon beginning in late 1993 and early 1994. According to an al-Qaeda defector, an attempt was made to buy nuclear material in South Africa in order to build an ‘improvised nuclear device’ for $1.5 million.
In 1996 Zawahiri himself was detained in Russia, but released by the security services. The speculation was that he was trying to buy a bomb. Zawahiri once said that for $30 million it should be possible to buy a suitcase nuke from a disaffected former Soviet scientist. In 1998 he took personal control of al-Qaeda’s nuclear and biological weapons programmes.

That same year Osama bin Laden issued a ‘fatwa’ saying that it was a good Muslim’s duty to “kill Americans and their allies, civilians and military ...”
It was followed by the embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya. That December, Osama bin Laden told a ‘Time Magazine’ reporter that acquiring weapons of mass destruction “for the defence of Muslims is a religious duty.”

In 1999 a secret al-Qaeda biological weapons programme was set up in a Kandahar laboratory. Anthrax seems to have been the weapon of choice.
In the summer of 2001 a man matching the description of the 9/11 bomber Mohammed Atta tried to buy a crop-duster airplane in Florida, US. Zacarias Moussaoui, now serving a life sentence, was caught with crop-duster manuals.

The list goes on. The Pakistani nuclear proliferator, A Q Khan, reportedly turned down an al-Qaeda request for help building a bomb. Ramzi Yousef, the World Trade Centre bomber, planned to have cyanide gas “engulf the victims trapped in the North Trade Tower” in his failed attempt to bring down the building in 1993. But the explosion incinerated the gas.

Despite its interest in chemical and biological weapons, al-Qaeda seems focused on the nuclear option. Its stated goal is to kill four million Americans. America’s NATO allies with troops in Afghanistan might also be vulnerable.

While the world focuses on Iran as the greatest potential source of nuclear proliferation, the clearest danger may be forming somewhere in Pakistan under the direction of Zawahri and Osama bin Laden. And unlike Iran, al-Qaeda would have no reason to develop a bomb other than to use it.