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How Do Terrorists Get a Hold of Nuclear Material?

Nuclear smugglers acquire nuclear material and technology piece by piece through clandestine networks. They are potentially very dangerous people who are aggressive in looking for innovative ways to illegally transfer nuclear material and dual-use items.

published by
NPR's All Things Considered
 on April 11, 2010

Source: NPR's All Things Considered

World leaders at the Nuclear Security Summit this week hope to make progress toward preventing nuclear terrorism. But how do the myriad parts that go into making a nuclear weapon get into the hands of terrorists and rogue governments in the first place? Host Linda Wertheimer talks to Mark Hibbs, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who has actually searched out nuclear traffickers and asked just that.

"Many of the [nuclear smugglers] I have met have very deep backgrounds in engineering, physics, and chemistry," says Hibbs. "They also tend to be logistical experts … these people are very aggressive in looking for innovative ways of solving the problem of moving illegal [nuclear] material."

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