ISIS Seizes Nuclear Material—but That’s Not the Reason to Worry

ISIS Seizes Nuclear Material—but That’s Not the Reason to Worry

07/11/14

Matthew Bunn

ISIS, Counterinsurgency, Terrorism, Nuclear Weapons, Iraq

"Like the Taliban’s Afghanistan before 9/11, the Islamic State may become a safe haven for people from other groups and countries to train and plot complex attacks."

The Iraqi government has told the United Nations that when the group now calling itself the Islamic State (formerly the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, sometimes referred to as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or ISIL) seized the city of Mosul, it also acquired some 40 kilograms of uranium compounds from the university there.  Iraq’s ambassador to the United Nations, Mohammad Ali al-Hakim, warned that “terrorist groups have seized control of nuclear material at the sites that came out of the control of the state.”  (See the excellent account from Frederik Dahl of Reuters here.)

This has provoked a bit of a hullabaloo on the internet (see, for example, here and here) – but I would argue it’s time for everyone to calm down.  All of the highly enriched uranium (HEU) that once existed in Iraq – the material that could really be used for a nuclear bomb, which Iraq had as fuel for research reactors provided by Russia and France – was removed after the 1991 war.  (Saddam Hussein launched a “crash program” to make a bomb out of that HEU after the invasion of Kuwait, but didn’t succeed before the war intervened.)  Iraq’s most dangerous radiological sources that could be used in a so-called “dirty bomb” were largely removed in a cooperative effort after the 2003 war.   Former IAEA safeguards chief Olli Heinonen has confirmed that there should be no enriched uranium in Mosul. IAEA spokeswoman Gill Tudor told Dahl that “on the basis of initial information we believe the material involved is low grade and would not present a significant safety, security, or nuclear proliferation risk.”

Read full articlehttp://nationalinterest.org/feature/isis-seizes-nuclear-material%E2%80%94-that%E2%80%99s-not-the-reason-worry-10849