No nuke terror
Mueller 21 – John, Adjunct Professor of Political Science and Senior Research Scientist at the Mershon Center for International Security Studies at Ohio State University, Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, and member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. “The Stupidity of War: American Foreign Policy and the Case for Complacency, Chapter 4: Al-Qaeda and the 9/11 Wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan”, Cambridge University Press, 03-04-2021
The exaggeration of terrorist capacities has been greatest in the many much overstated assessments of their ability to develop nuclear weapons or devices. It has been widely predicted for two decades now that, because al-Qaeda operatives used box cutters so effectively on 9/11, they would, although under siege, soon apply equal talents in science and engineering to fabricate nuclear weapons and then detonate them on American cities. A popular estimate was that such a disaster might well happen by 2014.29 Given the decidedly limited capabilities of terrorists, this concern seems to have been substantially overwrought: thus far, terrorist groups seem to have exhibited only limited desire and even less progress in going atomic. That lack of action may be because, after a brief exploration of the possible routes, they – unlike generations of alarmists – have discovered that the tremendous effort required is scarcely likely to be successful.30