Osama Bin Laden was known for using unconventional methods of attacks
against his targets - but did he ever get his hands on the ultimate weapon?
After the 9/11 attacks, people around the world were waiting for the next shoe to drop,
and many people feared that shoe could take the form of a mushroom
cloud. But how would Al Qaeda get their hands on a nuclear bomb? Was
it possible - and did he actually have one in storage, waiting for the right moment?
One thing was for sure - Al Qaeda was never going to have the resources to build a
nuclear bomb. Only nine countries have ever done this successfully,
and most of them are powerful and wealthy nations. Those who aren’t
had support from allies in their programs. Al Qaeda never had any powerful patrons,
and was usually viewed as an unwelcome guest even by the governments that hosted
them - with Pakistan, Sudan, and Afghanistan rarely giving Bin Laden any formal support.
Would any of the nuclear nations risk helping Osama Bin Laden get his hands on one?
Most of the candidates are obviously flat out. The United States, France, Great Britain, India,
and Israel were all enemies of Al Qaeda. For all of Russia’s tension with the United States,
they were not likely to help either - after all, they have problems with Muslim extremists
in their Chechnya region and were frequently targeted by terror attacks. In a similar vein,
China might be a geopolitical enemy of the United States, but their goal is a stable world
where they’re the dominant power - and that’s certainly not helped by nuclear-armed terrorists.
Which leaves two wild cards.
North Korea, the world’s newest nuclear power, often comes off as the most unstable. Its leader,
Kim Jong-Un, frequently boasts of using his nuclear missiles against the west,
and might be willing to help enemies of the US gain their own weapons. But
would he be willing to cooperate with Al Qaeda? Unlikely, because Al Qaeda is seen as too much
of a wild card even for the Kim dynasty, and once the weapon leaves North Korea,
it’s impossible to know how it would wind up being used. And if an Al Qaeda bomb is used against the
west and is traced back to North Korea, it could end with US bombers over North Korea.
And that just leaves Pakistan.
The second-newest nuclear power, Pakistan had by far the closest link to Al Qaeda - with
Osama Bin Laden eventually being hunted down in his Abbottabad compound in 2011.
Questions remain about how much the Pakistani government knew about Al Qaeda’s activity in the
country - which is probably why the US didn’t loop them in when plotting the mission to take out the
terror leader. But despite this, the government tries to maintain friendly relations with the US,
hoping they’ll rein in India in the Kashmir region. So it’s highly unlikely that the
Pakistani government would provide Al Qaeda with weapons that could be used against the US.
But that doesn’t mean no one would.
Like any government, the Pakistani government is full of differences of opinions. They might
not get into the brawls on the floor of Parliament that the South Koreans do,
but you definitely have a struggle between militants and moderates. Additionally, the
many scientists who worked on the nuclear program have their own agendas, and it’s possible that one
of them might be sympathetic enough to the terror group to help Osama Bin Laden craft his own bomb.
But this might be unlikely for a number of reasons.
For one thing, you can’t just “give” someone a nuclear bomb, at least not
easily. The lightest nuclear bomb in the US arsenal weighs around seven hundred pounds,
so it’s not something you can just pass along. And once you have it,
delivering it is another matter. The bombs aren’t easy to set off, and they’re not going to be much
use without a delivery mechanism - and Pakistan doesn’t have any delivery mechanism that could hit
the United States easily. So even if a rogue scientist did pass along a bomb to Al Qaeda,
the country that would be most at risk from it going off would likely be Pakistan itself!
But that’s not the only potential source for a nuclear bomb.
During the Cold War, the United States and Russia went a little…crazy. Today, both countries have
more than ten times the number of nuclear weapons of any other country! The United States has most
of its bombs either in missile silos on the homeland, on ships deployed abroad, or deployed
in NATO nations as a deterrent. The Soviets did the same thing, but there’s one difference - the
borders of Russia have changed a lot since the days of the Soviet Union, and the Soviets deployed
their massive stockpile of weapons around their territory. That included in places like Belarus,
Ukraine, and Kazakhstan - all of which are independent countries now. In the aftermath
of the collapse of the USSR, all those countries voted to give up their nuclear
weapons and have them transfered back to Russia in exchange for guarantees of safety.
But did that really work out?
Well, it certainly didn’t for Ukraine in terms of the “guarantees”. But we’re also not sure it
worked entirely for the nuclear weapons. There were a lot of bombs out there - in the thousands
- and the governments may not have been able to round them all up. There have been persistent
reports of nuclear bombs on the black market, even possibly being up for sale on the Dark
Web. Is there any truth to this? Would getting a nuclear bomb be as simple for Al Qaeda as making
a Bitcoin purchase? It’s not clear, but even if they did manage to get an old Soviet bomb,
they would face some major stumbling blocks. For one thing, they would still need to deliver
and detonate it. And second…no one is even sure how many of those old Soviet nukes still work.
So the good news is, Osama Bin Laden likely never had a path to
a city-destroying nuclear bomb. The bad news is, he had another option.
Currently in the news, Vladimir Putin is yelling that Ukraine is about to detonate
a dirty bomb and blame it on Russia. To which Ukraine responded “Dude,
you’re the guy threatening to nuke people every thirty seconds”.
But what exactly is a dirty bomb?
Unlike nuclear bombs, which are fission devices that create a massive explosion
that could devastate an entire city, dirty bombs are conventional explosives - but they
still pack a radioactive punch. That’s because they’re constructed with radioactive material,
usually surplus material from nuclear plants or nuclear programs. The initial detonation of
a bomb might look very similar to a standard car bomb or briefcase bomb - but the effects
would only become clear later, because radioactive material would be dispersed
through the air and begin poisoning people. In the best-case scenario, this could render a large
area of a city uninhabitable until lengthy decontamination efforts. With a heavy dose,
it could kill thousands from radiation poisoning and render a city a no-go zone for years.
And this isn’t simply a hypothetical.
Way back in 1995, Russia discovered first-hand that terrorists were trying
to go nuclear. Chechen separatists, demanding independence for their heavily Muslim region,
tried to force the hand of President Boris Yeltsin by detonating an explosive loaded
with caesium-137 in a public park in Moscow. But it was apparently too much
of an escalation even for the Chechens - one of the rebel leaders tipped off the media,
the bomb was found and defused, and it was only after the fact that people realized
just how dangerous this could have been. Three years later, they made a second attempt - and
once again warned people, meaning both attacks largely amounted to an elaborate scare tactic.
But a few years later, someone tried to bring this terror to the United States.
Everyone was still on edge in 2002 when authorities arrested a man named Jose
Padilla. He was an American convert to Islam, and an Al Qaeda member in custody had tipped
off American sources that he was trying to obtain a dirty bomb to detonate on US
soil. He was quickly arrested, and it became clear that he was fairly far in the process,
with one key step - he had to get the actual radioactive material! While that’s kind of…a
big step, he was actively scouting for it and seeking the best places to detonate it. Padilla
was ultimately sentenced to over two decades in prison, which his defenders say was extreme for
a man who may have just had some crazy ideas and no way to carry them out. But it was another clear
piece of evidence that the threat of a dirty bomb was absolutely on the mind of Al Qaeda members.
And this pattern continued over the next few years.
In 2006, a radical named Dhiren Barot plotted to target American and British financial buildings
with a dirty bomb, but he planned to use low-yield devices that would be unlikely
to cause deaths. His main goal seemed to be to contaminate the buildings long-term, but he was
never able to get ahold of radioactive material - a common pattern, because with each failed attack,
the odds are that countries with nuclear material are keeping them locked up tighter and tighter.
So is it likely that Bin Laden ever got his hands on some?
With the access he had to former Soviet republics and potential rogue agents within the Pakistani
nuclear program, it’s impossible to rule out. What we do know is that he never used them,
and none of the terrorists who attempted to use dirty bombs ever succeeded in getting
their hands on radioactive material. Knowing Osama Bin Laden’s ambition,
it’s likely that if he had the chance, he absolutely would have used it.
But there’s one more x-factor - which is that Osama Bin Laden
never successfully hit the US homeland again.
In the aftermath of the attacks, security was ramped up massively around the United States,
particularly at the borders, on airplanes, and in shipping lanes. So it would have been
incredibly difficult for a terror group to smuggle a large nuclear or radioactive
device into position to use against the United States. It’s possible that
the closing of these openings led to Osama scaling back his plans back and
concentrating on consolidating his power in Muslim nations - and keeping himself
alive and ahead of Seal Team 6, which he was able to successfully do for almost ten years.
But that doesn’t mean terrorists have stopped trying.
Osama Bin Laden is dead and buried - in the deep ocean - but he’s found equally ruthless
successors. The army of Daesh, also known as Isis, has become notorious for its brutal terror attacks
in Muslim nations and Europe, and in 2014, a group of militants attacked Mosul University in Iraq.
Their target? 88 pounds of uranium compounds. There was only one problem - it was unenriched,
so it couldn’t be used for a nuclear bomb. But it was a potential contaminant for a dirty bomb,
although uranium isn’t the most radioactive isotope that could be used.
So ultimately, Osama Bin Laden was never able to take that last leap into being a nuclear threat.
Beyond the extreme difficulty of getting ahold of a nuclear or radioactive weapon,
the main appeal of these weapons is the psychological impact and economic
disruption of contaminating an area of a city. But it’s also likely to be viewed as a massive
escalation by the country targeted, and lead to immediate and massive military retaliation.
So while Osama Bin Laden likely would have loved to get his hands on a nuclear weapon,
it might not have helped him in the long run - and might have led to him meeting his end even sooner.
Want to know more about the most infamous missing nuke of all time?
Check out “Nuclear Warhead for Sale on the Dark Web” or watch this video instead.