Development of Analytical Instruments for Prediction of Nuclear Terrorist Activities: Some Features of the Approach

There is now intense national and international attention to the risks of nuclear terrorism. The possibilities that terrorist groups might acquire the materials and the knowledge for building nuclear or radiological weapons are of particular concern. According to the report of International Panel on Fissile Materials (IPFM) only highly enriched uranium (HEU) global stockpiles make up about 1500 tons. In addition, there is a large amount of radioactive material and radiation sources which can be used by terrorists. Accurate control and accounting of all these materials is a difficult task and therefore is not always effective enough. Actuating improvised nuclear device or radioactive dispersal device can be the heaviest form of consequences for society. However, designing and manufacturing of nuclear explosive devices is laborious and large-scale task, which is not easy to hide. Therefore it is necessary to create analytical tools and indicators which could help in timely manner disclose the work under way by terrorists. The information received by means of such tools can be used by law enforcements for prevention of illegal actions. This paper presents an attempt to create an analytical tool, so-called \"prerequisite tree\", the approach to the construction of which is similar with nuclear safety assessment approaches (particularly \"event trees\"). Such \"prerequisite trees\", has been considered for two cases. In the first case, the tree consists of \"branches\" and units, which include all the actions that must be performed by terrorists to build an IND. In designing the structure of the \"tree\" special attention was given to indicators which allow make a conclusion that a group of persons engaged in concealed development of nuclear or radiological bomb. It is obvious that for development of a nuclear or radiological device a large number of various resources are required. Therefore, the authors concluded that the creation of such devices is extremely difficult for small group of individuals, and even more unlikely for one person. Number of identified key stages in the development of such devices allows the development of tools and indicators that can be used to timely detection and prevention the acts of nuclear terrorism.