Matthew Bunn of Harvard Kennedy School said, “For whatever reason, for a certain brand of right-wing extremists in the United States and elsewhere, there’s a real obsession with nuclear.” He went on to say that this is especially concerning when they work at a nuclear plant or knows someone who does. Insiders are especially dangerous because of all the nuclear threats on record, most of them were perpetrated by insiders or with the help of insiders. Bunn and Scott Sagan recently co-edited a book titled Insider Threats. Nuclear threats constitute some of the material in the book.
      A book titled The Turner Diaries is one of the foundational documents for extreme racists and right-wing movements in the U.S. The book envisions them using nuclear weapons against U.S. cities to destroy the government so the perpetrators can rebuild a whites-only nation.
      One extremist who worked at a nuclear power plant was Ashli Babbitt. She was part of the crowd who stormed the U.S. Capital on January 6th. She was trying to climb through a broken window when she was shot and killed by a policeman. From 2015 to 2017, Babbitt worked at the Calvert Cliffs nuclear power plant in Maryland. As far as anyone knows, she did not do anything wrong while she worked there. 
      Nuclear power plants remain an interest to many extremists. In 2015, a suspect who was linked to the Paris terrorist attacks was found to possess surveillance footage of a top official at a nuclear facility in Belgium. Authorities were concerned that members of the Islamic State might have been planning to kidnap that official in order to obtain radioactive materials for a terrorist attack.
     Bunn said, “The Japanese terror group called Alum Shinnikyo that launched nine gas attacks in the Tokyo subways in 1995 and Al Qaeda both pursued nuclear weapons fairly actively. Recently the Under Secretary General of the United Nations for Counterterrorism reported that the Islamic State has used bitcoin to buy and sell radioactive materials.”
     Bunn says that India and Pakistan are particularly concerning because of the terrorists who live and operate in the two countries. We know little of what is happening in Russia with respect to nuclear terrorists since Russia invaded the Crimea and their cooperation on international nuclear security ended.
     Bunn commented, “We really have only very modest information available on what’s going on in Russia which is the world’s largest stockpile of nuclear weapons, the world’s largest stockpile of plutonium and highly enriched uranium in the world’s largest number of buildings and bunkers.”
     The U.S. has been assisting other countries to completely dispose of nuclear materials that they don’t need anymore. Bunn helped to create this program. He said that more than half of all the countries in the world that use to have nuclear materials that could have been used to make nuclear weapons have disposed of those nuclear materials. He says that there is much that still needs to be accomplished with regard to nuclear security. He encourages the U.S. to keep its attention on nuclear weapons.