Nuclear Terror: Do We Still Have to Worry?

Peter Zimmerman
King’s College
London

It has been an accepted assumption that a nuclear terrorist attack is possible, and that it will be catastrophic. Now, nuclear skeptics such as American social scientist John Mueller and some Swiss physicists have asserted that there is only one chance in a million that a terrorist group would succeed if it attempted to make a bomb, and that the effects of a low yield ground burst in a modern urban setting would not be catastrophic. So, do we still have to worry about nuclear terrorism, and do we have to invest money in protecting our countries against the threat? I will give some answers, at least some of them unexpected.

Peter was born in Portsmouth, Virginia in 1941. He graduated from Stanford University in 1963 with a Bachelor of Science degree. He earned a Filosofie Licentiat degree at Lund University in 1967 and a Ph.D. at Stanford University in 1969. All degrees are in experimental nuclear and elementary particle physics.Peter was Chief Scientist of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency until the agency was folded into U.S. Department of State. He then became Science Adviser for Arms Control in the U.S. Department of State. After the election of George W. Bush as president , Zimmerman left the State Department and then served as the Chief Scientist of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee from August 2001 until January 2003 and as Democratic Chief Scientist until March 2004. In 2004, Zimmerman became Professor of Science and Security in the Department of War Studies at King's College London. Peter D. Zimmerman is an American nuclear physicist, arms control expert, and former Chief Scientist of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He is currently Emeritus Professor of Science and Security at King's College London. He retired from the college in August 2008 and was named Professor Emeritus on 1 September of the same year.