Is the United States safe from nuclear attack?

     The answer is unfortunately a resounding no. Nuclear energy has given us the prospect of clean limitless energy that up until this point has proven unrealized. Apart from our nuclear installations being an amazingly tempting target the installations themselves are providing the fuel for a potential homemade nuclear bomb. The prospect of a sovereign nation attacking us is remote and will be for the immediate future due to the nature of our defense strategy know as M.A.D. or mutually assured destruction. This doctrine assures that the United States is safe from hostile countries that would do us harm with the prospect that any aggressor country would meet a full and overwhelming nuclear response to their aggression. This doctrine is flawed however in that it relies on the aggressor to be a sovereign country. If say an organization or a lone wolf were to attack us this strategy would mean the annihilation of millions of innocent people. Say we went after al-Qaeda in Afghanistan with nuclear weapons the world outcry would be enormous. No longer is the nuclear weapon race the sole domaine of sovereign nations. Now organizations around the world with the drive and funding can appropriate nuclear weapons. The ease of this proliferation is partly due to the popularity of nuclear power plants themselves. One of the byproducts of nuclear fission is Plutonium-239, this is due to the fact that not all Uranium-238 is used during the fission process and some Uranium-238 absorbs a neutron at low kinetic energy levels so that it doesn’t split but captures the neutron and after radiating some particles it becomes Plutonium-239. Now Plutonium, is a much better atomic weapon fuel! In fact Plutonium was used to create the smallest nuclear bomb ever tested in the United States known as the W54, it’s about the size of a large shoebox and very easy to hide.

Many Uranium powered power plants in the world reprocess their spent fuel (the United States does not) and this reprocessing by chemical means removes the “unburnt” Uranium and concentrates the Plutonium into a radioactive caked that won’t be used in the reactors.
 The resulting “by-product” is the ideal fuel for a nuclear bomb! If the United States or friendly countries were the only ones with this special process it wouldn't be that bad but countries like North Korea, Iran, Syria, and Pakistan know the physics behind the bomb as well and are more than happy to export their knowledge to the highest bidder creating a huge potential for people that mean to harm us to acquire this material and strike the United States!