Center for Strategic Communication

ASP’s event hosted on Tuesday, “Nuclear Terrorism: What’s at Stake,” was featured by the publication Security Management. Journalist Holly Gilbert summarized the panel dialogue, emphasizing the heavy vulnerability of U.S. ports that participants discussed:

The threat of harmful nuclear material entering the United States through the nation’s ports is a very real one, but international cooperation and technological solutions can help better secure our waterways against that threat. That was the subject of a panel discussion titled “Nuclear Terrorism: What’s at Stake?” hosted by the American Security Project in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday.

Dr. Stephen Flynn, a professor at Northeastern University and former president of the Center for National Policy, said that smuggling through shipping containers is already happening on a daily basis, which demonstrates the possibility of a nuclear device, planted by terrorists, to go undetected. “You name the contraband, and it is [already] flowing through the system, whether it’s knockoff products on the low end, to the movement of large sums of cash, to narcotics, to every form of weapons short of nuclear weapons, in terms of what we’ve found there,” he said. “The bottom line is the system remains highly vulnerable for folks to move things because it’s essentially an honor system, and it’s an honor system of enormous size.”

A full copy of the Security Management article by Holly Gilbert can be found here.

A full summary of the event can be found here on the American Security Project website.