Revista del Instituto Español de Estudios Estratégicos n.º 12 - Año: 2018 - Págs.: 273 a 298 277 Enrique Arias Gil The future of nuclear terrorism in individual terrorist... – 2008, United States: After reports of several shots being fired in a house in Belfast, Maine (USA), police found neo-Nazi James G. Cummings, 29, dead, allegedly shot to death by his wife. Radioactive material and instructions on how to build a dirty bomb were found in his home, in addition to abundant white supremacist propagan-da. According to the FBI report, Cummings already had the ingredients needed to make a dirty bomb (albeit a low-level radiation one): hydrogen peroxide, uranium, thorium, lithium, termite reaction, boron, black iron oxide and magnesium tape. – 2009, France: Dr Adlène Hicheur, 32, with dual Algerian and French citizenship and specialised in particle physics and antimatter, was arrested on 8 October 2009 for allegedly attempting to acquire radioactive material, taking advantage of his work with the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN)8, and for virtual correspondence with Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) terro-rist organisation. On 4 May 2012, Hicheur was sentenced to five years in prison for plotting terrorist attacks on behalf of Al Qaeda’s North African branch. – 2015, United States: Self-proclaimed white supremacist and U.S. navy veteran Glendon Scott Crawford was arrested for attempting to produce a radiological dispersal device (RDD) with the assistance of another individual. The aim was to kill members of the Muslim community and the then U.S. President, Barack Obama. Crawford was sentenced to 30 years in prison on 19 December 2016 in Albany, State of New York. Although there have only been five cases of nuclear terrorism by individual ac-tors (four North Americans and three far-right lone wolves), we should ask ourselves whether nuclear terrorism by individual terrorists and lone wolves is likely to increase in the coming years; a question we shall attempt to answer later in this paper. The first problem we encounter when attempting to define nuclear terrorism is that, despite numerous attempts by terrorist organisations and individual actors to engage in it, an attack has never actually been carried out. As Vicente Garrido Rebo-lledo has pointed out, ‘in reality, no one fully understands the relationship between terrorism and weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and particularly what is known as nuclear terrorism’9. Although such weapons (like ‘dirty bombs’) are not (normally) regarded as a WMD (based on the number of deaths), they are considered a weapon of mass panic (WMP ‘because of the level of panic they can cause’)10 11. According to Xavier Bohigas, the term ‘nuclear terrorism’ ‘is the intentional use or threat to use 8 TOBOSO BUEZO, Mario. Lobos de Occidente: El Terrorismo Individual como Elemento Emergente y Evolución Táctica de Al-Qaʿida. Madrid: Instituto Universitario General Gutiérrez Mellado, 2014, p. 196. 9 GARRIDO, Vicente. Terrorismo nuclear: ¿desafío a la seguridad?, Política Exterior, no. 148 (julio/ agosto), Madrid, 2012, p.3. 10 Ibid. 11 FERGUSON, Charles D. and POTTER, William C. The Four Faces of Nuclear Terrorism. California, USA: Center for Nonproliferation Studies, 2004, p. 193.
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