Nuclear Materials Quotes

I am afraid of radium and polonium ... I don't want to monkey with them.

Nuclear materials are not as safe as nuclear weapons …. The nuclear materials which are received after dismantling nuclear weapons are not as secure.

The gravest threat faced by the world is of an extremist group getting hold of nuclear weapons or materials.

... the president [Barak Obama] has failed to finish the job of securing radiological material in hospitals and industrial facilities, or to crack down on the threats from bioweapons and toxic chemicals. Second, with his revised EPA guidelines on dirty-bomb damage, Obama has taken a tentative but insufficient step toward leveling with the public in a way that deprives terrorists of their ability to spread hysteria. That mirrors what he has tried to do more generally: tentatively steer Americans toward the realistic view that while terrorism is inevitable, it is not an existential or apocalyptic threat—–unless we treat it like the apocalypse.

After the Cold War ended, there was an agreement between the former Soviet Union and America to convert weapons-grade nuclear materials into reactor-grade materials. So disarmament and nuclear energy actually are strongly linked.

I developed a counterterrorism device that's revolutionizing the way we detect nuclear materials.

A likely source for terrorists seeking to buy or steal nuclear materials is the former Soviet Union.

Almost all of the governments have agreed that they will not acquire nuclear weapons and that they will allow the International Atomic Energy Agency to monitor their commercial and research nuclear power operations to ensure that nuclear materials - highly enriched uranium and plutonium - are not diverted to use in weapons.

The emergent terrorist threats and the spread of nuclear technology and materials have made it much more likely that terrorists will get their hands on a nuclear weapon and that just changes the whole calculus. I love the quote by Rev. Richard Cizik: "If you've never changed your mind about anything, then pinch yourself, you might be dead." The world has changed and we need to start talking about this.

Polonium is, frankly, pretty useless, and no country in the world except Russia bothered to refine it by the late 2000s.

Searches of al Qaeda sites in Afghanistan, undertaken since American-backed forces took control there, are not known to have turned up a significant cache of nuclear materials.