At least 40 developing countries from the Persian Gulf region to Latin America have recently approached U.N. officials here to signal interest in starting nuclear power programs, a trend that concerned proliferation experts say could provide the building blocks of nuclear arsenals in some of those nations.
The Bush administration has approved a plan to expand domestic access to some of the most powerful tools of 21st-century spycraft, giving law enforcement officials and others the ability to view data obtained from satellite and aircraft sensors that can see through cloud cover and even penetrate buildings and underground bunkers.
In the past five years, new technology has made it easier to genetically modify microbes and even create new ones from scratch. Some worry that the developments could lead to novel and more dangerous kinds of bioterror threats.
The U.S. government is building a highly classified facility to research biological weapons, but its closed-door approach has raised concerns.
Pakistan has begun building what independent analysts say is a powerful new reactor for producing plutonium, a move that, if verified, would signal a major expansion of the country's nuclear weapons capabilities and a potential new escalation in the region's arms race.
A new report from the Center for Nonproliferation Studies finds a growing threat from Soviet-era biological weapons facilities. "They often have culture collections of pathogens that lack biosecurity, and they employ people who are well-versed in investigating and handling deadly pathogens," said Raymond A. Zilinskas, a bioweapons expert and coauthor of the draft report on the antiplague system. "Some are located at sites accessible to terrorist groups and criminal groups. The potential is that terrorists and criminals would have little problem acquiring the resources that reside in these facilities."
Many experts believe the odds for a chemical attack are relatively high, compared with biological or nuclear terrorism because of the widespread availability of raw materials including millions of military-grade chemical weapons scattered in at least a dozen countries.
Iran has begun production of weaponized anthrax and is actively working with at least five other pathogens, including smallpox, in a drive to build an arsenal of biological weapons, according to an opposition group that previously exposed a secret nuclear enrichment program in the country.
Tens of thousands of radioactive devices currently used in medicine and industry are powerful enough to inflict major damage if used by terrorists in a "dirty bomb," yet governments worldwide have failed to take steps needed to prevent them from falling into the wrong hands, according to a study from the Center for Nonproliferation Studies at Monterey Institute of International Studies.
Spurred by fears of a "dirty bomb" attack that could spread radioactive poisons across major cities, U.S. and international nuclear experts have begun quietly searching former Soviet republics to recover the remains of Russian radiation experiments before someone else does.