This paper reviews the growing potential for cyber-attack on the UK’s operational fleet of Vanguard-class submarines armed with nuclear-tipped Trident II D-5 ballistic missiles, and some of the implications for strategic stability.
Nuclear terrorism
The dangers of vulnerable nuclear forces
For a while during the Cold War, the nuclear standoff was almost comfortable. When the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev was briefed on the destructive power of the hydrogen bomb, he told his son Sergei, he was so upset that he could not sleep for several nights. But then, he said, he realised that these weapons could never be used and he could sleep again.
Non-state actors & WMD: Does ISIS have a pathway to a nuclear weapon?
On March 2014, during the Nuclear Security Summit held in the Netherlands, President Obama identified his number one concern as being the prospect of a nuclear weapon going off in Manhattan. UK Home Secretary Theresa May pinpointed her particular fear of the so-called Islamic State (ISIS) acquisition of “chemical, biological or even nuclear weapons” in the “world’s first truly terrorist state”. Fortunately, there has not yet been a nuclear or radiological terrorist attack, but the smuggling of nuclear material remains a pivotal threat to nuclear security.
The 2016 Nuclear Security Summit Returns to Washington
In his 2009 speech in Prague, President Obama described the threat of terrorists acquiring nuclear weapons as the “most immediate and extreme threat to global security”. Setting the bar high, he also announced the start of a global summit process that would focus on the security of nuclear materials from the threat of theft and terrorism in and work “to secure all vulnerable nuclear material around the world within four years”.