Osama bin Laden

Osama Bin Laden was known for using unconventional methods of attacks against his targets - but did he ever get his hands on the ultimate weapon?

After the 9/11 attacks, people around the world were waiting for the next shoe to drop, and many people feared that shoe could take the form of a mushroom cloud.

But how would Al Qaeda get their hands on a nuclear bomb?

Was it possible - and did he actually have one in storage, waiting for the right moment?

One thing was for sure - Al Qaeda was never going to have the resources to build a nuclear bomb.

Only nine countries have ever done this successfully, and most of them are powerful and wealthy nations. Those who aren’t had support from allies in their programs. Al Qaeda never had any powerful patrons, and was usually viewed as an unwelcome guest even by the governments that hosted them - with Pakistan, Sudan, and Afghanistan rarely giving Bin Laden any formal support.

Would any of the nuclear nations risk helping Osama Bin Laden get his hands on one?

Most of the candidates are obviously flat out. The United States, France, Great Britain, India, and Israel were all enemies of Al Qaeda. For all of Russia’s tension with the United States, they were not likely to help either - after all, they have problems with Muslim extremists in their Chechnya region and were frequently targeted by terror attacks. In a similar vein, China might be a geopolitical enemy of the United States, but their goal is a stable world where they’re the dominant power - and that’s certainly not helped by nuclear-armed terrorists.

Which leaves two wild cards.

North Korea, the world’s newest nuclear power, often comes off as the most unstable. Its leader, Kim Jong-Un, frequently boasts of using his nuclear missiles against the west, and might be willing to help enemies of the US gain their own weapons.

But would he be willing to cooperate with Al Qaeda? Unlikely, because Al Qaeda is seen as too much of a wild card even for the Kim dynasty, and once the weapon leaves North Korea, it’s impossible to know how it would wind up being used. And if an Al Qaeda bomb is used against the west and is traced back to North Korea, it could end with US bombers over North Korea.

And that just leaves Pakistan.

The second-newest nuclear power, Pakistan had by far the closest link to Al Qaeda - with Osama Bin Laden eventually being hunted down in his Abbottabad compound in 2011.

Questions remain about how much the Pakistani government knew about Al Qaeda’s activity in the country - which is probably why the US didn’t loop them in when plotting the mission to take out the terror leader.

But despite this, the government tries to maintain friendly relations with the US, hoping they’ll rein in India in the Kashmir region. So it’s highly unlikely that the Pakistani government would provide Al Qaeda with weapons that could be used against the US.

But that doesn’t mean no one would.

Like any government, the Pakistani government is full of differences of opinions.

They might not get into the brawls on the floor of Parliament that the South Koreans do, but you definitely have a struggle between militants and moderates. Additionally, the many scientists who worked on the nuclear program have their own agendas, and it’s possible that one of them might be sympathetic enough to the terror group to help Osama Bin Laden craft his own bomb.

But this might be unlikely for a number of reasons.

For one thing, you can’t just “give” someone a nuclear bomb, at least not easily.

The lightest nuclear bomb in the US arsenal weighs around seven hundred pounds, so it’s not something you can just pass along. And once you have it, delivering it is another matter. The bombs aren’t easy to set off, and they’re not going to be much use without a delivery mechanism - and Pakistan doesn’t have any delivery mechanism that could hit the United States easily. So even if a rogue scientist did pass along a bomb to Al Qaeda, the country that would be most at risk from it going off would likely be Pakistan itself! But that’s not the only potential source for a nuclear bomb.

During the Cold War, the United States and Russia went a little…crazy. Today, both countries have more than ten times the number of nuclear weapons of any other country! The United States has most of its bombs either in missile silos on the homeland, on ships deployed abroad, or deployed in NATO nations as a deterrent. The Soviets did the same thing, but there’s one difference - the borders of Russia have changed a lot since the days of the Soviet Union, and the Soviets deployed their massive stockpile of weapons around their territory. That included in places like Belarus, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan - all of which are independent countries now. In the aftermath of the collapse of the USSR, all those countries voted to give up their nuclear weapons and have them transfered back to Russia in exchange for guarantees of safety.

But did that really work out?

Well, it certainly didn’t for Ukraine in terms of the “guarantees”. But we’re also not sure it worked entirely for the nuclear weapons. There were a lot of bombs out there - in the thousands - and the governments may not have been able to round them all up.