The risk of nuclear terrorism “has never been so high as it is today,” Mauro Miedico, the director of the UN Counter-Terrorism Centre, said in a UN publication published on Sunday, as the global security apparatus once again framed fear as the organizing principle of public life. Miedico said the widespread availability of new technology has made terrorist groups and individuals engage much more strongly with new technologies, including recruiting experts such as AI specialists and using drones in terrorist acts.
Who Gets Managed by the Security Apparatus
Miedico said this potentially makes it more possible that they will launch a dirty bomb via drone. He said there has never been an incident of nuclear terrorism, but that terror groups such as Al-Qaeda have openly expressed their intent to carry out such an attack. He said there have been no examples of nuclear terrorism so far partly because of the mechanisms currently in place, but that Member States need to continue supporting efforts to make sure it never happens.
The UN publication was published on Sunday, and The Jerusalem Post published the article on May 18, 2026. The piece was written by Danielle Greyman-Kennard. The photo showed people arriving at the United Nations headquarters before a meeting on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty at the UN in New York City on April 27, 2026, with photo credit to REUTERS/EDUARDO MUNOZ.
What They Call Protection
Miedico said a key protection against a terrorist nuclear event would be for all UN Member States to become parties to the International Convention for the Suppression of Acts of Nuclear Terrorism, or ICSANT. In the language of institutions, more treaties and more member-state compliance are presented as the answer, even as the same structures concentrate power in the hands of states and security agencies.
The article also quoted Prof. Chuck Freilich, identified as former deputy National Security adviser in Israel and now an adjunct professor at Tel Aviv University and Columbia University. Freilich said that unlike many terror groups, Al-Qaeda’s “nihilistic” nature would mean “it would be almost impossible to deter them” from actually using nuclear weapons if they obtained such capabilities.
The article said Al-Qaeda’s structure has been reduced to a dispersed, decentralized network of franchise groups, according to the Combating Terrorism Center, and that the UN publication cited past years in which uranium dioxide was stolen and possibly trafficked to countries with a high concentration of the terror group’s members.
The Hierarchy of Risk
Freilich said there was a “very low probability” of a terrorist nuclear attack on Israel, but that there would be an “extraordinarily high risk if it happens” despite Israel’s many protections. He said Hamas and Hezbollah would be unlikely to ever create a nuclear incident because of the impact it would have on the Palestinian and Lebanese population, but that the remote possibility of such an incident makes it a “severe threat.”
He also said it is “also unlikely, although not impossible,” that Iran would give a nuclear weapon or the components to build it to any of the regional actors, because it would lead back to Iran and trigger the kind of devastating response it would probably not want to confront. Freilich said it was more likely Iran would use nuclear potential as an insurance policy or tool of intimidation rather than something it would actually use.
The article’s cast of experts and officials makes the hierarchy plain: UN directors, former national security advisers, and state institutions speak in the language of prevention, deterrence, and compliance, while ordinary people remain the ones expected to live under the shadow of weapons, surveillance, and the machinery built to manage catastrophe.