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How Right-Wing Extremists Pose A Nuclear Threat

How Right-Wing Extremists Pose A Nuclear Threat. Cincinnati Public Radio By ANN THOMPSON 12 july 21, According to the Harvard Kennedy School’s Matthew Bunn, “For whatever reason, for a certain brand of right-wing extremists in the United States and elsewhere, there’s a real obsession with nuclear.” He says we need to be especially concerned when they work or know somebody who works at a nuclear plant.

These insiders are especially dangerous, he says, because of all the nuclear threats we know about, almost all of them were perpetrated by insiders or with the help of insiders.

Bunn and Scott Sagan recently co-edited a book called Insider Threats. Some of the material covered involves nuclear threats

” ‘The Turner Diaries,’ which is one of the sort of foundational documents for extreme racists, right-wing movements in the United States, envisons them using nuclear weapons against U.S. cities to sort of bring down the government in order to rebuild a whites-only nation,” says Bunn.

One extremist who worked at a nuclear plant was Ashli Babbitt. She was among the crowd storming the Capitol Jan. 6. Police shot and killed her after she tried to get through a barrier. From 2015 to 2017, Babbitt was employed by Calvert Cliffs nuclear power plant in Maryland and as far as anybody knows, didn’t do anything wrong there.

But nuclear plants remain an interest to plenty of extremists. In 2015, a suspect linked to the Paris attacks was found with surveillance footage of a top official at a nuclear facility in Belgium. Authorities were worried the Islamic State may have been plotting to kidnap the official to obtain radioactive material for the terrorist attack, according to The New York Times.

And it doesn’t stop there. “The Japanese terror group called Alum Shinnikyo that launched nine gas attacks in the Tokyo subways in 1995 and Al Quaeda both pursued nuclear weapons fairly actively,” Bunn says. “Recently the Under Secretary General of the United Nations for Counterterrorism reported that the Islamic State has used bitcoin to buy and sell radioactive materials.”……….. https://www.wvxu.org/post/how-right-wing-extremists-pose-nuclear-threat#stream/0

July 13, 2021 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | 2 WORLD, safety