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Bieniawski, the assistant deputy administrator for the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), had arrived in Santiago, Chile, to join a group of scientists and nuclear engineers on a top-secret mission to remove a potential nuclear bomb from the country. Around 40 lb. (18 kg) of highly enriched uranium (HEU) — with enough latent energy to destroy a portion of a city — had already been inventoried, secured and made ready for transport to a highly secure facility in the U.S.
For the past 14 years, U.S. teams like the one in Chile have been engaged in a race against terrorists to gain control of the global supply of HEU — the compound from which a nuclear bomb can be most easily fabricated. President Barack Obama has said preventing terrorists from obtaining an atomic weapon is his Administration's top national-security priority, and last year he vowed that the U.S. would secure all vulnerable nuclear material within four years.
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Graham Allison of Harvard University, a former Assistant Secretary of Defense who recently served on the Congressional Commission on the Prevention of WMD Terrorism, believes "it is more likely than not" that a terrorist will detonate a nuclear bomb in a U.S. city by 2014.