Stardate 20011110.0630 (On Screen): bin Laden claims, in an interview, that he has access to both nuclear and chemical weapons but that he'll only use them if we use such weapons against him. He says they only have them as a deterrent. I don't give much credence to this report, simply because such restraint is completely out of character. It's entirely possible they do have access to some form of chemical weapons; the more primitive ones (i.e. chlorine) are extremely easy to make. More advanced ones like nerve gas are much more of a challenge but not really difficult if you only want to make them in small quantities. Dirty nuclear weapons, which is to say conventional bombs packed with radioactives to produce fallout, are not hard to make if you have access to a quantity of radioactives. But that's also not a very important weapon; it's more of a nuisance than anything.
Coming up with an adequate amount of fissionable material to actually produce a fission weapon is a different matter, and if they had such a thing I believe they would have used it already. I think this is a bluff. (discuss)
