U.S. Uses Nuclear Experts to Battle Terror Threat

The United States has deployed roughly 2,000 nuclear scientists and bomb experts as a final line of defense against nuclear terrorism, the Los Angeles Times reported yesterday (see GSN, Sept. 27, 2007).

Since the program’s inception in 2001, the federal government has more than doubled funds for the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Emergency Response Office, which aims to detect, approach and defuse a nuclear weapon or radiological “dirty bomb” before it detonates in a U.S. city.

Twenty-six response teams are spread around the country.  They have access to aircraft outfitted with radiation sensors to signal the presence of a nuclear or radiological weapon.  At major sports events, they inconspicuously slog through crowds with backpacks of equipment to detect highly enriched uranium and plutonium.

"After everything else fails, we come in,” said Deborah Wilber, the director of the Emergency Response Office.  “I don't believe it is a question of if it will happen.  It is a question of when.”

If a unit were to discover a weapon, an FBI team would rush to the location from rural Virginia and a team of bomb experts would fly in from an airbase in Albuquerque, where a fueled jet remains on 24-hour alert.

The bomb squads would attempt to disable the weapon’s trigger mechanism and then transfer the weapon to the G Tunnel, a 5,000-foot-deep shaft in the Nevada desert.  Once the weapon was secured behind steel blast doors at the bottom of the shaft, FBI agents and scientists would attempt to disassemble it while compiling forensic information.

Between 500 and 1,000 FBI agents and roughly 1,000 nuclear weapons scientists participate in the effort on a part-time basis.

None of the emergency response teams has uncovered a terrorist suspect yet, but one group looked into the background of a homeless person in possession of a radioactive substance they encountered in downtown Las Vegas.  In another incident, a police officer’s radiation sensor was set off by a hot dog vendor in New York City who had recently undergone a medical examination.

The government is also developing a nuclear forensics system that could be used to identify the nation of origin for nuclear material used in an attack or an attempted bombing.  Even if a bomb detonated, such a system could use samples of fallout to allow the United States to identify and potentially retaliate against the weapon’s supplier (see GSN, Oct. 11, 2007).

The nuclear forensics program aims to act as a deterrent by encouraging other countries to keep close guard over their nuclear assets, the Times reported.  A major report on nuclear forensics is due in February.  The study is attempting to determine whether the United States could reliably link a nuclear device to a particular source and convince the world of its accuracy. 

Jay Davis, a retired weapons scientist involved with the forensics report, said nuclear forensics experts hope they could determine a detonation’s size in one hour, the sophistication of the weapon’s design in six hours, how its fuel was enriched in three days and its supplying nation — “Does this look like a Russian, a Chinese or a Pakistani device, or something we have never seen before?” — in one week.

Although the emergency response teams form a final line of defense against such an attack, no one should rely on them to intercept a nuclear device, said Charles Curtis, president of the Nuclear Threat Initiative.

Preventing the detonation of such a weapon “is a very, very, very difficult problem, but not impossible,” he said.

However, Vahid Majidi, who heads the FBI Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate, expressed more optimism.  He said his office’s chance of locating a nuclear weapon in Manhattan would be “quite reasonable” with a 24-hour warning.

“When you think of issues only as a technical problem, you only think of technical capability.  I am not sitting on my hands waiting for some detector to go off.  We will use every asset at our disposal.  Technology is a very small portion of what we do,” he said (Ralph Vartabedian, Los Angeles Times, Jan. 6).

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