By James Kitfield
National Journal
LOS ALAMOS, N.M. -- The recent disclosure that documents about nuclear bombs and radiological “dirty bombs” had been found at captured al-Qaeda terrorist network facilities in Kabul, Afghanistan, immediately triggered alarms among the nuclear scientists who work atop the high desert mesas in this remote region of New Mexico. For more than 50 years, nuclear experts at Los Alamos and at nearby Sandia National Laboratories have studied terrorist and criminal groups for any signs that they were on the verge of cracking the nuclear code first broken here. Everything they knew about al-Qaeda told them that these terrorists might be drawing too close to a terrible discovery.
Indeed, ever since members of the Manhattan Project tested the first atomic bomb in New Mexico in 1945, scientists at Los Alamos have been the pre-eminent keepers of the nuclear flame. When the former Soviet Union created the secret nuclear city “Arzamas-16” as the birthplace of its own atomic bomb, it hewed closely to the Los Alamos blueprint. So much so, in fact, that Russian residents later jokingly referred to their town as “Los Arzamas.”
Almost from the inception of the nuclear age, no one understood better the apocalyptic threat of these weapons than the nuclear scientists who made them. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the Manhattan Project and the father of the atomic bomb, eventually fell out of favor with the U.S. military at least partly over his strident support for arms control and his opposition to development of the much more powerful hydrogen bomb. The scientists at Los Alamos developed and help train and man the Energy Department's secretive Nuclear Emergency Search Teams that for 30 years have stood poised to respond to the threat of nuclear terror or the smuggling of a nuclear weapon onto U.S. soil.
Most important, the scientists at the Los Alamos, Sandia, and Lawrence Livermore national laboratories helped devise a U.S. nuclear doctrine designed to strictly limit the spread of nuclear weapons and technology, and to render their use unthinkable through the dynamic tension of "mutually assured destruction." And for the past decade, they have watched with growing concern as unpredictable world events have repeatedly tested the tolerances of that careful calculation and narrowed its margins for error.
Weakened Security
The breakup of the former Soviet Union, followed by the fundamental restructuring of a Russian society that accounted for the world's largest stockpile of both nuclear weapons and the fissile material necessary to make them, created a gaping hole of vulnerability in terms of nuclear proliferation. U.S. experts concede that that hole remains open to this day.
"We've been worried about Russia for 10 years, because initially the Russians insisted they didn't need any help securing their weapons and nuclear material, which was a ludicrous assertion," Siegfried Hecker, a senior fellow and former longtime director of Los Alamos National Laboratory, told National Journal. "The Russians simply failed to take into account how dramatically their country had changed with the breakup of the Soviet Union. With the evolution toward an open society, the old Soviet security system based on guns, guards, and gulags was simply not good enough anymore. So we've spent a lot of time educating the Russians about the gaps in their own security system, and I still don't think the Russian leadership fully appreciates just how real the continued vulnerabilities are in the Russian nuclear complex."
On top of Russian instability has come the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, particularly the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, which has -- or had, until recent weeks -- strong links with the government of Pakistan, an emerging nuclear power. Pakistan's detention of two of its nuclear scientists for suspected connections to Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network, and recent news reports suggesting previously undisclosed contacts between other Pakistani nuclear weapons experts and al-Qaeda, underscore the difficulty such societies have in safeguarding their nuclear secrets in times of extreme turmoil.
John Immele, a deputy director of Los Alamos, said: "The biggest security threat in terms of nuclear weapons or expertise falling into the wrong hands has always been the 'inside job,' because it short-circuits so many of the traditional barriers to nuclear proliferation. From that standpoint, the threat to the Pakistani government from Islamic fundamentalists, and the close ties between fundamentalists inside the government and Pakistan's nuclear weapons program, are obviously causes for concern. If a terrorist group were to get its hands on nuclear fissile material," he said, "the main impediment to making a bomb would be to find an expert to assemble it. As cases concerning Pakistani and some Russian nuclear scientists in the past have shown, there are an increasing number of nuclear experts out there, and some find themselves in desperate circumstances. That's one more way the bar to a terrorist group acquiring a nuclear device has dropped."
Perhaps the greatest disruption to the equilibrium of the nuclear "balance of terror" is the emergence of criminal and terrorist organizations with a level of power and technological sophistication once associated only with nation-states. Should Al-Qaeda or another one of these terrorist groups with global reach succeed in acquiring nuclear weapons, experts say, it would turn on its head a nuclear doctrine that is based on the deterrent value of mutually assured destruction. Doomsday cults or religious zealots bent on martyrdom may not care much about traditional theories of deterrence.
Roger Hagengruber, the senior vice president for national security at Sandia, has spent much of his career contemplating the threat of nuclear terror. "For 50 years, the United States has closely watched various terrorist organizations for telltale indications that they might become a nuclear threat," he told National Journal. Possible warning signs include evidence of state sponsorship, a display of rapidly increasing technological sophistication, or persistent attempts to acquire materials or expertise associated with nuclear weapons.
"The reason we've been so concerned about al-Qaeda for some time is because all the warning indicators are positive," Hagengruber said, citing bin Laden's statements that acquiring nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction was a "religious duty" for Muslims, and intelligence reports of persistent attempts by al-Qaeda operatives to acquire nuclear fissile material. "You have a large, seemingly well-funded terrorist organization that has persisted over a long period of time. They have operated with either direct or indirect state support in a region of the world where the security infrastructure guarding nuclear materials is under significant stress. And they have an unprecedented degree of enmity toward the United States. I still think it's relatively unlikely that bin Laden actually acquired a crude nuclear weapon, or even significant amounts of weapons-grade fissile material, but that is not a set of circumstances that engenders either confidence or complacency. The consequences of being wrong or not paying the requisite attention are just too catastrophic."
Suitcase Bombs
Even a brief visit to the National Atomic Museum at the Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, N.M., reveals the degree to which the nuclear flame threatened to become a wildfire during the arms race of the 1950s and '60s. On display are full-scale models of both of the original nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, "Little Boy" and "Fat Man," and a mockup of a Titan II intercontinental ballistic missile with multiple thermonuclear warheads, arguably the most fearsome weapon ever devised. In between sit replicas of virtually every nuclear weapon designed at Los Alamos and fielded by the U.S. military: nuclear air-to-air missiles, atomic mines, atomic depth charges and torpedoes, nuclear artillery shells -- even the equivalent of an atomic bazooka to put atom-splitting destructiveness into the hands of the U.S. infantry.
Implied by this exhibit of nuclear inventiveness run amok, but not on display at the museum, are perhaps the least-talked-about of all nuclear weapons -- portable atomic demolition charges, or nuclear "suitcase bombs." Speculation has been heated, although unsubstantiated, that al-Qaeda may have acquired such weapons from the former Soviet arsenal.
Gen. Aleksandr Lebed, a former Russian national security adviser, sparked the speculation in 1997 when he told CBS's 60 Minutes that the Russian military had lost track of more than 100 suitcase-sized nuclear weapons, out of a total arsenal of some 250. The Russian atomic energy commission denied the report -- and even the existence of such weapons -- and Lebed later seemed to back away from his own assertions. However, other Russian experts have confirmed the reality of such bombs. For instance, the Los Angeles Times recently quoted Russian START II negotiator Nikolai Sokov as saying the suitcase bombs existed but speculating that they have been dismantled. Russian scientist Alexei Yablokov, a former member of the Russian National Security Council, told Congress that the suitcase nukes were actually controlled by the KGB, the former Soviet intelligence service, and were thus outside the inventory-accounting system of the Russian military.
Yossef Bodansky, the director of the U.S. Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, heightened concerns over the Russian suitcase bombs. Citing unnamed intelligence sources in his 2000 book, Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America, Bodansky claimed: "Although there is debate over the precise quantities of weapons purchased, there is no longer much doubt that bin Laden has finally succeeded in his quest for nuclear suitcase bombs. Bin Laden's emissaries paid the Chechens $30 million in cash, and gave them two tons of Afghan heroin worth about $70 million" for the bombs. Bodansky's book seemed to lend credence to bin Laden's assertion in a recent interview that al-Qaeda possessed nuclear weapons as a "deterrent."
Nuclear experts at Sandia and Los Alamos confirm that both the Soviet Union and the United States developed portable nuclear weapons. The U.S. weapon is the MK-54 Small Atomic Demolition Munition. Given the stringent security systems that nuclear states create to guard such weapons, however, the scientists consider the threat of loose mini-nukes as the least likely of all nuclear terror threats.
"Every state that has ever created a nuclear arsenal has come to a sobering realization of what it possesses, and has established extraordinary levels of security to protect those weapons," said Hagengruber of Sandia. "So while we can never dismiss the possibility of a stolen Russian nuclear weapon, that would be extremely difficult to accomplish, and the Russian president would almost certainly know about such a theft immediately."
Immele of Los Alamos concurs. "There is no question that both the United States and the Russians developed suitcase-sized atomic demolition munitions," he said. "We studied Lebed's comments very closely and compared them to our extensive knowledge about what the Russian military has done to account for its nuclear weapons, however, and we have no intelligence leading us to believe that those weapons have escaped Russian control. What you find is that even a country with 25,000 nuclear weapons and a less-than-state-of-the-art accounting system will keep a very close accounting and jealously guard control of its actual nuclear weapons." However, he cautioned, "nuclear materials and expertise are much harder to account for and keep track of, which is why so much of our concerns about Russia are focused on its nuclear fissile material and scientists."
Doomsday Ingredients
Most analysts cite as a success story the joint U.S.-Russian programs designed to rid the former Soviet states of their nuclear weapons, and to help Russia secure and dismantle its own weapons. The United States has spent roughly $4 billion on the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction program (named for legislative co-sponsors former Sens. Sam Nunn, D-Ga., and Richard Lugar, R-Ind.). To date, the Nunn-Lugar program has deactivated 5,700 nuclear warheads, destroyed 434 ICBMs and 483 air-to-surface missiles, and eliminated hundreds of Russian bombers, submarines, and missile launchers.
However, attempts to consolidate and safeguard the much larger Russian stockpile of nuclear fissile material -- the essential ingredient of these doomsday weapons -- have had a more checkered record. Indeed, the first indication that Russia might be leaking lethal nuclear material from its increasingly decrepit inventory came as early as 1992, when a Russian was caught attempting to steal 1.5 kilograms of highly enriched uranium from a facility in Podolsk. Other incidents soon followed. In March 1993, authorities in St. Petersburg seized 6.6 pounds of weapons-grade uranium from smugglers. In August 1994, police in Munich, Germany, seized 360 grams of plutonium and 5 pounds of uranium, part of a shipment apparently stolen from a nuclear research center in Obninsk, Russia. In one of the most worrisome incidents, an anonymous tip enabled the Czech police to seize 2.7 kilograms of highly enriched uranium in December 1994.
Because nuclear experts consider the difficulty of acquiring weapons-grade fissile material as the single greatest impediment to a group or nation that wants to build nuclear weapons, these seizures sounded a loud wake-up call. The theft of significant amounts of uranium is particularly frightening because uranium can be used as the key ingredient in relatively rudimentary nuclear devices that experts consider most within the technological grasp of fledgling nuclear states or terrorist groups.
The Energy Department's efforts, under its "Lab-to-Lab" initiative, to protect Russia's stockpile of fissile material have encountered severe obstacles. One is the continuing Russian reluctance to open its secret nuclear cities and research facilities to prying Western eyes. The second has been the unwillingness of both Russian and American authorities to acknowledge the vast scope of the problem of securing the enormous Russian stockpile of fissile material.
"I think it's fair to say that the Russians themselves didn't have a complete handle on the quantities and scattered locations that made up their fissile-material stockpile," said Kent Biringer, who works on cooperative international programs at Sandia. "As we started out on these programs, we didn't have a solid baseline from which to work that told us what we were trying to get our arms around."
When the true size of the Russian stockpile eventually came into clearer focus, U.S. officials realized they had greatly underestimated the challenge. Richard Wallace, the program manager for material protection, control, and accounting in the Russian Nonproliferation Program at Los Alamos, said: "What we found was that Russia had produced roughly 10 times more nuclear fissile material during the Cold War than the United States, and they had it scattered at many more sites. They also had 10 secret nuclear cities," Wallace said, "and each one dwarfed one of our comparable nuclear weapons laboratories. The Russians also had to go through a major cultural change in how they thought about security at their stockpile sites."
Eventually, U.S. experts were able to estimate that Russia had a total of 850 metric tons of weapons-usable fissile material -- enough for more than 70,000 nuclear weapons -- stored at 95 separate sites. Because it takes only about 17.5 pounds of plutonium or 55 pounds of enriched uranium to make a nuclear bomb, securing that vast trove of fissile material became one of the United States' top nonproliferation priorities of the 1990s.
The lax security systems at some of those Russian sites have become legendary within the weapons-lab community. Security experts talk about perimeter fences with gaping holes; fissile material stored in unguarded boxes in hallways of poorly guarded facilities; and facilities without air conditioning, where windows without bars were routinely kept open to ease the summer heat. According to experts at Los Alamos, managers of Russian nuclear reactors also routinely set aside extra stashes of plutonium and uranium "off the books" to make up for potential shortfalls in their production quotas at the end of each accounting period.
U.S. experts thus focused in the early years of the Lab-to-Lab program on rudimentary fixes such as consolidating fissile material at fewer sites, and protecting it with radiation detectors, closed-circuit television camera systems, electronic sensors on perimeter fences, and computerized accounting systems. Even some of these relatively simple fixes went awry. U.S. experts discovered, for instance, that the batteries in some of their security systems failed in the harsh Siberian winters. Levels of radiation dust and radiation contamination on workers that were considered routine at some Russian facilities often set off U.S. radiation detectors.
Today, U.S. experts at Los Alamos estimate that roughly 570 tons of Russia's total 850 tons of weapons-usable material are more secure as a result of the security upgrades. They concede, however, that more than 200 tons of fissile material remain largely unsecured. A May 2000 report by the General Accounting Office, Congress's investigative arm, found that U.S. officials have yet to gain access to 104 of 252 nuclear sites "requiring improved security systems."
"There is still a lot of room for improvement in securing Russia's fissile materials," according to Larry Walker, the manager of Cooperative International Programs at Sandia. "What you find is, the closer you get to Russia's actual nuclear weapons, the more secretive and less willing to give access the Russians become. Access remains an issue, because it's difficult to improve security unless you can actually see a storage site and witness how things are stored and handled."
Stalled Progress
After making significant headway in the early years, the U.S.-Russian cooperative programs to secure Moscow's fissile-material stockpile got stuck in 1998 and have not yet recovered. The reasons for the lagging progress are varied, experts say. As the materials protection program grew in cost from a few million dollars to more than $100 million annually, Congress and Administration officials began demanding a higher level of access to Russian nuclear facilities, and the Russians balked. A bureaucracy that had been thrown into disarray by the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s also began to reassert itself, throwing up red-tape barriers to greater Western access. And the Russians angered the United States by insisting on exporting a civilian nuclear reactor to Iran. The State Department lists Iran as the most active state sponsor of terrorist groups in the world.
Political tensions over the bombing of Serbia, NATO expansion, and a U.S. national missile defense system also soured relations between senior American and Russian officials in the late 1990s. Finally, because of a financial collapse in 1998, many Russian nuclear scientists and technicians were not paid for months at a time, raising fears that they would peddle their expertise on the world market. The Japanese doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo, for instance, was known to have actively recruited Russian nuclear design specialists, and even student physicists from Moscow State University, in an attempt to acquire nuclear weapons.
"After making enormous progress in the first three to four years, our cooperative programs with the Russians basically ground to a halt, and I don't think many officials in the Bush Administration still understand just how broken this process now is," said Hecker, the former director of Los Alamos. "Partly because the U.S. government lost its way and switched from an approach of cooperation to one that dictated an unnecessarily intrusive level of access into sensitive Russian facilities, we've lost the spirit of partnership necessary to make these programs work. Couple that with the fact that the Clinton Administration never really had a strategic vision or overarching strategy for dealing with the Russian nuclear complex and setting priorities among all these various programs, and you have a process that has essentially ground to a standstill in many respects. And until we can restore a common sense of purpose between us and the Russians, no amount of money will fix the Russian nuclear security problems."
Meanwhile, indications of serious Russian security lapses continue. Russian officials in 1998 broke up a conspiracy by employees of a major nuclear facility in the Chelyabinsk region of the Ural Mountains to steal 18.5 kilograms of weapons-usable material. The Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies has documented 11 cases involving diversion and recovery of Russian weapons-grade material between 1992 and 1997. The International Atomic Energy Agency further documents six seizures of weapons-grade material linked to states of the former Soviet Union between 1999 and 2001. Four Russian sailors were arrested at a base on the Kamchatka Peninsula in January 2000, with radioactive materials that they were suspected of stealing from a Russian nuclear submarine. According to a New York Times report, Turkey recently revealed that its undercover police had broken up a smuggling ring holding 2.2 pounds of what appeared to be enriched uranium, bought from a Russian of Azeri origin. The head of the Russian agency responsible for nuclear security recently told reporters that, on two occasions last year, terrorists had staked out Russian nuclear facilities. Earlier this month, on December 6, Russian police arrested members of a criminal gang who were trying to sell uranium for $30,000.
Reports coming in a steady drumbeat from U.S. commissions and blue-ribbon panels have warned that the inadequate security of the fissile-material stockpile of the former Soviet Union remains a glaring weakness in the global system designed to prevent a nuclear catastrophe. A 1997 Defense Science Board Study noted: "Defense planners are increasingly concerned about possible state and non-state use of radiological dispersal devices [dirty bombs] against U.S. forces and population centers abroad and at home, as technological barriers have fallen and radiological materials have become more plentiful." A 1999 congressional commission chaired by former CIA Director John Deutch and Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., warned that power outages, inadequate inventory control, and unpaid Russian guards and technicians had all increased the threat of an "insider" diversion of Russian nuclear fissile material.
Perhaps the starkest warning was issued earlier this year by an Energy Department advisory group headed by former Sen. Howard Baker, R-Tenn., and former White House counsel Lloyd Cutler. "The most urgent unmet national security threat to the United States today is the danger that weapons of mass destruction or weapons-usable material in Russia could be stolen or sold to terrorists or hostile nation-states," the Baker-Cutler study concluded. The group recommended that the United States spend $30 billion over the next eight to 10 years on a crash program to finally secure Russia's weapons of mass destruction and its stockpile of fissile material.
Ominously, the steady stream of warnings in recent years resembles similar unheeded alarms raised before September 11 about the possibility of a catastrophic terrorist attack. Nonproliferation advocates were thus dismayed that the Bush Administration's fiscal 2002 budget proposed cutting the Pentagon's Nunn-Lugar programs by 9 percent (from $443.4 million in fiscal 2001 to $403 million), and the Energy Department's nonproliferation programs by 11.5 percent (from $872.4 million in fiscal 2001 to about $773.7 million). Congress has since moved to restore some of the proposed funding cuts, however. And in a December 11 speech at the Citadel, Bush promised expanded efforts and increased funding for securing Russian fissile material and for finding peaceful employment for Russian nuclear scientists.
In an attempt to jump-start the stalled threat-reduction programs, Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Joseph R. Biden Jr., D-Del., and Lugar recently introduced the Debt Reduction for Non-Proliferation Act, which would forgive Russia's debt of $3.7 billion to the United States in exchange for its cooperation with U.S. efforts to secure and monitor Russian weapons of mass destruction and fissile material.
"Time after time, the United States has put together groups of objective, bipartisan policy experts to study this problem, and each time, they have concluded that this is an urgent national security issue -- and every time, their reports are ignored," said Joseph Cirincione, the director of the Non-Proliferation Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. Part of the problem, he says, is that such programs have no natural domestic constituency in Russia, and in the United States they smack of unpopular foreign aid. And because cooperative threat-reduction programs do not command the same priority within the Administration as missile defense, they can easily get shoved off the summit-level agenda.
"Another problem is, this seems like a distant threat because nothing terrible has happened yet," Cirincione said. "The general feeling among experts, however, is that we've been lucky so far. There is absolutely no doubt that there are bad people out there trying very hard to get their hands on Russian weapons of mass destruction and nuclear materials, and if we don't secure the source, sooner or later they will succeed. After September 11, the once-inconceivable is now all too easily imagined."
An Unseen Hand
A decade's worth of seizures and the breakup of numerous smuggling rings in Russia and Europe clearly point to a lucrative black market in nuclear fissile materials. No one knows with any certainty whether terrorists have successfully smuggled any of that material through the porous southern Russian border into Central Asia or nearby Afghanistan. Few intelligence experts doubt, however, that one of the unseen hands creating the demand for fissile material was that of Osama bin Laden.
The most unambiguous testimony to date on al-Qaeda's methodical, well-financed campaign to acquire nuclear bomb-making material came from Ahmed Al-Fadl, an al-Qaeda operative who turned state's witness in the trial earlier this year of men accused of bombing two U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998. Al-Fadl claimed he was the middleman in a mid-1990s deal between al-Qaeda and Sudanese officials for the purchase of $1.5 million worth of highly enriched uranium, apparently diverted from South Africa's former nuclear program. Though Al-Fadl was not present for the final exchange, his testimony convinced U.S. prosecutors that "at least since 1993, bin Laden and others made efforts to obtain components of nuclear weapons."
Recent years have yielded a steady stream of news reports and intelligence leaks about al-Qaeda's attempts to acquire fissile material. In 1998, for instance, bin Laden aide Mamdouh Mahmud Salim was arrested in Munich and charged with acting on behalf of al-Qaeda to acquire nuclear materials. As The Christian Science Monitor recently reported, a Bulgarian businessman claimed to have met bin Laden himself last year to talk over a complex deal to transship nuclear materials across Bulgaria to Afghanistan.
Pakistan, meanwhile, continues to detain Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood and a second nuclear scientist considered key to Pakistan's nuclear program. Mahmood has reportedly acknowledged meeting bin Laden and Taliban leader Mohammed Omar during at least three visits to Afghanistan last year, and he is said to have talked at length about developing nuclear and biological weapons. According to The New York Times, CIA Director George J. Tenet, during his recent trip to Pakistan, raised U.S. concerns about additional contacts between Pakistani nuclear weapons experts and al-Qaeda.
If the al-Qaeda network has successfully acquired enough weapons-grade uranium, U.S. experts say the group's last major challenge in eventually constructing a workable nuclear bomb would be to entice a trained nuclear scientist to spearhead the project. "The history of nuclear programs suggest that they depend on only a few key, knowledgeable scientists, with sufficient time and bankrolling, to bring a program to fruition," said Biringer of Sandia. "That's why we have focused a lot of effort on trying to retrain Russian scientists in other disciplines so they will not attempt to sell their services on the open market."
U.S. experts say that Russian nuclear scientists are generally much better off today than in 1998, when they went unpaid for up to eight months because of a financial crisis and the collapse of the ruble. Nevertheless, they worry that Energy's "Nuclear Cities Initiative," designed to retrain Russian scientists and shrink the Russian nuclear complex, has suffered from erratic funding and tepid congressional support.
"Virtually all Russian scientists we have dealt with are enormously loyal and patriotic, and most of them would like to stay where they are and continue to conduct meaningful work and research," Hagengruber said. "So we are not worried about Russia hemorrhaging nuclear scientists. These scientists remain one of our major concerns, however -- because unfortunately, all it takes is enough fissile material and one or two good scientists to create a real problem. Even a 99 percent solution is not really good enough."
Experts at Los Alamos and Sandia doubt that al-Qaeda has had the requisite time, weapons-grade fissile material, and nuclear expertise to actually construct a crude nuclear weapon, though they would not rule the possibility out. One expert who concurs in those doubts is Iraqi defector Khidhir Hamza, who headed Saddam Hussein's secret nuclear bomb program through the mid-1990s and co-authored the book, Saddam's Bombmaker. Despite obvious weaknesses in global nuclear nonproliferation defenses, Hamza insists that the difficulties inherent in constructing a nuclear weapon remain daunting.
"We in Iraq were in the market for nuclear materials, and not a week passed without us getting an offer from somebody to sell us such materials," he told CNBC's Geraldo Rivera on October 26. "People came to Baghdad with bags of samples, and left with bags of money, and we never got any serious nuclear materials. Despite what people say, the [protections of such materials] are not that loose, and this radioactive material is very difficult to transport." As for actually constructing a nuclear bomb, "that's not that easy either," Hamza said. "Iraq is a country with thousands of nuclear workers, and we still couldn't get a bomb ready in time for the Gulf War."
U.S. experts are much less skeptical that al-Qaeda or another terrorist organization could build a dirty bomb by packing a conventional explosive with fissile material that would kill and injure, mainly through radioactive dispersal and contamination. On the spectrum of nuclear threats, experts consider this a "high-likelihood, low-lethality" scenario.
Bruce Blair, an arms control expert and former nuclear missileer who is now the president of the Center for Defense Information in Washington, said: "There's almost no credible evidence that al-Qaeda acquired a portable nuclear device that could actually split the atom, but I think it's very plausible that bin Laden acquired fissile material that could be wrapped around dynamite and exploded in an urban center like Lower Manhattan to cause panic and terror, and require the evacuation of large portions of the city for a considerable period of time."
According to Blair, the Defense Department ran an analysis of just such a worst-case scenario involving a dirty bomb made with 50 kilograms of nuclear power plant spent fuel packed around 100 pounds of conventional explosives. "The calculation was that lethal doses of radiation would be dispersed over roughly a half-mile area, leading to hundreds, if not thousands, of casualties," Blair said. "There is also considerable data on what would be involved in cleaning up after such a terrorist attack, and that dates back to 1966, when an Air Force plane carrying nuclear weapons crashed in Spain."
Indeed, a display at Sandia's National Atomic Museum depicts the collision of a B-52 and a KC-135 tanker during midair refueling over Palomares, Spain, on January 17, 1966. Photos document how three thermonuclear weapons that burst open in the crash contaminated a 285-acre area with highly enriched plutonium, which has a half-life of 24,000 years. More than 4,000 Air Force personnel were drafted into the cleanup effort, which required plowing hundreds of acres and removing 4,810 barrels of plutonium-contaminated earth to a storage site in South Carolina. In 2001 dollars, the cleanup operation cost $230 million.
In a post-September 11 world, a Palomares-type incident occupies the "high-likelihood, low-lethality" end of the spectrum of threats to U.S. national security. Such a classification is a testament to the almost unthinkable menace posed by nuclear-armed terrorists.
A Pentagon study has concluded that new earth-penetrating, low-yield nuclear weapons may be the only way to destroy deep underground bunkers that hold biological and chemical weapons, the Albuquerque Journal reported yesterday.
In a recent presentation to Congress, researchers concluded that conventional weapons would be unable to destroy the deepest reinforced bunkers of biological or chemical weapons without dispersing the contents. According to the study, called Project Sand Dune, specially designed low-yield nuclear bombs “have the unique ability” to do the job, destroying both the bunkers and the weapons they might hold.
New nuclear weapons could be designed to burrow into the ground and then detonate precisely on target in a low-yield nuclear explosion, said the study. Current U.S. nuclear weapons have overly large yields as well as limited capabilities for penetrating the ground before exploding (John Fleck, Albuquerque Journal, Dec. 18).
The bombs would have a yield less than five kilotons, compared to the approximate combined 30 kilotons of the two nuclear bombs the United States dropped on Japan during World War II (H. Josef Hebert, Associated Press/Yahoo.com, Dec. 19).
Critics of the U.S. nuclear program released the Sand Dune study to the public last week, saying it indicates the Pentagon is moving toward creating a new generation of nuclear weapons.
“I fear that this report is the beginning of a reversal of the current U.S. policy to not produce new-design nuclear weapons,” said Jay Coghlan, director of Nuclear Watch of New Mexico (Fleck, Albuquerque Journal). Congress would have to lift a 1994 ban on designing new nuclear weapons before the United States could actually build the special low-yield warheads.
Martin Butcher of the Physicians for Social Responsibility said the type of warhead the report discussed was “the dirtiest kind of all. It’s highly radioactive.” Building the bomb would increase the risk of nuclear proliferation, he said (Hebert, Associated Press).
The U.S. government has made no move to actually start building the weapons, but the Energy and Defense departments have established a joint nuclear planning group to study the possibility of using nuclear weapons to destroy underground targets, according to the Journal.
Project Sand Dune began in 1997 after the Defense Department concluded conventional weapons could not destroy very deep bunkers, the report said, adding that about 10,000 deep bunkers exist in rogue states (Fleck, Albuquerque Journal).
Click here to read the report on the Nuclear Watch of New Mexico Web site.
A U.S. delegation arrived Monday at the Krasnoyarsk-26 plutonium production and reprocessing facility in Russia, plant officials said. The U.S. experts came to the facility to discuss funding for additional security measures to prevent the theft of plutonium, said Karasnoyarsk-26 Chief Engineer Yuriy Revenko (ITAR-Tass, Dec. 17, in FBIS-SOV, Dec. 17).
Initial U.S. Energy Department-funded security measures for the Krasnoyarsk plant include increased access control, material surveillance equipment, sensors and tamper-indicating devices, according to a report by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
The facility has three layers of protection, the report said. The first layer is the protective zone, which includes the facility’s outer perimeter protected by a double barbed wire fence. The next layer is the inner zone, which includes the production site. The most sensitive zone is the high-security zone, which includes the plutonium-oxide storage facility. Personnel move between the three zones via security checkpoints.
The external threat to the facility is considered “minimal,” according to the report (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace report, June 2001).
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