Matthew Bunn has a solid op-ed in The Washington Post on the real nuclear terrorist threat.
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Loose Nukes
26 Sep 2007 08:49 am
Comments (6)
They just cause hysteria and high cleanup costs.
Well, I'd go with the subjunctive mood there. There hasn't been a "dirty bomb" used so we're not at all sure, one way or the other, about the result and follow-up costs. Obviously, your mainstream, blood-gore-and-veins-in-the-teeth terrorist doesn't think much of a "dirty bomb" as a terror weapon because there haven't been any. Considering how easy they'd be to make, that's surprising. You'd think there'd be one or two a week. If not more.
I sit a few miles from the HQ of CentCom and downwind in 'normal' conditions. So 'DirtyBombs' have occupied my thoughts from time to time. I had a hilarious (to me) idea of writing up a humorous piece in which OBLaden held a 'drive' to recycle all the radium-dial watches in the 'Uhmma' for the 'war effort'. Then with the last video he made, I wondered if THAT's what happened to his beard. So it wasn't that funny.
Thanx to ChrisFord for making me feel a little better about the 'real nukes'. I confess, Tom Clancey's prescience about JetLiners crashing in the US Capital gave me a thought to 'The Sum of All Fears'. The source of that fictional fissile material (a crashed Israeli jet) also came to mind when I heard about the 'accidental' flight of 6 nukes from Minot ND to Barksdale LA.
I think it's probably good that we are frightened of this and that our imaginations are busy.
It is my understanding that, while it is possible for terrorist groups to make a crude nuke, it is still pretty difficult. It requires some pretty complex industrial techniques that are difficult in and of themselves, but also difficult to conceal. Chris Ford; is my understanding correct. You seem to know a blot about the subject.
The problem with nuclear weapons is not getting the material. It's figuring out the physics necessary to get it to blow up. This requires fairly complex explosives configurations that will throw the plutonium together quick enough to cause it to blow up, rather than just fizzle and release some radiation. The design of these explosive "lenses" was a major classified secret for many years.
Today this information is likely to be available, but it still requires someone with considerable knowledge in several fields, access to sophisticated computer software, and testing equipment.
All that said, it's fascinating that the article never once mentions Israel with its 100-400 nuclear weapons surrounded by terrorist enemies. Some of these nukes are reputedly small and usable as "mines" - if not actually tactical "suitcase nukes".
Worse, because of Israel's "ambiguity" policy, nobody knows if any or all of these weapons have Permissive Action Controls that would render them inert if not activated properly.
Israel's nuclear arsenal are THE biggest threat to world peace in existence. Israel should be disarmed of its nuclear arsenal by any means necessary - long before Iran is even ASKED about its non-existent nuclear weapons program.
"The problem with nuclear weapons is not getting the material. It's figuring out the physics necessary to get it to blow up. This requires fairly complex explosives configurations that will throw the plutonium together quick enough to cause it to blow up, rather than just fizzle and release some radiation. "
Uranium designs are relatively simple, provided you have well over the critical mass to work with.
Comments closed October 10, 2007.
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Heads in the Sand
Bunn's concerns about HEU reactors of the type the Russians, universities, and US Navy uses in its cores is a little overblown because:
1. All the reactor fuel is irradiated. Exposure to unshielded HEU assemblies already run for a few full power hours in a reactor will kill someone in minutes.
2. To get to the fuel will require "terrahist evil-doers" to take over national or research reactor sites, hold it against the security reaction force the nation sends against it long enough to have the days needed to disassemble the reactor, pack the fuel elements in shielded containers, and escape.
3. Then the "evildoers" must build a reprocessing facility to acid dissolve the fuel oxides, remove 10s of millions of curies of radioactive fission products in order to get metallic uranium and fabricate it and create some bombs that wouldn't kill anyone near the fab facilities or bomb in an instant.
4. Pick a site where the HEU has not been depleted enough yet that it can still work as bomb material.
5. Do all that in a way that somehow keeps your location and work secret because the whole world would be hunting once terrorists broke into a reactor and stole some million+ roentegen fuel sticks.
6. Have a workable bomb design ready. (Much easier for a HEU device than a plutonium implosion bomb)
The scarier "loose nukes" were and still are HEU and plutonium outside reactors that were stored in weak security places in Russia and it's spinoff nations. That is what the emphasis properly has been on. America and some of France's Japan's and UK's reactors have run for the last decade burning up the 50 tons of HEU and 2 tons of plutonium that was Russia's SALT and regular production "excess" from the Cold war. Some of that was under terrible security in the early 90s. And clean so no bad radiation dose would be gotten if you got a drumfull of it. (Enough in one drum, sans neutron absorbing material, to make several nuke weapons. You need 20Kgs of HEU, 9 Kgs of Pu for a sophisticated device)
Lowest in priority are rad sources capable of making a "dirty bomb" - because dirty bombs are unlikely to cause any casualties outside a coventional chemical explosive's force in disbursing the material on bystanders. They just cause hysteria and high cleanup costs.
Posted by Chris Ford | September 26, 2007 12:08 PM