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Can Terrorists Build a Nuclear Bomb?
kjh1 writes "Popular Science is just chock full of good articles this month. One in-depth article addresses the question many are afraid to acknowledge is a possibility - can terrorists acquire the raw materials and then deliver a nuclear bomb? A good read that explains the difficulty in doing all of the above, while pointing out calmly that it is still possible." From the article: "Most experts with whom I spoke said that a nuclear terror attack is plausible but not inevitable, and that there's no way to precisely gauge the odds. 'I don't think the public ought to lose a lot of sleep over the issue,' says nuclear physicist Tom Cochran of the Natural Resources Defense Council. "
... would think that the possibility of a terrorist WMD is far-fetched.
Lose sleep? No. Sleep with one eye open? Damn right.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.
I think people are far more worried about the radiological and economic effects of a dirty bomb than a mushroom cloud vaporizing New York or San Francisco. The article should have discussed how easy it is to build a dirty bomb and the effects it will have on the area it's detonated in.
30 kilos of plutonium... check.... a nice book telling them what areas of their "alternative energy department" they need to improve... check....
Ex Soviet troops guarding stockpiles of nuclear arsenal when the Second Superpower collapsed chose to supplement their severance pay with government equipment. I was in China in November 2001 and reliably informed that I could go up to the Russian border and purchase plutoniom which was readily available on the black market. I visited the largest mosque in China during my time there and wondered what would happen if I put a small bomb together, blew up the mosque and claimed responsibility for the IRA in conjunction with ETA and Greenpeace. It just seems so easy for a single person or small group to alter the course of world history. Which is why personally I believe what's necessary when dealling with issues such as global terrorism like this is moral responsiblity and not shows of force.
cL0h
correct - easier and cheaper, and gets better results - from THEIR perspective ...
Question Authority before IT questions You
You can get discarded radioactive materials from places like junkyards. There are even incidents of people PLAYING with radioactive materials they find in old medical equipment.
This article completely glosses over all of that.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
The real question isn't whether terrorists could build a nuclear bomb, but whether they would want to. As long as the US can threaten smaller countries with the "invade first and ask questions later" approach to foreign policy, the fear will breed opponents to the US. The stronger the fear is, the likelier it is to fool individuals into thinking they can solve things by killing US citizens. The most effective way to combat terrorism is to stop people from being afraid, not by rounding up terrorists that are already known. America is channeling all its energy into short-term solutions and forgetting the long-term ones.
One good turn - gets all the covers.
So they can say "We have a nuke" More people are scared of nukes because they are nukes...
It's like me saying "I overclocked my 4 gig processor to 5" Do I need it? no, it's just to say it and sound special
I have worse karma than M$.
If a terrorist group is able to build a dirty bomb that causes mass casualties why would they want a nuke?
Because dirty bombs aren't designed to cause mass casualties. Their main effect is fear; with the popular in terror of anything 'nuclear', they are ideal for cowing a whole population. Hell, you don't even need to detonate one; just the thought of a dirty bomb is good enough to terrorize people. The current mindset in the USA is ample evidence of this.
They can also render an (albeit-small) area of real estate uninhabitable for a lengthy period of time. This of course can lead to a significant amount of economic fallout.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
What would you use such a powerfull bomb for?
To prepare occupation?
The only thing such a bomb is useful for is to create fear, terror in your enemies' hearts.
while (!asleep()) sheep++
There's a lot of things we know terrorists can do - blowing up trains, flying planes into buildings, releasing nerve gas on the underground - because they've already done it. And look how often that happens. The chances of dying in a terrorist attack are about 10,000 times smaller than dying in a car accident.
What is the defense against the use of a nuclear weapon by a terrorist? The answer is not a missile shield. Even if the shield is 80% effective, one successful nuclear bomb would be devastating.
The best defense is, in fact, to Westernize the globe so that everyone joins the Western world. For example, if Middle Easterners accept Western values, then they will value human rights, democracy, etc. If the most pressing issue of the day in Syrian become "Gay Marriage: Yes or No?" instead of "Suicide Bomber: Here We Go", then the world is safe. A Westernized Damascus itself would hunt down any nutcases trying to build a nuclear weapon.
I'm not trying to be a troll, but Western culture is the finest in the world. A Western acquaintance who adopted a Korean orphan is proof of the compassion and goodness of Western values. That Korean orphan, shunned and left to die in Korea, eventually attended MIT.
The women in the Middle East are even worse off. The brutal treatment of women in the Middle East speaks volumes about Middle Eastern culture.
You are also aware, of course, that it is the exposure that counts, not the source.
Oh. I guess not.
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of nuclear states with very bad economies. If you only need a few nukes, buying them probably wins out in the build versus buy debate.
when I realized that living and working close to a large, urban area was no longer enjoyable and even dangerous. We moved to an agricultural area that is less risky from a terrorist standpoint just because of the paucity of victims and lack of headline material ("suicide bomber kills 3 pheasants, a rabbit, and 14 beetles"). It takes a bit more energy to make a living in rural America (or rural anywhere I expect) but the rewards are great even disregarding the enhanced safety. No crowded freeways, a lower noise threshold and abundant recreation (fishing, boating, hunting, bird watching, etc.). Plus, the advent of the Internet and high bandwidth has made moving to the country easier than ever. Overhead is less expensive too; I pay $350 a month for about 600 sq feet of office space in downtown and a 3-br/2bath house in a nice area is less than $100k!
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
I'm a physicist. I know how hard it would be for an unskilled, untrained bunch of terrorists to build a bomb from scratch. I don't lose sleep over this.
However, why would terrorists want to even try this? Assuming they wanted a real nuclear detonation rather than a dirty bomb, isn't the possibility of purchasing or stealing an intact, complete weapon of more concern? Reading this doesn't exactly give me the warm fuzzies about the former Soviet Union. And remember, the Pakistanis and North Koreans have the expertise, know-how, materials, and a desperate need for hard currency.
Your sunny Denver day doesn't create a radioactive environment. The Chernobyl cloud did. Kids playing outside were not only "roasted", but also inhaled/swallowed the stuff. Same happens when eating those mushrooms and deers.
Spot the difference?
It's worth noting that the size (i.e. yield) of a nuclear weapon terrorists would be likely to acquire/build would be very low (maybe a few kilotons). And while the destruction sowed by such a device would be larger than that of a plane or truck bomb, it would not destroy a city.
First the bomb is likely to be detonated at ground level, or a few stories up in a garage. This limits the blast damage significantly. Assuming an urban environment, tall buildings would also limit the devices blast effectiveness. US and Soviet bombs of the Cold War were several *mega*tons, and were detonated several thousand feet in the air. With a terrorist's bomb you will not see the massive air burst followed by a blast wave that topples buildings and vaporizes people for miles.
The most dangerous effect from small bombs detonated at ground level is fallout. This would likely be enhanced by the very structures that limited the blast radius. Surrounding buildings would force radioactive dust and debris up, making the likelihood of winds blowing the fallout over a larger area higher.
Indeed, a nuclear detonation in Manhattan would destroy several blocks and kills tens if not hundreds of thousands of people. Such an event would be devastating to our economy and to the lives of millions. IMHO this is something completely different from Cold War style nuclear scares. A nuclear war between the US and Soviet Union would have killed hundreds of millions of people, billions in the after effects. Here, the likelihood of you being personally and directly harmed by a terrorist nuclear weapon is relatively low when compared to the effects to the economy on a national (and global) scale.
sig
To answer your main question: I believe that any nation state where the founding principle of government is the implementation of literal religious fundamentalism (Islam or Christianity) is dangerous if they possess nuclear weapons.
To response to your other trolls: Iranians are Persians, not Arabs. Also, this has nothing to do with ethnicity or skin color. It has to do with character and morality.
The trouble is this makes for an incredibly heavy and incredibly inefficient nuke. This severely limits the deployment methods - perhaps the only viable method for a terrorist to use such an enormous bomb is to load it on a ship and detonate it in the harbour. It's also easier for the authorities to detect such a large bomb.
This is the design of the Hiroshima bomb. In its favour, it is so easy to build that the US didn't even bother testing it before they used it.
Nukes that are portable enough to let off in any location are much more complex (and have a limited shelf life - i.e. they need maintenance to remain usable). The simpler forms of plutonium-based bombs (a sphere of Pu surrounded by highly engineered high explosive lenses - this is the implosion bomb design used for all fission nuclear weapons from Trinity and onwards) have a Po-210 initiator in the centre (a very strong alpha emitter). The trouble is Po-210 has a very short half-life, so leave your bomb in storage for 100 days or so and it probably won't work.
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Never mind if the rest of the world doesn't want to be "westernized" right? I mean, it's all justified as long as we get rid of those pesky comunists! Er, i meant terrorists. Also, the afirmation that western culture is the finest in the world is INFINITELY debatable. It is a huge world out there, you know.
Come on, the problem is not as simple to solve as "let's westernize them" - look how well that went in Iraq.
IM (very) HO, America needs to deal with terrorism by analizing what makes it appear in the first place instead of assuming it spawns in the vaccum, with people that hate the Western "for their freedom".
Noooo, he wanted change now, so we decided to go piss everybody off, kill several tens of thousands (regrettable, oh so regrettable, but hey, that's war, kids!), tie up our military in a grand neoconservative experiment, and piss away every last ounce of goodwill and "I wanna be like you guys" we'd spent several decades building.
We were so well on the way to westernizing the world. Now, we've turned ourselves into the very kind of monster we're trying to defeat. We've gone from being the world's beacon of freedom, democracy and civil rights to "oh, shut up--at least we're better than Saddam was!"
Just wait. It has yet to get really bad.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
What we _all_ need to do is to learn to value each others as equals. That goes from the Mullahs in Saudia Arabia tellling women to cover themselves completely, to the Baptist Preachers in Alabama telling women that their place is behind their man.
Unfortunately, you showed which is the main problem of this world even if you didn't intend to.
Is people that think their culture is "better" who make it this bad.
The first question I would ask you is, who decides which culture is better?, or, who has the right to say so? you're right, each person should decide which culture is better, but for him/herself, not for somebody else.
Secondly, have you ever thought how would you feel if somebody else wanted to impose his/her culture to you based simply on the fact that he/she believes it is better than yours?
Haven't you thought that maybe the eastern world think tehir way of living is the best?
Unfortunately, we're victims of our own nature, a big majority of people are blinded by ignorance, and use any excuse they can find to achieve their ends. Some use the "democrazitaion" of the "axis of evil", others the "anhihilation" of "infidels".
The fact is that there will always exist a good excuse to try to impose one's views, as a matter of fact I'm doing exactly that, it's unavoidable.
As much as some people would like to live in peace, there will always be somebody that will find a way to manipulate people in order to achieve their goals in a destructive manner.
IMHO there is one solution that might work, but this is just a dream, and this solution will not come without education.
If we were educated to accept people's differences, if we were educated in order to accept the good things that other cultures have to offer, if we were educated in finding and rejecting what is so wrong with our own culture, then we'd be much better off.
Of course problems would still be present, but in a much less dangerous manner, that's for sure.
Unfortunately, those same people that manipulate others will never allow them to think for themselves.
I can't remember any expected death rates, but I recall that there was big fuzz about not letting your kids play outside for a longer time, and if they come back in, clean them thoroughly -- almost a Dr. No kind of scenario.
Hysteria? Maybe. But I still object the comparison of a radioactive cloud with a sunny day in Denver.
Noooo, he wanted change now, so we decided to go piss everybody off, kill several tens of thousands (regrettable, oh so regrettable, but hey, that's war, kids!), tie up our military in a grand neoconservative experiment, and piss away every last ounce of goodwill and "I wanna be like you guys" we'd spent several decades building.
I'm sure that he woke up one morning and decided to go piss everybody off, yeah that seems like a logical decision that a world leader would make. Several decades??? We were hated long ago for being a superpower, this was long before the current administration. So my question to all the people that say we are as bad as some of the islamo-facist states that exist, then why don't you move to another country if this is so horrible? Put your money where your mouth is.
root@allevil:~#
Like you, I certainly find the plight of women in the middle-east appalling. However, when viewed from the outside, many might say that Western culture is also deeply flawed. A random sample of these issues might include:
In most Western countries there remains a huge gulf between the wealthy and the poor.
Women in Western societies often feel compelled by the media to conform to a given body shape and appearance. It still seems that many base the value of a woman on her appearance.
Men in Western societies are often defined by their job and earning capacity.
The elderly are often disregarded and ignored. Perhaps this is because they no longer possess beauty or earning power, or perhaps people don't want to be reminded of infirmity or death.
A major portion of a individual's existence in the Western world is concerned with the accumulation of wealth and possessions.
I'm not trying to voice reactionary views, or suggest that I would rather live in a non-democratic state. However, regarding our Western culture as a being vastly superior and virtually flawless would seem to be dangerous. If we look carefully at the past, we might see that we share more in common with the previous fallen civilisations than we would like to admit. So you should not find it surprising if there are those who might fail to welcome the idea of being "Westernised".
US Media to citizens:
"We in the US media wish to shield you from this world. We bring you only news stories from your own country,
The top two stories on CNN. The headline and the one on the top right.
1. Blasts rock Baghdad, kill 20
2. Putin: Iran not developing nukes
Top stories on Fox news:
1. Attacks Target Shiites in Baghdad
2. Putin: Iran Has No Nuke Plans
The US reports plenty of world news. I know while any post that says (something in the US = bad) is modded up here, this is just silly. When the Tsunami happened, it was 24/7 Tsunami coverage here. When the Russian Schoolchildren were held by terrorists it was basically 24 hour coverage. Sorry if CNN doesn't report soccer scores from around the world, but America doesn't care about trival stuff from around the world.
unless the story furthers the goal of making you even more freightened. Besides, who wants any real news about other countries?
The BBC is available in America, the fact is people are more interested in their local news than world news. Sorry if this bothers you. It isnt' a media consperacy though, it's just a free market economy reacting to what people want.
They don't even have NASCAR in those strange lands!
I guess you are trying to generalize about southerns now, since NASCAR's following is mostly in the more rural section of the country.
Do you really care about what happens in a place without NASCAR, unless they are IMMINENTLY ready to attack! Like SHARKS, and ASBESTOS, and POWER LINES!!! News at 11!!!!!!"
Please. Yes, people care more about trivial events in their own country than trivial events around the world. When something big happens, it is covered ad nausem.
The article has inaccuracies but IMHO the conclusion is accurate.
It says that 100 lbs (about 45 kg) of U235, enough to achieve critiacl mass is the size of a bowling ball but it's the size of a grapefruit. Other sources say that 50 lbs is needed for critical mass but it's not clear what degree of enrichment was used for the calculatons and whether depleted uranium or other neutron reflector is used. A neutron reflector effectivly lowers the amount of fissionable material needed to achieve critical mass.
Fabricating a U235 device should be fairly easy after enough U235 is obtained especially compared to a PU device.
Even if the detonationn would be a spectacular fizzle there would be deaths and radioactive contamination and the psycological impact would be tremendous.
Nate
Good point. Don't forget you also need a reliable means of vectoring the ordinance. This is also a similar problem with BIO weapons. It's easy to make them put being able to succesfully deploy them is thankfully very difficult. It seems to me that the truly dangerous weapons are the ones that can be succesuflly deployed and this thankfully seems out of reach.
What of dirty bombs made with depleted uranium? Older X-Ray machines have a readily available supply which could be obtained cheaply and realatively inexpensively. And what of Korea? They have already refused to agree to the UN treaty barring nations from actively developing nuclear weapons, I'm sure Korea would be more than happy to supply a few terrorist groups with some lower grade weapons.
A device would not have to be very large or have a 12 kiloton yield to do alot of damage. Property would most likely be lost at ground zero, the real threat would be the iradiated area and secondary fallout carried on wind currents. Imagine one going off in Central Park large enough to iradiate the total area of the park. How many residents would be in that area at any given time?
This worries me more than bieng caught in the blast from an ICBM, at least then it flash, your dust. But a death from radiation poisoning, that is terrifying.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Grandparent: unless the story furthers the goal of making you even more freightened.
You: The top two stories on CNN. The headline and the one on the top right. 1. Blasts rock Baghdad, kill 20 2. Putin: Iran not developing nukes
I don't see how stories about insurgents in Iraq (essentially equivalent to terrorists, and spun as a threat to the US) and nukes in Iran disprove the original point.
As to people being naturally more interested in their local news, well, sure. But the tendancy is far more pronounced in the USA. There may be any number of reasons for it, but it's certainly the case. Let's compare the top stories on news.bbc.co.uk, for example: Aside from the Baghdad explosion, the top two stories are about Nepal and the Congo.
Care to rebut?
The chances of dying in a terrorist attack are about 10,000 times smaller than dying in a car accident.
I have to call BS on this one. There've been, what, ~3500 terrorist-caused deaths in the US in the past decade? With your math, there must have been 35,000,000 US car accident deaths in that same decade. Traffic deaths, however, are closer to about 40,000 a year -- not 3,500,000 a year.
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Terrorists building nukes isn't the problem. They may (probably) already have them from the former soviet union. What about the so called missing suitcase nukes?
An interesting introduction to the possibilities.
that a lot of the reason they worked on the first try was because of all the double checking that went on. It's easy to make a U-235 bomb, comparatively. But it's really hard to make a gas centrifuge that won't be corroded by Uranium Hexiflouride. There is a considerable material and technical barrier there. mechanical, electrical, materials engineering, nuclear chemistry. And then we get into the manufacture of the gadget, which still requires some talent for math. With Plutonium, it's somewhat easier to get the material, which is very effective as a simple poison, but very hard to make a bomb that doesn't just spread the radioactive crap around.
Again, the computers are an aid for the easiest part of it. Understanding the geometry you need, that's pretty available. But being able to precisely machine the parts, accounting for things like thermal expansion, that requires real professionals. People who've invested a lifetime in cultivating a very special set of skills. CNC machines might make some of it simpler. But there is a wide gulf of know-how that a lot of people aren't accounting for.
The people with these kinds of skills don't have the kind of go nowhere lives that lead a person to cast their busted hand in with Osama. They're not some dumbasses with a BS in engineering, and an inability to get laid. They've got a decade or two of insight that practically defies reduction to the printed word.
All in all, it's probably much simpler to steal or buy a nuclear weapon than to build one.
I don't thing it's about having your cake and eating it too. Haven't you ever done something, or thought something, and then later realized that you were mistaken? There is nothing wrong with changing your mind over an issue when you are presented with new information. Of course not everyone is quite that sincere, but I think it's okay to give people the benefit of the doubt.
He said no conventional design has ever failed. Browsing the test tables a bit showed that we had 17 successful attempts before our failed attempt. This was an early attempt at creating a very low yield weapon. It's expected yield was only 200 tons, and they used 5 tons of HE in order to attempt to start it. It was definitely not a conventional design.
Even building a HEU bomb isn't really that simple. High energy collisions can produce unexpected effects, and you may well get a very disappointing yield, if anything. And, if you have plutonium, you have no choice but to do an implosion-style device, which means manufacturing/acquiring krytrons, high performance capacitors, etc, and a lot more rigorous testing.
In a real nuclear bomb development program, you don't want to waste your hard-to-get HEU/plutonium on a fizzle. So, what is generally done is you take a material with similar properties to your nuclear fuel build test bombs with it (in the case of uranium, you'd use DU). Then, during the collision, you analyze the impact (for example, with high-speed X-ray analysis). This in itself requires a good amount of equipment. Even with all of the "parts" on hand, a proper atomic bomb development program will still take at least half a year and a lot of resources.
Hijacking fuel rods? That'd work for most US nuclear submarine fuel rods (which are highly enriched), but not conventional power plant fuel rods. You'll only have a few % of U235 - you might as well just refine from scratch. If you're talking about spent fuel rods, you can get plutonium out of them, but you have to worry about the differences between Pu239 and Pu240; you don't want to have to separate them, or again, you might as well just start from scratch. Plus, you have to deal with all of the other dangerous radioactive "junk" that builds up in spent rods.
A truck full of spent fuel rods would, however, make for a nice way to irradiate a large area. Put them in a big vat and set two timers: One to dump as much nitric and hydrofluoric acid as you can get your hands on into the mix to dissolve the cladding and possbly some of the fuel, and the second to dump a large tank of gasoline in a couple hours later and ignite it to help burn the radioactive compounds into the air. You should be able to cause a US-based chernobyl that way. Cleanup would be catastrophically expensive, as it was for Chernobyl; and while mass irradiation events aren't frequently filled with mass casualties, the area that they contaminate is rendered uninhabitable for several hundred years (not 10s of thousands or millions like anti-nuclear nuts pretend, mind you, but still a long time).
"Well, then fire it up and show me what this..." (sigh)
Uranium can be worked safely with ordinary care (and very robust tools).
Handling a lump of plutonium can be done safely with reasonable precautions. However, machining plutonium is incredibly dangerous, contaminating a large area with dust unless done with appropriate respect. Plutonium dust is deadly in amazingly small quantities (inhaling 30 micrograms may be fatal). It's not some magic poison that can't be dealt with, but a machine shop with good veltilation won't cut it.
OTOH, for a terrorist who considers those workers (and their neighbors) expendable, it's not an issue I guess.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I was wondering if somebody was going to mention a dirty bomb. Popular science doesn't seem to take that into account. I would think a dirty bomb (a system that disperses radioactive material instead of causing it to explode) might be better for the purposes of terrorism than an actual nuclear bomb. Wouldn't kill as many people, but it would cover a larger area, cause more panic. Wouldn't have to use refined weapons grade material either.
Well by the definition on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorist) , the US can be seen as a terrorist (and a big one at that). I imagine that it wouldn't take them that long to create a new bomb. :)
I hadn't realized that Slashdot had degraded into fear mongering. Really.. what's next? The latest discussion over "orange alert"? haha...
And keep in mind, before September 11th, there was a previous attempt to topple the WTC. I believe the bombing (which I believe was under the Clinton administration) was supposed to cause one building to collapse into the other.
Human nature didn't radically change on 9/11. The biggest change was that we--the United States--discovered that we really were vulnerable to terrorism. Terrorism wasn't born on 9/11; it just felt that way for most Americans.
9/11 did make a big difference--but it's hardly a repudiation of the steady, impressive progress we'd been making ever since the days of the Cold War. We didn't win the Cold War with missiles--we won it with culture. The Berlin Wall was not torn down by NATO tanks--it was torn down by people who wanted what we had to offer. That intangible, American essence of freedom has been, and always will be, far mightier than any army we could ever field.
There are always going to be people who are willing to resort to deplorable, senseless, vicious crimes against humanity to get their way. We can minimize it, but we cannot eradicate it--and the more we're willing to use any means nessecary in trying to eradicate it, the faster the ranks of the enemy will grow.
We just can't kill 'em fast enough. This war cannot be won on the battlefield.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
> he injustices the west (the US) does is no worse then the ones they do to themselves
Perhaps if our injustices were vastly less bad - or even not committed at all! - then it would be harder to redirect discontent against us. Saying "but he's just as bad!" won't convince anyone we're the good guys. If we do bad things to the people of a country, we're giving extremists in that area all the ammunition they need to paint us as the "real" bad guys.
If we didn't make ourselves a convenient scapegoat, the corrupt regimes in the area might undergo change from within, something that I think almost everyone can agree would be positive.