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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. "
If a terrorist group is able to build a dirty bomb that causes mass casualties why would they want a nuke?
"I'll be better when I'm older"
The terror factor would be through the roof. The actual damage would very minor. Chernobyl was a incredibly HUGE dirty bomb. It killed a few hundred in the immediate vicinity, and may kill a few hundred more in twenty years from cancer. But the hysteria it produced was off the scale. People in Italy, thousands of miles away were in a panic because a radioactive cloud about as powerful as solar radiation in Denver on a sunny day was heading for them.
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
Interesting enough I'm doing a paper on this. What it basically comes down to is can they gain nuclear materials? They can thanks to the disarment of nuclear weapons. 80ish cases of soviet nukes gone missing. Quite a few scientists were stealing small amounts of nuclear materials and selling them. A few were caught but not all. Saddam Hussein has bought dud nukes from South Africa and another country (I think Russia or N. Korea). It's only a matter of time until he gets the real thing. A of couple of Russian hunters have ran into discarded nuclear batteries.
Unfortunately this is a preventable catastrophe but one we're not doing enough about (N. Korea). If you want to learn more I reccomend watching the PBS documentry "Avoiding Armageddon".
There are 11 types of people, those who know unary and those who don't.
I have no *clue* what the administration's "Iran know how in six months" crap is, nor do I see any problem with terrorists building a bomb (though the latter might wind up with a nasty melter, rather than a BOOOM).
All they'd have to do is have someone look up what that kid wrote in the late seventies. He got a visit from the FBI, I think - his science project was "how to build a nuclear bomb", and they looked *really* dumb when he showed them that he'd only gotten stuff out of magazines and standard texts.
Hell, I have a 20 year old issue of, umm, Mother Jones? that has a cover story on how to do it. Of course, the hardest part is the centerfuging, when you have the liquid in a bucket, and have to spin around as fast as you can in the living room for half an hour.
mark "this is 'secret'?"
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?
Except, of course, that article was in last months issue. Or at least the issue that they sent me last month. Why are magazine publishers and car manufacturs always releasing stuff a month/year before the date the put on the product? When did we get this far ahead? Can't they just release an "intrim" issue (Febuary, 2005 B) or something and get the dates back on track?
#include <signature.h>
Ok, I'll bite. Iran hasn't sufficient infrastructure, yet. North Korea is bankrupt, has a cache of weapons, and the means to make more. Now, who are we supposed to be afraid of? Iran? right...
In a way, this situation reminds me of the attitude towards tsunamis in the Indian ocean.
Anybody who thought about it at all realized that it was inevitable that a tsunami of this scale would hit sooner or later. It is an event that is, as mathemeticians say, "Poisson distributed", that is to say that it is like the decay of a radioisotope and the resultant emission of a particle. It can happen at any time, but it can be characterized by a rate, which is a probability that it will happen in some specific period of time. The rate for massive tsunamis in the Indian ocean, as it happened, was very low, so nobody was concerned it would occur this year, and or even in our lifetimes. So few people other than professional tsunami watchers probably thought the expense of building a warning network was warrented. And who knows? There may have been other investments that would have, based on mathetmatical expected return, saved more lives.
But now that it has happened, of course everyone wishes we'd spent the money to put a warning system in place. And, in fact, we almost certainly will. It's hard to say whether this is the best investment, but there are other reasons to do so I guess.
The case of nuclear terrorism has both similarities and differences. It is different, in that there is a human agency involved that would do this sometime in the next several years if it could. But they are somewhat unlikely to be able to do this, due to steps we have taken to prevent that. If we take further steps, it becomes extremely unlikely. But it never quite becomes impossible. At some point, we may be able to drive the threat of nuclear terror down to the point where it is a lot like the pre-tsunami situation. People not professionally involved will question the value of the next marginal investment in prevention. And they will, arguably, have a point. But when the disaster actually happens, hopefully some generations hence, people will have wished to have done more.
At the same time, there are other possibilities, like the killer asteroid scenario, that could use some attention. The problem is you just don't know in advance which disaster will happen to you. Choosing what to do is not simple. Suppose you are examining the possibilty that an asteroid capable of spreading the destruction of a small nuclear bomb is going to hit a population center. Suppose (hypothetically, of course) it turns out to be 10x more likely than a terrorist attack of the same magnitude. We should spend our money on asteroid defense, right? Well, what if it costs 100x as much to do something about it?
In short, you have to know the marginal value of a dollar invested in terms of incresed security.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
How about our Pakistani allies?
Its important to note that no conventional design test has ever failed. US worked on the first try, Soviet bombs worked on the first try and every indication is every other nuclear power's tests worked on the first try.
And those were built without the help of computers.
Making a bomb work is simple if you have the nuclear material. Making it make a HUGE bang is hard. Making the bomb itself tiny is hard. But making a bomb is easy.
The thing that is really keeping it from happening, I think, isn't the fact that making a bomb is hard, but making a bomb that can go supercritical with a small amount of fuel is very hard. The Ted Taylor book talks about that issue in some detail. (He made both the largest and smallest fission devices).
I love how people like Ted Taylor will make a career of something that endangers humanity (mini nukes) then turn around and preach about its dangers. Sort of like how Oppenheimer reveled in the thrills of working on the Manhattan Project then turned around and said how bad nukes were. A case of "Having your cake and getting to eat it too".
The brutal treatment of women in the Middle East speaks volumes about Middle Eastern culture.
And the brutal treatment of Iraqi children by americans speaks volumes about the west. Not to mention the lovely photos of Abu Ghirab.
If the US weren't such a sadistic nation they'd have won by now. I am sure for far less then the $300Billion spent so far. They could have sent in a platoon of realtors into Iraq, bought everything, set everyone up with a low priced GMAC home mortgage and had a Mc Donalds on every corner and a WalMart in every town by now. $300Billion could have bought Iraq up for less than 2k an acre on average for the 170 million acres that constitute Iraq. That's a pretty high price for a desert view and no mod cons. On top of that, at 6% interest the money could be doubled in six years.
Instead, they're just setting up for more trouble. That $300 Billion is just a down payment on a money pit in a bad neighborhood made worse by their presence rather than better.
Clancy's 'Sum of All Fears,' circa 1990 or so, IIRC, has that exact plot; Islamic terrorists build a nuke.
In the afterword, he laments the fact that information on how to build a nuke was SO easy to obtain, he felt obligated to not reproduce it in his book. He mentions calling up Oak Ridges and asking about specs for some of the fabrication machinery, and having blueprints FedEx'd to him the next day.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Seriously, I'm not so worried about terrorists getting raw material and building their own weapon from scratch as I am of them buying or "stealing" one. Building a weapon would require a lot of time, knowledge and raw material, but with an unknown number of unfriendy states posessing or already developing weapons who can say buying one outright is out of reach for some well monied extremist group? For all we know it might be a way for say, North Korea to detonate a weapon inside the US with plausible deniability. Can't you just hear Kim Jong-Il saying "Oh those darned terrorists, they stole one of our weapons!! We sure are sorry you lost Washington :(; maybe you shouldn't have been such capitalist pigs."
Some might say it's a little kooky to imagine a black market for ready-made nukes, but is it really any less likely than a group like Al Queda building one from scratch? These people have money, lots of money; and everyone, even countries, has their price. All I'm saying is that we shouldn't focus all our attention on the raw materials and brains required to build one for an independent organization like Al Queda, when they could just as easily follow our American lead and outsource their dirty work to someone else.
The newspapers have published numerous diagrams, not very helpful to the average man, of protons and neutrons doing their stuff, and there has been much reiteration of the useless statement that the bomb 'ought to be put under international control.' But curiously little has been said, at any rate in print, about the question that is of most urgent interest to all of us namely: 'How difficult are these things to manufacture?...
Had the atomic bomb turned out to be something as cheap and easily manufactured as a bicycle or an alarm clock, it might well have plunged us back into barbarism, but it might, on the other hand, have meant the end of national sovereignty and of the highly-centralized police state. If, as seems to be the case, it is a rare and costly object as difficult to produce as a battleship, it is likelier to put an end to large-scale wars at the cost of prolonging indefinitely a 'peace that is no peace.'
-- George Orwell, "You and the Atomic Bomb," October 19, 1945
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
How do people westernize?
Screwing your momma?
First define 'western' and stop being such an ignorant bastard with throwing around labels.
I live in the Netherlands and the majority of the public feels americans are so conservative and puritan, that you are living in the middle ages, dumber than sheep. Poorly informed, maximally exploited by commerce, very easy to scare, mainly due to the fear of the unknown, and boy, are the majority poorly informed, if not simply indifferent about everything non-american.
Your democracy is not our democracy, your values are not our values. What is 'western' ?
Our nude beaches are mostly topless, our (soft)drugs legal. Love for sale too, we collect taxes on them. Is that western?
Women reduced to sex objects, cosmetic surgery for boob, butts, lips and genital surgery, is that western?
Being judged by your looks (increased superficiality and shallowness), is that western?
Or indifference, selfishness, feelings over meaning, is that western?
Parents who become indifferent about the well-being of their kids as soon as they are 18 and kicked out of the house, is that perhaps western?
Being materialistic, is that western?
Look up civilization in any major dictionary, look up international declaration of human rights, it speaks of "dignity".
East and west, all religions and non-religious people alike, they share that one thing.. they all strive for greater dignity of man.
The question is how best to serve it.. dictatorships don't serve this, but neither does capitalism and individualism it promotes and exploits.
To figure out which ways serve dignity of man best, not on short term, but long term as well (wealth based on maximum consumption, maximum exploitation of poor people in poor countries and depleting natural resources, as capitalism depends on, and globalism spreads world wide, is not durable.. to be a winner, you have to make losers, and the biggest loser is nature, natural resources, animals and eventually people), you have to make judgements based on much deeper philosophic exitential insights, than such superficial indifferentiated labeling.
Polonium is not used in initiators anymore. The half life is too short. The half life of tritium tends to be the limiting factor in how long a modern bomb can be stored. If you want just way too much information on building nuclear bombs just go here http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Nwfaq/Nfaq4.html
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
IANANP/E (Nuke Physicist/Engineer) so I am uncertain of the validity of claims made by the person interviewed, however, in the recent series "The Power of Nightmares", which aired on the BBC, they interviewed a physicist who had done research on Dirty Bombs and their effects. Essentially, he stated that the only real danger from a dirty bomb would come from two things, the first of which is the damage from the explosion itself. The second, and possibly more dangerous impact, is the psychological impact which would cause people to trample one another in panic to escape.
The problem with a dirty bomb is that the radioactive material becomes so scattered that there would easily be ample time for cleanup before anyone would be adversly effected by the radiation. If I remember his statements in the documentary correctly, he stated that the radiation becomes so dispersed, in fact, that you could live in the area for years before the radiation would actually start to cause you harm. He mentioned something around 100 years, but I don't remember specifically the amount of effect he was talking about.
Basically, aside from the psychological effect, and the destruction from the initial explosion, there is nothing to worry about from a Dirty Bomb, at least according to the scientist interviewed in the series.
Though I don't know how well grounded in fact the series is/was in general, it was interesting to see the "threat of terrorism" in a different light.
Intelligence Analysts and fiction writers have been on this tack for years. Remember, America built the first nuke in 1944 using technology which today is absolutely primitive. There exists a body of open source knowledge these days to allow your average college educated engineer to construct a functioning nuclear weapon capable of 10 or 20 kilotons. That's enough to take out a city block, and poison 10 city blocks with radiological fallout.
But then, you have to consider something else - the expense. Currently, third world governments are hard pressed to operate a weapons program under the radard. It would be far harder for individual organizations run as charities are to pool the resources for such a weapons program while maintaining terror operations. One nuke may have the political value of a million suicide bombers, but 20 suicide bombers can have the political, economic, and social impact of one nuke at 1/1000th the price. For that reason, you're unlikely to see a terrorist organization carry out a nuclear attack unless they do so with state sponsorship. After Afghanistan and Libya, no state on this planet (save for the crazies in Pyong Yang) will dare transfer such technology to a non-state actor.
The biggest danger we'll face is someone making a dirty bomb from radioactive materials from old medical equipment.
Speaking of sailing something into a US harbor and detonating it, I'd be a lot more concerned about a hijacked LNG tanker being vented in a harbor, and when the mixture is at the right ratio, detonated. It'd take quite a bit of planning, but I see no reason why it couldn't be done. Large tankers carry 60,000 tons of LNG. TNT is 4.6 MJ/kg, while methane (most of natural gas) is 50-55.5 MJ/kg. Consequently, if you had perfect combustion and complete ventillation, you'd have a ~0.7 MT fuel-air bomb. Probably less in practice, but still...scary concept - at maximum output, it'd be about 45 times bigger than the Hiroshima bomb.
"Well, then fire it up and show me what this..." (sigh)
You want to do damage, it's a whole lot easier to buy a truckload of fertilizer, and openly buy 500 gallons or so of diesel fuel from any truck stop for cash, and if you have them delivered to a farm, nobody will notice or even think twice about it as it would be routine, and the chances are excellent you can get away with it and never be caught.
For probably $10,000 you can create a dozen nasty good sized bombs without even having to do anything which in any way looks suspicious or illegal until you set the damn thing off. I doubt that you can go nuclear on less than a million. A million bucks will probably buy you a thousand Oklahoma City-sized bombs, but at best gets you one lousy nuke. Which is going to have more effect for the same amount of money? One spectacular bomb that kills about the same number as the World Trade Center, Second Edition, or a thousand WTC-sized bombs?
Estimates are the WTC attacks cost Al-Qaeda maybe $100,000. Would a nuclear bomb have done better in terms of horror, publicity or terror than two hijacked airliners? Above a certain level it really doesn't matter, you've already made your point, and trying to use even stronger methods doesn't buy you anything more.
Further, you don't have to be a martyr to use ANFO, but you'd better be intending to die if you use a nuke, because otherwise if you drop a nuke, you guarantee they will hunt you down for as long as it takes. And let's not forget that it's possible for a very tiny group (2 people, maybe even just 1) can set up an ANFO bomb. And it doesn't take a whole lot of smarts to do it. It's going to take a lot more people - with intelligence - to set up a usable nuke.
The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.
It takes some brains to build a bomb. But --
Nuclear weapons and nuclear-grade materials became available to wealthy criminals, with the collapse of the Soviet Union:
Around the same time, parties unknown stole the entire supply of gold from the Soviet central bank: For more about nukes, gold, and global organized crime, see Thieves World by Claire Sterling.
-kgj
-kgj
IHMO, that was not the exact reason they were dropped on Japan. The US (not sure if the allies were brought in on the decision making process) had a choice... either take the war to the Japanese homeland by invading, or drop the bombs and see if they could shock the political leadership of Japan into surrendering. The latter was the choice taken and it worked out. My recollection (a little hazy, no totally positive) is that the US had no additional bombs ready (for immediate use) after the first two. So if the first two had not worked out, then there would have been a bigger mess. The primary objective was to save lives of US/allied servicemen who surely would have perished in large numbers upon invading Japan. For comparison, look up the losses during various island invasions for the Pacific theatre of WW-II.
The context that you have to keep in mind is that prior to the first bomb being dropped, the whole concept of an atomic bomb was only theoretical (outside of the US development and testing). No one (other governments, i.e. Japan) had ever seen or heard of the effect of an atomic bomb. They had no reference of what to fear. Today, we have much knowledge (as well as old newsreels of test explosions) to see why there is something to fear.
As a closing note, an atomic/nuclear weapon is as much or more a biological weapon (due to the fallout and long term health effects) as it is a weapon of destruction. Blow something up and you will have health and medical consequences that far outweigh the destruction effects.
This msg is brought to you by the letter 'W'.. for Worthless Wuss