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. "

Comments

Do they need to?

[vonoech]

If a terrorist group is able to build a dirty bomb that causes mass casualties why would they want a nuke?

What's hard about building a bomb?

[whitroth]

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'?"

Re:Good Question...

[hey!]

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.

Exactly.

[tgd]

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).

Re:Exactly.

[cluckshot]

At risk of telling the terrorists how (like they don't already have somebody who knows more than myself telling them) I am going to lay out just how difficult it is to come up with a U-235 device. First take the U-235 and powder it in a inert gas environment. Then Sinter it like a ceramic (very hot here) into two hemispheres or use C-4 to explosively form it into a hemisphere. The latter method is probably the best and fastest. Once formed place one hemisphere on a plate of armor plate steel attached to the muzzle of an Artillery tube say 155 or so. With a fashioned shell probably best aluminum cased load the other hemisphere in the shell to be fired in the gun. Weld the whole thing severely shut with high grade steel with a few slits near the muzzle end to allow pressure to decrease but not clear through. The whole thing needs strong containment.

That is about it for the bomb building except delivery. Difficult but not impossible. The problem of getting the U-235 is difficult but not impossible and takes far less resources than in the old days. The cost is well within those of a fairly rich person. Essentially the process is to take Uranium Hexafloride and Ionize it into a particle accelerator. Taking a set of high tech magnets send the gas down the accelerator tube and the magnets will aim the streams. This process used to be really expensive of energy and such but frankly isn't very expensive due to advanced magnets developed under the US Navy's Advanced Propulsion Project and now made in China... (Anyone suspecting North Korea here is right)

It is probably pretty easy to do this by a chemical process in presence of these strong magnets as well. Something similar to Chromotography. But for those who will argue, this isn't free. It probably could be done for several million dollars now. It would be a lot cheaper in a 3rd world country where you don't care too much about the junk you throw around or the people exposed to it.

Re:Best Defense: Westernization

[woodsrunner]

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.

Go read 'Sum of All Fears'

[SuiteSisterMary]

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.

Orwell said it best

[dpbsmith]

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

Re:Cargo ship or moving van.

[Rei]

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.