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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"
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.
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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).
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.
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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
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