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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. "
With the help of Google, anything is possible! How to build a nuclear bomb Complete with book search!
I highly recommend this book by John McPhee from 30 years ago. He even discusses the destruction of the world trade center.
Their name is MuhammadGyver.
... 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.
'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. "
Sleep! No time for that now after that article. Thanks a fucking bunch Popsci. As if my dreams weren't f'd up enough.
-Teiresias
http://www.popsci.com/popsci/print/0,21553,1017201 ,00.html
The printer-friendly version of the article, with all the text on one page instead of spread out over 5.
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"
If 30 kilos of Plutonium is enough to build one, I'd say they have a strong case...
30 kilos of plutonium... check.... a nice book telling them what areas of their "alternative energy department" they need to improve... check....
The original article is already sluggish, so there.
Just
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.
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.
hah, no, those WW II devices were quite complicated and did have precision detonators, initiators, precision machined components, etc. there's some old interesting books on the construction of them that you can find in university libraries. Even in this day & age, it would take the resources of a government to duplicate the effort. Just getting enough u235 in one place only gets you alot of contamination, heat, radiation, etc.
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.
After the cloud arrived, there were areas in Germany (esp. Bavaria) where you shouldn't eat (wild) mushrooms and venison anymore because of the radiation. And even today, almost 19 years after, it is not wise to eat too much of certain mushroom types. The joys of half-life.
If that's what you call hysteria, I'd like to get your definition of severity.
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...
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.
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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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.
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
How about our Pakistani allies?
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.
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).
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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IIRC the US had a project in the late 60's which tried to determine how hard it would be to build a nuclear bomb. They employed some freshly graduated physic students which had no prior knowledge about bomb designs but were allowed to use any material being in public domain. After about 3 man years they presented a working design. Taking into account that nowadays there is much more information available to the public it is likely that it would take even less time.
However, you are quite right that it would be incredibly expensive/complicated for a non-government group to obtain amounts of weapon grade uranium or plutonium sufficient for a critical reaction. And even if they would be able to build a nuclear bomb it would still be extremely hard to transport it to a place were it could be of any use for them (I know that it's in theory possible to build bombs the size of a suitcase, but it would be hard enough for a government to build such a device).
I don't read replies by ACs.
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.
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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.
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.
... and the fix was worse than the problem.
It's a classic scenario. What we really have to worry about is going back in time and accidentally doing something that makes us cease to exist.
That appears to have already happened, and then been corrected. Unfortunatley, we now have Biff in charge of the world, so things are even worse off in this timeline than they were in both the original timeline, and the one where we don't exist. God damn that delorian and misguided science!
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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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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
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
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"Gun type" - This was the way they built the Hiroshima bomb. Two bits of fissile material banged into each other using high explosive to form a critical mass. This only works with Uranium as plutonium bombs built using this method would "fizzle"- chain reaction kicks off before the core go's critical. Nobody makes bombs like this because of the inherent danger of accidental detonation- they could concievably go off in a crash or fire. The advantage of this type of bomb is that it's easy to make and you can be pretty sure it will go off ok (which is why they chose it for Little Boy).
"Implosion type"- a sphere of fissile material with a hollow in the middle is crushed into a critical mass using explosive lenses. This is much more efficient than the gun type due to the increased density and the detonation speed. Getting the high explosive lenses right is a real bastard though. The literatures pretty light on the explosive details strangely enough.
So, basically, your common or garden "building it in his cave" terrorist stereotype is going to have to go for the gun type. All the cross section and neutron transport data's available, you only need some world war II tech high explosives and machining ability and you're done. Thing is you're limited to highly enriched uranium.
Ok, so nobody's serious suggesting that any non-governmental group is enriching their own uranium (at least I hope not). So they have to aquire very high U235 content uranium from somewhere. Where's the only place you find this? Bombs. Basically I reckon that anyone in a position to sell terrorists material for a bomb is in a position to sell them one pre-assembled.
"Physics is to math as sex is to masturbation." -R. Feynman
"Don't look at nuclear flash with remaining good eye."
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
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.
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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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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
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Well, given that Analog magazine published, in their April 1979 issue, a science-fact article titled "Build Your Own A-Bomb and Wake Up the Neighborhood!" which laid out in clear terms how to build a brute-force gun-type bomb, I'd have to say that the only limitation would be their ability to get enough bomb-grade nuclear material. Admittedly, the device is crude, and not transportable at all; it's essentially a two-story pipe mounted vertically in a building, with one hemisphere of nuclear material at the bottom and one at the top mounted on a heavy lead cylinder that can be dropped down the pipe. However, it's perfectly functional, and aside from the production of the two hemispheres, doesn't require anything more than basic handyman skills to produce -- the 'detonator' involving nothing more complex than pulling out a rod that keeps the upper cylinder from falling down the pipe, and getting someone willing to be there to yank out the rod probably isn't going to be a problem.
The article spends more time focussing on the problem of getting enough bomb-grade material from what was, at the time, the most accessible source of fissiles -- hijacking a truck full of fuel rods and refining the nuclear fuel to get bomb-grade material. With the breakup of the Soviet Union, it's probably a lot easier to get either the fuel or bomb-grade material directly, and getting an actual nuclear device eliminates all of the grunt work. Given the amount of effort needed to refine power-plant grade enriched nuclear fuel, the article suggested, IIRC, that a more effective use of the terrorists' effort would be to grind the fuel into a powder, take it up in a small private aircraft, and dump it out over a large city as they fly around, getting more effective distribution of the contamination. Additionally, spreading the nuclear material directly increases the cost to their target from the hysteria associated with a public announcement of the contamination and the government's attempts to clean it up, not to mention being able to repeat the attack once or twice using nothing more lethal than, say, table salt and still get the same hysteria and government reaction from the residents of the city you claim you've contaminated.
Records recovered last month from a raid on Al Qaiada show they recently aquired 30kg of Plutonium. Al Qaiada denies having such material, saying in a statement "if we had that much material, we would have used it by now."
In related news, Al Qaiada's senior weapons expert has been executed for failing to maintain accurate records.
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Please, a nuke being detonated in America - hey, what is that bright flash outside of my win
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Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
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.
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Radioactive cobalt dumped in vacant lot in Bangkok. 3 dead, 12 injured.
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Radioactive cobalt shows up in scrapyard in Turkey. Two injured cutting up the scrap.
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Radioactive cobalt shows up in scrapyard in Brazil. Four dead, 300 exposed.
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Radioactive cobalt shows up in Mexico. Recycled into rebar and metal furniture. One known dead, injuries unknown. Discovered when some of the furniture was trucked to Los Alamos and set off radiation alarms.
And that's with the stuff in big chunks. "Weaponized", ground into a powder for distribution, it would be far more dangerous.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)
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
Hehe, that's a funny analogy, given the origin of the term "Poisson distribution". The name of the distribution derives from a simple analogy -- fishing (poisson means "fish" in French)
;-)
Well, if you find that funny, I have another good one for you
The Poisson distribution was named after Simeon Poisson.
So the irony is doubled. Or standing on its head or something.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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.
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
pakistan's Chief Nuclear Scientist personally travelled, executed, and followed up on the nuclear weapons sales to rogue states like Iran, North Korea, and Libya.
- iran.htm
t m - iran.htm
- dprk.htm
k han.htm
d .html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/4242771.stm - and I quote
"The US has called Dr Khan the "biggest proliferator" of nuclear technology."
Country-specific proliferation by pakistan.
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Selling to Iran
http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/world/iran/khan
Selling to Libya
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4228713.s
http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/world/iran/khan
Selling to North Korea
http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/world/dprk/khan
Other states that are not yet CONFIRMED include Syria, Saudi Arabia.
http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/world/pakistan/
In his startling televised confession Wednesday, Abdul Qadeer Khan insisted he acted without authorization in selling nuclear technology to other governments. A.Q. Khan admitted selling nuclear technology to Iran, Libya, and North Korea. A.Q. Khan asked for clemency, but the Pakistani government made no public announcement about whether he is to be prosecuted. The confessed proliferation took place between 1989 and 2000, though it is suspected that proliferation activities to North Korea continued after that date. The network used to supply these activities is global in scope, stretching from Germany to Dubai and from China to South Asia, and involves numerous middlemen and suppliers.
Summary
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If you think that the chief scientist of pakistan could travel all over the world and SELL nuclear designs AND ENCASH the money AND SHIP the nuclear materials WITHOUT the permission of the government of pakistan, then the pakistanis are too stupid to be allowed to hold WMDs.
If the government of pakistan did allow the transfer of WMDs to Saudi Arabia, Iran, Libya, Syria, and North Korea, then they are too dangerous to be allowed to hold WMDs. (remember 15 of the 19 9/11 terrorists were saudis, and ALL were muslims).
Either way pakistan will be disarmed. Its too much of a basket case to allow them to have WMDs.
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And as a dessert, let me finish by saying that the money for the 9/11 attack on WTC ($100,000) was transferred from Karachi (pakistan) to chief terrorist Mohammed Atta (saudi) by a certain ISI-trained Saeed Sheikh from Mohammed Khalid (kuwaiti). Saeed Sheikh was also responsible for the murder of Daniel Pearl cos Pearl had almost proven that the pakistani intelligence (ISI) was somewhat involved in WTC. Saeed Sheikh is currently in pakistani custody, but FBI/CIA are not allowed access to him. WHY would an "ally" not provide access to such a critically important terrorist ???? Khalid was caught in pakistan too and handed over to CIA but khalid is not pakistani and hence did not know the internals of the ISI involvement.
http://billstclair.com/911timeline/main/essaysaee
Of course, your beloved pakistan is a "stauch ally". yeah fuck right!
Sig Heil: Scumerica - Land of the Free* (* 18+, valid papers, health insurance, some restrictions apply)
I looked up some links after this.
There's a general article at
How Stuff Works.
A study of several cases at
Federation of American Scientists. Death rates will depend a lot on the thresholds for closing an area and moving people out. Meaning that cancer rates climb but not enough to evacuate the area. I think the numbers in the FAS article assume people stick around. Say rich people move out, poor people move in. FAS death rate numbers assume more things. Like no advance in cancer treatment in the next 40 years. And little protective measures.
And an article at
American Institute of Physics that says don't make such a fuss.
> 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.