[ RadSafe ] Suitcase Nukes a Myth?

[Clayton J Bradt]

Interesting.

Clayton J. Bradt
Assistant Bureau Director
BERP
NYS Dept. of Health
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Suitcase Nuclear Weapons, Favorite Threat of Hollywood Scriptwriters,
Are Probably a Myth

KATHERINE SHRADER  AP News

Nov 10, 2007 11:23 EST
Members of Congress have warned about the dangers of suitcase nuclear
weapons. Hollywood has made television shows and movies about them.
Even the Federal Emergency Management Agency has alerted Americans to a
threat — information the White House includes on its Web site.


But government experts and intelligence officials say such a threat
gets vastly more attention than it deserves. These officials said a
true suitcase nuke would be highly complex to produce, require
significant upkeep and cost a small fortune.
Counterproliferation authorities do not completely rule out the
possibility that these portable devices once existed. But they do not
think the threat remains.
"The suitcase nuke is an exciting topic that really lends itself to
movies," said Vahid Majidi, the assistant director of the FBI's Weapons
of Mass Destruction Directorate. "No one has been able to truly
identify the existence of these devices."
Majidi and other government officials say the real threat is from a
terrorist who does not care about the size of his nuclear detonation
and is willing to improvise, using a less deadly and sophisticated
device assembled from stolen or black-market nuclear material.
Yet Hollywood has seized on the threat. For example, the Fox thriller
"24" devoted its entire last season to Jack Bauer's hunt for suitcase
nukes in Los Angeles.
Government officials have played up the threat, too.
Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., once said at a hearing that he thought the
least likely threat was from an intercontinental ballistic missile.
"Perhaps the most likely threat is from a suitcase nuclear weapon in a
rusty car on a dock in New York City," he said.
In a FEMA guide on terrorist disasters that is posted in part on the
White House's Web site, the agency warns that terrorists' use of a
nuclear weapon would "probably be limited to a single smaller
'suitcase' weapon."
"The strength of such a weapon would be in the range of the bombs used
during World War II. The nature of the effects would be the same as a
weapon delivered by an intercontinental missile, but the area and
severity of the effects would be significantly more limited," the paper
says.
___
THE GENIE THAT ESCAPED
During the 1960s, intelligence agencies received reports from
defectors that Soviet military intelligence officers were carrying
portable nuclear devices in suitcases.
The threat was too scary to stay secret, government officials said,
and word leaked out. The genie was never put back in the bottle.
But current and former government officials who have not spoken out
publicly on the subject acknowledge that no U.S. officials have seen a
Soviet-made suitcase nuke.
The idea of portable nuclear devices was not a new one.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the U.S. made the first ones, known as the
Special Atomic Demolition Munition. It was a "backpack nuke" that could
be used to blow up dams, tunnels or bridges. While one person could lug
it on his back, it had to be placed by a two-man team.
These devices never were used and now exist — minus their explosive
components — only in a museum.
Following the U.S. lead, the Soviets are believed to have made similar
nuclear devices.
Suitcase nukes have been a separate problem. They attracted
considerable public attention in 1997, thanks to a "60 Minutes"
interview and other public statements from retired Gen. Alexander
Lebed, once Russia's national security chief.
Lebed said the separatist government in Chechnya had portable nuclear
devices, which led him to create a commission to get to the bottom of
the Chechen arsenal, according to a Center for Nonproliferation Studies
report. He said that when he ran the security service, the commission
could find only 48 of 132 devices.
The numbers varied as he changed his story several times — sometimes
he stated that 100 or more were missing. The Russians denied he was
ever accurate.
Even more details emerged in the summer of 1998, when former Russian
military intelligence officer Stanislav Lunev — a defector in the U.S.
witness protection program — wrote in his book that Russian agents were
hiding suitcase nukes around the U.S. for use in a possible future
conflict.
"I had very clear instructions: These dead-drop positions would need
to be for all types of weapons, including nuclear weapons," Lunev
testified during a congressional hearing in California in 2000,
according to a Los Angeles Times account.
Naysayers noted that he was never able to pinpoint any specific
location.
In a 2004 interview with the Kremlin's Federal News Service, Colonel-
General Viktor Yesin, former head of the Russian strategic rocket
troops, said he believes that Lebed's commission may have been misled
by mock-ups of special mines used during training.
Yesin believed that a true suitcase nuke would be too expensive for
most countries to produce and would not last more than several months
because the nuclear core would decompose so quickly. "Nobody at the
present stage seeks to develop such devices," he asserted.
Some members of Congress remained convinced that the suitcase nuke
problem persists. Perhaps chief among these lawmakers was Curt Weldon,
a GOP representative from Pennsylvania who lost his seat in 2006.
Weldon was known for carrying around a mock-up of a suitcase nuke made
with a briefcase, foil and a pipe. But it was nowhere near the weight
of an actual atomic device.
___
THE SCIENCE
Majidi joined the FBI after leading Los Alamos National Laboratory's
prestigious chemistry division. He uses science to make the case that
suitcase nukes are not a top concern.
First, he defines what a Hollywood-esque suitcase nuke would look
like: a case about 24 inches by 10 inches by 12 inches, weighing less
than 50 pounds, that one person could carry. It would contain a device
that could cause a devastating blast.
Nuclear devices are either plutonium, which comes from reprocessing
the nuclear material from reactors, or uranium, which comes from
gradually enriching that naturally found element.
Majidi says it would take about 22 pounds of plutonium or 130 pounds
of uranium to create a nuclear detonation. Both would require
explosives to set off the blast, but significantly more for the
uranium.
Although uranium is considered easier for terrorists to obtain, it
would be too heavy for one person to lug around in a suitcase.
Plutonium, he notes, would require the cooperation of a state with a
plutonium reprocessing program. It seems highly unlikely that a country
would knowingly cooperate with terrorists because the device would bear
the chemical fingerprints of that government. "I don't think any nation
is willing to participate in this type of activity," Majidi said.
That means the fissile material probably would have to be stolen. "It
is very difficult for that much material to walk away," he added.
There is one more wrinkle: Nuclear devices require a lot of
maintenance because the material that makes them so deadly also can
wreak havoc on their electrical systems.
"The more compact the devices are — guess what? — the more frequently
they need to be maintained. Everything is compactly designed around
that radiation source, which damages everything over a period of time,"
Majidi said.
___
PROVING A NEGATIVE
A former CIA director, George Tenet, is convinced that al-Qaida wants
to change history with the mushroom cloud of a nuclear attack. In 1998,
Osama bin Laden issued a statement called "The Nuclear Bomb of Islam."
"It is the duty of Muslims to prepare as much force as possible to
terrorize the enemies of God," he said.
Among numerous of avenues of investigation after the Sept. 11 attacks,
Tenet said in his memoir that President Bush asked Russian President
Vladamir Putin whether he could account for all of Russia's nuclear
material. Choosing his words carefully, Tenet said, Putin replied that
he could only account for everything under his watch, leaving a void
before 2000.
Intelligence officials continued digging deeper, hearing more reports
about al-Qaida's efforts to get a weapon; that effort, it is believed,
has been to no avail, so far.
But intelligence officials are loath to dismiss a threat until they
are absolutely sure they have gotten to the bottom of it.
In the case of suitcase nukes, one official said, U.S. experts do not
have 100 percent certainty that they have a handle on the Russian
arsenal.
Laura Holgate, a vice president at the Nuclear Threat Initiative, says
the U.S. has not appropriately prioritized its responses to the nuclear
threat and, as a result, is poorly using its scarce resources.
Much to many people's surprise, she noted, highly enriched uranium —
outside of a weapon — is so benign that a person can hold it in his
hands and not face any ill effects until years later, if at all. It can
also slip through U.S. safeguards, she says.
The Homeland Security Department is planning to spend more than $1
billion on radiation detectors at ports of entry. But government
auditors found that the devices cannot distinguish between benign
radiation sources, such as kitty litter, and potentially dangerous
ones, including highly enriched uranium.
Holgate considers the substance the greatest threat because it exists
not only at nuclear weapons sites worldwide, but also in more than 100
civilian research facilities in dozens of countries, often with
inadequate security.
Her Washington-based nonproliferation organization wants to see the U.
S. get a better handle on the material that can be used for bombs —
much of it is in Russia — and secure it.
The big problem, she said, is not a fancy suitcase nuke, but rather a
terrorist cell with nuclear material that has enough knowledge to make
an improvised device.
How big would that be? "Like SUV-sized. Way bigger than a suitcase,"
she said.

Clayton J. Bradt
Assistant Bureau Director
BERP
NYS Dept. of Health
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