Addressing the Unthinkable, U.S. Revives Study of Fallout

["Gerry Blackwood" <gpblackwood@justice.com>]

Note: Scary thoughts especially with the FBI as lead..... Gerry





March 19, 2004

Addressing the Unthinkable, U.S. Revives Study of Fallout

By WILLIAM J. BROAD

 

o cope with the possibility that terrorists might someday

detonate a nuclear bomb on American soil, the federal government

is reviving a scientific art that was lost after the cold war:

fallout analysis.



The goal, officials and weapons experts both inside and outside

the government say, is to figure out quickly who exploded such a

bomb and where the nuclear material came from. That would clarify

the options for striking back. Officials also hope that if

terrorists know a bomb can be traced, they will be less likely to

try to use one.



In a secretive effort that began five years ago but whose

outlines are just now becoming known, the government's network of

weapons laboratories is hiring new experts, calling in

old-timers, dusting off data and holding drills to sharpen its

ability to do what is euphemistically known as nuclear

attribution or post-event forensics.



It is also building robots that would go into an affected area

and take radioactive samples, as well as field stations that

would dilute dangerous material for safe shipment to national

laboratories.



"Certainly, there's a frightening aspect in all of this," said

Charles B. Richardson, the project leader for nuclear

identification research at the Sandia National Laboratories in

Albuquerque. "But we're putting all these things together with

the hope that they'll never have to be used."



Most experts say the risk of a terrorist nuclear attack is low

but no longer unthinkable, given the spread of material and

know-how around the globe.



Dr. Jay C. Davis, a nuclear scientist who in 1999 helped found

the Pentagon's part of the governmentwide effort, said the

precautions would "pay huge dividends after the event, both in

terms of the ability to identify the bad actor and in terms of

establishing public trust."



In a nuclear crisis, Dr. Davis added, the identification effort

would be vital in "dealing with the desire for instant

gratification through vengeance."



Vice President Dick Cheney was briefed on the program last fall,

Dr. Davis said. The National Security Council coordinates the

work among a dozen or so federal agencies.



The basic science relies on faint clues . tiny bits of

radioactive fallout, often invisible to the eye, that under

intense scrutiny can reveal distinctive signatures. Such wisps of

evidence can help identify an exploded bomb's type and

characteristics, including its country of origin.



Solving the nuclear whodunit could take much more information,

including hard-won law enforcement clues and good intelligence on

foreign nuclear arms and terrorist groups. For that reason,

several federal agencies are involved in the program, among them

the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of

Investigation.



The program addresses true nuclear weapons as well as so-called

dirty bombs, ordinary explosives that spew radioactive debris.



"It's a very hard job," said William Happer, a physicist at

Princeton who led a panel that evaluated the identification work.



Mr. Happer said he was worried that a rush for retribution after

a nuclear attack might cut short the time needed for careful

analysis. "If we lose a city," he said, "we might not wait around

that long."



The effort to fingerprint domestic nuclear blasts is part of a

larger federal project to strengthen the nation's overall

defenses against unconventional terrorist threats. Mostly, the

goal is prevention. For instance, the government recently sent

teams of scientists with hidden radiation detectors to check

major American cities for signs that terrorists might be

preparing to detonate radiological bombs.



In contrast, the identification program seeks to increase the

government's knowledge and options should prevention fail. "We're

trying to resurrect some of our capability," said Reid Worlton, a

retired nuclear scientist from the Los Alamos weapons laboratory

in New Mexico who has been called in to aid the fallout endeavor.

"It sort of died. They're not doing radiochemistry on nuclear

tests anymore, so it's hard to keep these people around."



The effort draws on work that began at the dawn of the atomic

era. Scientists working on the Manhattan Project built an array

of devices to monitor nuclear blasts in the New Mexico desert in

July 1945 and at Hiroshima and Nagasaki a month later. The

experience helped scientists learn what to look for.



The first hunt zeroed in on the Soviet Union. In the late 1940's,

military weather planes used paper filters to gather dust

particles around the periphery of Russia, and scientists in the

United States who analyzed the data at first sounded dozens of

false alarms, said Jeffrey T. Richelson, an intelligence expert

in Washington.



Then, on Sept. 3, 1949, a weather plane flying from Japan to

Alaska picked up a slew of atomic particles. "That was the real

thing," Mr. Richelson said. Twenty days later, President Harry S.

Truman announced that the Soviets had exploded their first

nuclear device.



The ranks of fallout investigators swelled during the cold war as

foreign nations conducted hundreds of atmospheric nuclear tests.

By all accounts, the sleuths made many important discoveries

about the nature and design of foreign nuclear arms.



In time, the ranks dwindled as more and more nations decided to

move their test explosions underground, eliminating fallout. The

last nuclear blast to pummel the earth's atmosphere was in 1980,

and the last known underground test, conducted by Pakistan, was

in 1998.



As the terrorist threat rose in the 1990's, the government began

to consider the quandary that would arise if a nuclear weapon

exploded on American soil. In 1999, Dr. Davis, then head of the

Defense Threat Reduction Agency at the Pentagon, began an effort

to address the identification problem by financing research at

the nation's weapons laboratories, many of them run by the Energy

Department.



The first money came in late 2000, Dr. Davis said, and the

attacks of September 2001 "made it clear that a very organized

event on a large scale was credible." That perception, he said,

helped the effort expand.



The secretive work won rare public praise in a June 2002 report

("Making the Nation Safer") from the National Research Council of

the National Academies, the country's leading scientific advisory

group. Having the ability to find out who launched a domestic

nuclear strike, the report said, could deter attackers and

bolster threats of retaliation. The report urged that the program

go into operation "as quickly as practical" and that the

government publicly declare its existence.



Since then, weapons laboratories and other federal agencies have

worked hard on the problem. "They're making progress but they've

got a ways to go," said Mr. Worlton, the retired Los Alamos

scientist.



In a drill this year, dozens of federal experts in fallout

analysis met at the Sandia laboratories in Albuquerque to study a

simulated terrorist nuclear blast. Mr. Worlton said they were

broken into teams and given radiological data from two old

American nuclear tests, whose identities remained hidden, and

were instructed to try to name them. Some teams succeeded, he

said.



Mr. Richardson of Sandia said the laboratory was developing a

land robot that could roll up to 10 miles to sample fallout and

return it to human operators for analysis. It could also radio

back some results if it became stuck. Mr. Richardson said the

robots, now in development, are to be ready in a couple of years.



Experts say a new aircraft for atmospheric sampling of nuclear

fallout is also in development. The Air Force currently has one,

the WC-135W Constant Phoenix, for such work. It was first

deployed in 1965.



Weapons experts say getting samples fast is important because

some radioactive debris can decay rapidly. If captured quickly,

they can shed light on a weapon's design.



One way of trying to identify a bomb's origin positively, several

experts say, is to match debris signatures with libraries of

classified data about nuclear arms around the world, including

old fallout signatures and more direct intelligence about bomb

types, characteristics and construction materials.



"If you're talking about a stolen device, you might try to do

that," Mr. Richardson said. "But if it's improvised, that's less

likely to work. It might not look like things you've seen before."



A further complication is that even knowing who made a bomb may

say little about who detonated it. In a 1991 Tom Clancy novel,

"The Sum of All Fears," Islamic terrorists find and rebuild an

Israeli nuclear weapon and set it off at the Super Bowl.



Federal experts say complex threat scenarios (for instance, an

American warhead being stolen and detonated in an American city)

mean that many types of intelligence might be needed for

successful identification. Over all, it is unclear how much money

the government is spending on the effort.



Private experts offered suggestions for improvement. Dr. Happer

of Princeton, who heads a university board that helps oversee

campus research, said the program might be cooperating too little

with nuclear allies. "It's to our advantage," he said, "for all

of us to share."



Dr. Davis, the former head of the Defense Threat Reduction

Agency, made several policy recommendations last April in an

article for The Journal of Homeland Security. He said the F.B.I.

should lead the program, presidentially appointed overseers

should guide it, goals should be set for how long analyses should

take and legal issues of prosecution should be examined.



In an interview, Dr. Davis said his suggestions had made little

headway, partly because of the topic's grisly nature. "This is an

ugly subject because your best effort is going to be barely

adequate," he said. "That's not the kind of phrase people like to

hear."



Mr. Richardson of Sandia said that the attribution effort had

made good technical progress and had already some ability to

identify an attacker.



"We're hoping for deterrence," he said. "We don't want anybody to

think they can get away with it."



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