The Race to Save L.A. from Nuclear Terror

By Tad Daley, LA City Beat. Posted July 25, 2008.

I once asked a journalist friend, who had been chained inside the courtroom every single day of the O.J. Simpson trial, the obvious question. "Did he do it?" Or had the LAPD, instead, planted a boatload full of fake "evidence," in an effort to frame the famous defendant?

"How do you know," she replied, "that it wasn't both?"

These days, working as a policy wonk on nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament, I am sometimes asked whether the danger of nuclear terror is "real" -- or whether, instead, certain modern-day Machiavellis are manipulating our most nightmarish fears, to promote their own cynical political agendas.

"How do you know," I am inclined to reply, "that it isn't both?"

Nuclear Terror -- Mission Impossible?

During the Cold War, it became commonplace to observe that "mutually assured destruction," or MAD, was surely the most appropriate acronym in human history. But I have always preferred the label given to fun characters like me who study these things, "nuclear use theorists," whom one can hardly resist acronyming as NUTS.

The NUTS today usually identify four broad scenarios that can loosely be called "nuclear terror." (This is the framework adopted, for example, by the excellent 2005 book The Four Faces of Nuclear Terrorism by Charles D. Ferguson and William C. Potter.)

In one, perpetrators obtain -- through theft, bribery, a paramilitary operation, pick your poison -- an intact nuclear warhead. There are probably more than 25,000 worldwide. Then, they find a way to transport it to a "high-value target" (e.g., a large American city). Then, they find a way to set it off. The sudden and unexpected vaporization of a major American city, without any warning whatsoever, by your everyday garden-variety nuclear warhead, would kill tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, possibly even more than a million. All in the blink of an eye, the snap of a finger, the single beat of a human heart. Many thousands more would die slow and agonizing deaths from radiation poisoning in the weeks that followed -- and all our modern medical marvels will do little even to alleviate their suffering, let alone to save their lives.

It could also plunge the planet into a worldwide depression. It could plunge the U.S. into martial law. It could plunge the nation into military responses -- without evidence any state was behind the dastardly deed -- that could take us from nuclear terror to nuclear war. In which case, the death and devastation would increase by a factor of 10. Or 100. Or more. (Khrushchev famously observed that after a nuclear exchange, "the survivors will envy the dead.")

In another scenario, perpetrators obtain -- through similar methods -- weapons-usable plutonium or highly enriched uranium (HEU). (The latter is far more likely, since HEU is easier to handle, easier to procure, and easier to design a bomb around.) Then they manage to assemble it into a crude nuclear device, transport it to the target (unless they had actually built it in, oh, a warehouse in Culver City), and set it off. If successfully constructed with a large enough yield, such an act could have identical consequences.

In another scenario, perpetrators attack or sabotage a nuclear power plant, causing not a nuclear explosion but a release of radioactivity. Such an act could kill thousands, and contaminate hundreds of square miles for many years to come.

Finally, perpetrators obtain a bit of radioactive material, assemble a conventional explosive around it, and set it off in a concentrated urban area -- discharging radioactivity in all directions. That's the "dirty bomb" you have heard so much about. While such a bomb could kill hundreds, contaminate several square miles, and impose a widespread psychological shock, its consequences would be nothing like those of an actual nuclear explosion.

Our focus today is on the first two scenarios. They are probably less likely than the last two scenarios. Nevertheless, they are enormously, almost inconceivably, more catastrophic.

In a disturbing article in the November/December 2006 issue of Foreign Policy magazine, Peter D. Zimmerman and Jeffrey G. Lewis constructed a chillingly plausible nuclear terror scenario. Zimmerman and Lewis argued that such a project could be undertaken by as few as 19 terrorist operatives, including a few nuclear physicists, a few expert machinists, an experienced metallurgist, perhaps one or two ballistics specialists, and perhaps a couple of electrical engineers. This team, the authors claim, in the space of a year, for a cost of less than $5.5 million, could easily construct the kind of simple gun-like device that killed more than 100,000 people at Hiroshima.

But only if, first, they had managed to procure the necessary HEU. Is that possible? Let's ask Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency and winner of the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize. In a speech in Munich in February, he said that his agency tackles 150 cases of illicit nuclear trafficking every year. Some of the material reported stolen has never been recovered, he said, and "a lot of the material recovered has never been reported stolen."

Right next to Foreign Policy on the newsstands that same month, in the November/December 2006 issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Nick Schwellenbach and Peter D.H. Stockton presented a terrifying new nuclear nightmare. Suicide terrorists might launch a lightning paramilitary operation on an American nuclear facility, barricade themselves inside, and quickly improvise a nuclear detonation right there. How? Unbelievably, simply by holding 100 pounds of HEU six feet above a similar mass, and letting go -- giving disturbing new meaning to the phrase "dropping the atom bomb." Luis Alvarez, Nobel Laureate in Physics, said famously more than two decades ago, "With modern weapons-grade uranium, terrorists, if they have such material, would have a good chance of setting off a high-yield explosion simply by dropping one half of the material onto the other half. Most people seem unaware that if separated U-235 is at hand, it's a trivial job to set off a nuclear explosion."

See more stories tagged with: terrorism, al qaeda, nuclear weapons, nuclear attack

Tad Daley, www.daleyplanet.org, is Writing Fellow with the Nobel Peace Laureate organization International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, www.ippnw.org, and its International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, www.icanw.org. He served in the past as a foreign policy advisor to Congressman Dennis Kucinich, Congresswoman Diane Watson, and the late U.S. Senator Alan Cranston. He lives and works in Los Angeles and finds the city terribly annoying at times, but on balance would like to keep it around.

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