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The Race to Save L.A. from Nuclear Terror

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


Is there anything we can do to prevent the loss of a city?
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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."


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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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The 5th (and worst) scenario!
Posted by: jhecht on Jul 26, 2008 5:55 AM   
Current rating: 5    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
>The NUTS today usually identify four broad scenarios that can loosely be called "nuclear terror."

It is not necessary for terrorists to raid nuclear plants to get nuclear material. The US military has provided it to them free of charge, in the form of depleted uranium, used in bullets, bombs and armor worldwide by the US (and other) military forces. But the US was the first, and remains the front runner.

It's hard to know how much DU has been made available to terrorists by its use in weapons systems, but at a minimum, many thousand of TONS have been used in Iraq, Iran, and other battle zones. Almost all of it is recoverable.

DU is not only radioactive, it is poisonous, and also pyrophoric - it burns when ignited - and it's easy to ignite. So the US has provided the terrorists of the world with an ideal weapon if such a use of the word can be allowed.

Here's a simple recipe for the cheapest dirty bomb in the world:

1-Gather up enough of the DU that the US has used so liberally to fill a 55 gallon drum.
2-Grind it into a fine powder. The workers who do so will die - but what's that to a jihadist who longs to cavort with 72 virgins in Paradise?
3-Fill the drum with the powdered DU, smuggle it into an American city - maybe a port city. Sheathe the drum with lead to get it past radiation detectors.
4-Ignite the DU with a conventional explosive, or thermite. This will create a vast cloud of poisonous, radioactive material that will cover miles. The DU will disperse as micron sized particles. It will pollute the land, the water, the buildings, and people will breathe it in, eat it, and drink it. Once in the human body, these micron sized particles cannot be dislodged, and will eventually cause cancer and many other diseases. So the immediate casualties are only the tip of the iceberg...

And before anyone tries to criticize me for laying this scenario out, it is common knowledge for those of us who know the real facts. There is no new information here, nothing that has not been publicly known for decades. The real question is, why has this not already been implemented? God must truly love us, to so shelter us from our folly.

So we have a MUCH more difficult task ahead than just keeping conventional nukes away from terrorists. We must ALSO clean up the VAST amount of DU that the US has so conveniently made available to radical groups worldwide. How nice of us to freely provide refined uranium to those who lack the ability to refine it themselves. The US has sown dragon's teeth globally, I fear what we will reap...

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Excellent article
Posted by: AngryWhiteFemale on Jul 31, 2008 2:09 PM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
Thanks for the ippnw link. I believe Kucinich quoted them in a YouTube video discussing how deadly it would be for us or Israel to attack Iran's nuclear facilities using bunker buster bombs. The ensuing fallout would kill over 2 million within 48 hours. And is anyone thinking of the NATO troops in Afghanistan when the fallout drifts east as of course it will?

Yet the folly we witness is Israel making overt threats to attack Iran sometime between the US elections and the inauguration in January and Darth Cheney foaming at the mouth to attack Iran before he leaves office. (Remember also that our UN mandate to occupy Iraq expires 12/31/08. If Iraq does not assent to a Status of Forces agreement -which the Parliament says it won't unless there is a concrete timetable for withdrawl- then we will be there illegally. Israel needs to fly over Iraqi airspace to attack Iran. We control Iraqi airspace. Disturbing)
Here's the link:
The US Government's Mindless Threats

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