Posted on 09/22/2004 10:06:51 AM PDT by Area Freeper
A trained nuclear engineer using material the size of an orange could build an atomic bomb to fit into a van, proliferation expert Laura Holgate said, sketching a nightmare scenario of a terrorist attack on a major city.
She recalled that terrorists had attacked the World Trade Center in New York in 1993 with a van loaded with conventional explosives.
Holgate told reporters at a meeting in Vienna of the UN nuclear watchdog International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that it was "not widely shared and understood" how risky the current situation is, especially since terrorists would not necessarily need top-level scientists to build a bomb.
The nuclear threat remains the big one, and all too real, said Holgate, a senior member of the Washington-based Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) think tank and a former US Department of Energy (news - web sites) official for disposal of plutonium.
She said the "raw material for nuclear terrorism is housed in hundreds of facilities in dozens of countries and inadequately secured."
"That's the central point of the Global Threat Reduction Initiative" which the United States and Russia have launched to repatriate highly enriched uranium (HEU) and to convert nuclear research reactors from HEU to low enriched uranium (LEU) use.
"We know nuclear theft is happening already," she said, saying that one institute in Russia has documented "23 attempts over eight years to steal nuclear bomb-making materials."
"We know these failed. We don't know how many succeeded and went undetected," Holgate said.
She also said she did not think terrorists had yet a nuclear weapon. "If terrorist organizations had been able to do this (obtain one), they would have used it by now," Holgate said.
The stakes are high.
"A nuclear device going off in any large city around the globe is going to kill millions of people," she said.
"The economic damage can be in the trillions (of dollars) and it can also be global," she said.
"This is in contrast to a dirty-bomb threat that tends to be hyped," she said about concern that terrorists could use conventional bombs with radioactive materials, contaminating areas with radiation rather than destroying them with the blast of an atomic bomb.
Holgate said a problem in making sure that nuclear materials are not lying where terrorists can get them is that there is "lack of acceptance" within the Russian government that "their material is not adequately secured and that there is a relationship between terrorism and these materials."
But she said the Russians seemed to be more aware of the threat since the Beslan school tragedy and a recognition of "weaknesses" in the Russian system, due to bribes and poor security.
The United States and Russia have produced most of the highly radioactive material now spread throughout the world.
Holgate said the United States and the then-Soviet Union gave out 20 tonnes of HEU in the 1950s and 1960s as part of the Atoms for Peace program for the peaceful uses of nuclear energy.
"Keeping track of where this HEU is now kilogram by kilogram is difficult." she said.
In addition, over 1,000 tonnes were created by the United States and the Soviet Union for their weapons programs, and there is no minute accounting for this.
William Potter, from the Monterey Institute of International Studies, a California-based think tank, said that in addition the Soviet Union and now Russia have some seven icebreaker ships which use nuclear fuel enriched to about 60 percent, Potter said.
HEU is uranium enriched to over 20 percent, but weapons grade uranium starts at 80 percent enrichment for the U-235 isotope.
Holgate said terrorists could do without the sophistication needed for small bombs. "A truck size is probably a more relevant size," since such a bomb could be made with lower levels of HEU.
Most fissionable material is not dangerously radioactive. The exception is U-233.
Chernobyl released a lot more radioactive contamination than any nuclear weapon. The Chernobyl plant is still operating and people still work there.
Don't forget your decay ratios (seven-ten rule). After about two weeks, most of the "hot" stuff would be at an acceptable range.
Why would losing 1% of our population destroy the U.S? A lot of countries have lost a lot more than that and survived.
Right! So, would you say a 10 kt fission bomb would kill millions in Manhattan, or 10s of thousands? Best guess.
Correction: Chernobyl was shut down four years ago. After the explosion in 1986, the three remaining reactors continued in operation for 14 years.
It's not a numbers thing. NYC is the financial center of the planet and a huge percentage of our major corporations are headquartered there.
bttt
Or would he finally start leveling mosques-full of Moo terrorists, without worrying about bad PR?
I'd limit it to Medina and Mecca. It's really going to suck for a lot of Muslims when the pilgrimages are out of the question.
Not if it happened in the business district. If the fallout affected homes, then people would be relocated until the radiation fell to a safe level.
But in any case we have enough empty apartments and homes in this country to house at least ten million people.
The size of a nuclear weapon in the hands of terrorists would matter less than where and how it was deployed. Had I no education in such matters I'd probably scoff the alarm this proliferation expert is sounding. Up until five or six years ago I'd have scoffed the suggestion airliners could bring down modern skyscrapers too.
Think if the WTC was still intact and a Hiroshima sized nuclear device was detonated in the middle of the complex ALL of the people in those buildings would have been dead(at the height of the work day 50,000+ in the north and south towers alone). I could easily see the total death toll from a 10-15KT blast in one of the more popular downtown Manhattan sites to be well over 100,000 in the initial blast and more than double that over the next week or two. IMO
Yes, that might be a greater danger than a dirty bomb, but it still would be difficult to kill a lot of people. If the dose is too high people would smell the ozone from the gamma rays. And anyone who loitered in the area would get sick immediately. The area would have to be selected carefully. Placing it on a vehicle might make it more difficult to track down.
I'd agree you might get into the 100's of thousands dead. But not millions. Not with 10kt weapon.
People gather in NYC for big events and marches. MILLIONS of them pack together for marches and parades. I wouldn't say it's impossible. In any event we wouldn't be able to count the dead anyway.
I think tracking nuclear material is possible and we have technologies that make it very difficult to move those materials.
What concerns me is that "device" which the North Koreans exploded last week which left a 2.5 mile mushroom cloud and no nuclear signiture!
I read the tin foil sites because in the pre-911 Rumsfeld's Rules, there was one that said "Hire Paranoids - They have a high rate of failure, but the uncover almost all conspiracies" . They are calling that device a Plasma bomb - a new level of destruction and portablilty. Perhaps it was something akin to the Red Mercury device that the Soviets produced.
It's just theorizing anyway. I didn't like the alarmist approach of the author. Now, if the terrorists detonated a fusion bomb....well, that's just indescribable.
Ummm no.
That statement is in the same category as "irradiated food will kill ya".
Let's let the DU types spread disinformation, shall we? For obvious reasons, no further discussion is appropriate.
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