'A Five Star Disaster For The World'

IT IS a potential nuclear smuggling route that has terrified the West since Pakistan detonated its first nuclear weapon three years ago. Bomb-making materials stolen from any of Pakistan’s 11 nuclear sites would have to cross just one ill-guarded border to be delivered to Osama bin Laden.
The report in The Times today of components for a nuclear weapon reaching bin Laden via Pakistan suggests this worst fear in the war on terror may have been realised. If proven, it would be “a five-star disaster for the world”, one of America’s leading non-proliferation experts said last night.

It would also focus international attention on two Pakistani nuclear scientists arrested this week, and on an alleged Pakistani intelligence agent whom US undercover agents heard say he wanted to “kill all Americans”. (Our allies?)

Pakistan has between 30 and 120 nuclear weapons, built with components smuggled from Germany and The Netherlands in the 1980s.

President Musharraf has declined US offers of increased “perimeter security” for his research reactors and nuclear storage sites, insisting they are completely safe, but other sources tell a different story.

The Pakistani connection to bin Laden’s efforts to acquire nuclear weapons came to the FBI’s attention two years ago. Raja Ghulam Abbas, linked by the US to both bin Laden and Pakistan’s ISI intelligence agency, met an FBI informer for lunch at a Manhattan restaurant within view of the World Trade Centre, and told him he wanted the twin towers “reduced to rubble”

. Allowed to return to Pakistan, Abbas later placed an order with an undercover agent from the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, according to American court papers, for 500 Stinger missiles and six nuclear switches needed to trigger a chain reaction.

The switches were not sent, but the British claim that bin Laden has obtained materials for a bomb remains all too plausible. Abbas is still at large and the ISI’s sympathies for the Taleban and bin Laden are well-known. Fears that similar views may have weakened security in Pakistan’s nuclear weapons programme deepened this week with the arrests of Bashir uddin Mahmood and Chaudry Abdul Majid, two former senior officials in the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission, who were being questioned yesterday about their support for the Taleban.

“This is horrible,” Gary Milhollin, director of the Washington-based Wisconsin Project, an anti-proliferation think-tank, said of the latest intelligence on bin Laden’s nuclear potential. “If this is true it means Pakistan is a proliferator to America’s worst enemy.”

Mr Milhollin cautioned that it would be much harder for bin Laden to obtain fissile material than the components needed to detonate it: 16 kilograms of highly enriched uranium (HEU) or roughly five kilograms of plutonium are the minimum needed for a nuclear weapon and Pakistan has a system to account for its nuclear material “down to the last gram”, he said.

However, the International Atomic Energy Authority has recorded hundreds of confirmed cases of attempted nuclear smuggling via Germany, Bulgaria, Turkey, Georgia and Central Asia.

In the latest smuggling incident, four pounds of HEU was confiscated from an hotel room in the Georgian resort town of Batumi less than three months ago. Since the September attacks, Ivan Ivanov, a Bulgarian businessman, has claimed that bin Laden approached him in Pakistan in April with an order for nuclear fuel from Bulgaria’s Kosloduj research reactor.

Experts said it was impossible to rule out bin Laden acquiring the components for nuclear weapons from rogue elements in Pakistan, while accumulating the fuel from the global nuclear black market.

FRIDAY OCTOBER 26 2001

Bin Laden's nuclear threat

BY PHILIP WEBSTER AND ROLAND WATSON

OSAMA BIN LADEN and his al-Qaeda network have acquired nuclear materials for possible use in their terrorism war against the West, intelligence sources have disclosed.
The Western sources say that the suspected mastermind of the September 11 attacks on America does not have the capability to mount a nuclear attack but fear he would do so if he could.

They believe that he obtained the materials illegally from Pakistan, which has a nuclear capability.

The knowledge that bin Laden has components for a nuclear weapons device in his arsenal is believed to lie behind the regular warnings from President Bush and Tony Blair that he would commit worse atrocities than the suicide assaults on New York and Washington if he were able to.

They may also explain the speed with which the decision was taken to go after bin Laden and his terrorist network, even if that meant toppling the Taleban regime in Afghanistan first.

The disclosure comes as MPs prepare to learn today the details of British troops earmarked for deployment to Afghanistan. They will include a commando group of about 1,000 Royal Marines, currently on exercise in Oman, as well as a large contingent of special forces and specialist support units. The force will be based on ships that have also been participating in the huge tri-Service exercise. They are expected to include the aircraft carrier HMS Illustrious, stripped of her Harrier jets so she can be used as a platform for helicopters, or HMS Ocean, a dedicated helicopter carrier, two anti-aircraft destroyers to protect the carrier, the assault ship HMS Fearless, and two Royal Fleet Auxiliary support vessels.

Yesterday Mr Blair sought to reassure Muslim leaders that the military action in Afghanistan should be over as quickly as possible. He told the Islamic Response to Terrorism Conference in North London: “I hope you understand that what is important is that we make sure at the same time we take the action necessary now in order to hold to account those who commited the actions of September 11.”

There has been clear evidence for several years that bin Laden’s agents have been trying to buy, steal or smuggle nuclear systems in order to attack the West. He has said that it was his “religious duty” to seek to acquire chemical, biological and nuclear weapons of mass destruction.(Repeat after me, It's not about religion and we love Muslims)

An informed source has told The Times that bin Laden appeared to have amassed a “terrifying” range of weapons although he was insistent that he did not have the capacity to launch a nuclear attack.

Intelligence sources, however, have voiced concerns about bin Laden obtaining radioactive material for a “dirty bomb”. Rather than being used in an atomic weapon, the material would be dispersed in a way that would seriously contaminate a small area. In an urban environment hundreds of people could die and thousands more be exposed to radiation poisoning.

In 1993 a senior bin Laden operative, Jamal al-Fadi, met a Sudanese military commander in Khartoum to try to negotiate the sale of a cylinder of enriched South African uranium for a black market price of $1.5 million (£1.2 million). A separate al-Qaeda attempt to buy weapons-grade nuclear material through the Russian mafia was foiled in Prague when several kilograms of highly enriched uranium were seized, according to a German TV report last week.

Earlier this week two former government nuclear scientists in Pakistan were detained amid fears about their links with the Taleban. Bashir uddin Mahmood was project director in Pakistan’s nuclear programme before its 1998 tests. Since retiring from the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission three years ago, he ran a group which carried out relief work in Afghanistan, and was known to be supportive of the Taleban. Chaudry Abdul Majid was a director of the commission in 1999.

Intelligence officials have long been aware of the potential for contraband uranium to be turned into an atomic “suitcase bomb”. An easier outcome is a radiological weapon — a conventional weapon with a radioactive core — which had the potential to contaminate large areas.

George Tenet, Director of the CIA, told the Senate Intelligence Committee last year that bin Laden was trying to obtain nuclear materials.

However, some are convinced bin Laden already has a nuclear capability. According to a book about the terrorist leader, The Man Who Declared War on America, Chechen rebels facilitated the sale of nuclear suitcase bombs in the late 1990s from a range of former Soviet republics.

Quoting Russian and Arab intelligence sources, the author, Yossef Bodansky, says that bin Laden’s go-betweens paid the Chechens $30 million in cash and gave them two tonnes of heroin with a Western street value of up to $700 million for a number of bombs.

In 1998 bin Laden issued a statement entitled “The Nuclear Bomb of Islam”, which said: “It is the duty of Muslims to prepare as much force as possible to terrorise the enemies of God.”

FRIDAY OCTOBER 26 2001

'Dirty' bomb could wipe out thousands

NIGEL HAWKES ON BIN LADEN'S SECRET WEAPON

NUCLEAR terrorism, the ultimate nightmare, could come in many forms, say experts who have studied the possibilities. The least likely of all is the explosion of a nuclear warhead, although there are thousands in the world. To achieve that, a terrorist group would either need to acquire a complete warhead from one of the current nuclear weapons powers, or the material and the know-how to make its own.

While neither is impossible, they do not make much sense from a terrorist’s point of view.

Much simpler, and equally terrifying, would be to create a dirty bomb from nuclear waste material and conventional explosives.

Setting it off in a city would spew lethal radioactivity over a considerable distance, causing many casualties and rendering whole neighbourhoods uninhabitable.

Bruce Blair, president of the Centre for Defence Information in Washington DC, estimated in a recent report that a dynamite-laden casket of spent fuel from a nuclear power station, detonated in Manhattan at noon, might kill 2,000 people and leave many thousands more with radiation poisoning.

It is quite possible that bin Laden’s terrorist organisation already possesses the material for this kind of “nuclear bomb”.

Earlier this year customs officers on the border between Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan seized ten canisters of radioactive material bound allegedly for Quetta in Pakistan. Some have suggested that their true destination was bin Laden.

Real nuclear weapons are a very different proposition. There are several possible sources from which bin Laden might have acquired one: Pakistan, the former Soviet Union, or, just possibly, Iraq.

Pakistan has about three dozen nuclear weapons, all based on highly enriched uranium.

But experts such as George Perkovich of the W. Alton Jones Foundation in Charlottsville, Virginia, believes that the fissile cores are kept apart from the warheads, which contain the electronics needed to detonate them.

Unless bin Laden had enormous help from supporters within the Pakistan nuclear organisations it would have been impossible to obtain both components and re-unite them. One without the other would not be much use.

All a nuclear weapon requires to detonate, technically, is a critical mass of either highly enriched uranium or plutonium and a source of neutrons to start the chain reaction. But in practice, engineering a successful nuclear weapon is a lot harder than this. Simply hurling two sub-critical masses of uranium together would be likely to produce more of a fizzle than a bang.

True, plenty of accounts of nuclear weapons that are publicly available provide more details of how to make them, but experts still believe that this is beyond the capabilities of bin Laden.

Such a primitive bomb would be too large for easy transport. It would be much better, from bin Laden’s point of view, to acquire a complete bomb, miniaturised to make it no larger than a small refrigerator.

The Soviet Union is said to have made several hundred such “suitcase” weapons, each capable of a one-kiloton explosion — though the Russians deny it.

Since the Soviet Union broke up there have been many reports of such weapons going missing. Russian General Aleksandr Lebed has testified to the United States Congress that 84 of the devices cannot be accounted for.

Mr Blair says the consensus among Western experts is that, while Russia may be unable to account for them all, the chances are that they have been dismantled and are in storage somewhere, and it is the paperwork needed to trace them that has gone missing.

A suitcase bomb, should bin Laden’s group be able to transport and detonate it, would cause thousands of casualties.

But the most plausible hypothesis is that bin Laden’s bomb, if it exists, consists of nuclear waste wrapped around plastic explosive. That is quite frightening enough.

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