Posted on 06/15/2002 5:29:00 PM PDT by vannrox
BY DAVID HUGHES
If you were planning to build a nuclear bomb, you would probably want to visit your local library to read such classics as Los Alamos Primer: First Lectures On How To Build An Atomic Bomb. Although not exactly a blueprint, the book is considered a good guide to the physics of nuclear fission. Saddam Hussein's bomb development team had a copy in its library, and you can obtain one for $27.50 by calling the University of California Press. The Boston Public Library bought two copies in 1992, but a clerk there recently admitted that the circulating copy is missing.
Nuclear-weapons experts are familiar with the book, a transcription of talks delivered at the onset of the Manhattan Project. Theodore B. Taylor, a retired U.S. nuclear-weapons designer who also served as the deputy director of the Pentagon's nuclear agency in the 1960s, knows the title well. In fact, Taylor says he would fail any student assigned to find open-literature publications about nuclear weapons if the student didn't come up with Los Alamos Primer.
"There is a lot more information in the public domain that was not there 10 years ago," acknowledges Terry Hawkins, deputy director of the nonproliferation and international security division at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Declassification and open-literature publication have driven this trend, he notes. "There is so much information floating around," adds his colleague Robert Kelley, who manages the Los Alamos nuclear emergency and proliferation response effort, "and it offers a person so many choices that he is often confused."
Although the U.S. government has been worried about nuclear terrorism and extortion for years, the ready availability of information has recently heightened fears. So has the availability of fissionable material. As the former Soviet empire continues to crumble, its nuclear materials have become tempting targets for smugglers and organized crime.
A third factor that piques concern is the emergence of religiously motivated terrorist groups, bent on causing mass death without regard to political considerations. This marks a change from the days when politically motivated terrorist groups such as the Red Brigade engaged in murder and kidnapping but rarely tried to inflict a large number of casualties.
Department of Energy's Nuclear Emergency Search Team trains to identify and neutralize terrorist devices. Above, dense foam is used to contain radioactive material should a bomb's conventional explosives go off. Disarming personnel work inside the foam. PHOTO BY LOS ALAMOS NATIONAL LABORATORY
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During the Cold War, the difficulty and expense of obtaining nuclear materials provided a barrier against nuclear terrorism. "That barrier is not as formidable as it once was," says Hawkins. "If a terrorist group or rogue state gets ahold of such material from smugglers, they solve the single most difficult problem in building a bomb."
From a security standpoint, the good news is that the Russian military is believed to be keeping a tight grip on strategic and tactical nuclear warheads. But it is also in the process of dismantling many of these weapons, creating stockpiles of bomb-grade plutonium and highly enriched uranium. The bad news is that at civilian laboratories fissionable material is not as closely guarded as it is in the West.
This has led to a series of smuggling incidents involving plutonium, highly enriched uranium and other bomb-related materials. In any one case, the police have not found enough material to make a bomb. In some instances, including the well-publicized Munich arrests of August 1994, the smugglers were simply falling for a sting operation and selling wares to undercover agents.
The U.S. Department of Energy national laboratories are working closely with their Russian counterparts to improve security, mainly by transferring commercially available Western technology to former Soviet facilities. But progress is slow. "One kilogram under control is only one kilogram under control," says Hawkins. "We have to work one kilogram at a time."
It will take Russia years to properly account for all the material it has--much less determine if any is missing. That raises concern now, because it takes only 30 to 50 pounds of highly enriched uranium or 10 to 20 pounds of plutonium to make a bomb.
In August 1994, German police netted 10 ounces of high-purity plutonium via a sting operation at the Munich airport. AP/WIDE WORLD PHOTO
According to physicist David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington, D.C., there are more than 1700 tons of highly enriched uranium and 1100 tons of plutonium in the world. Only 22% of the plutonium is under military control, while the rest is spent fuel from reactors or plutonium already separated from that spent fuel. Despite claims to the contrary, reactor-grade plutonium can be used to make a bomb. In fact, in 1962 the Defense Department set off a bomb (yielding just under 20 kilotons) made of reactor-grade plutonium--just to see if it could be done.
Homebuilt Horror
Experts disagree on how difficult it would be for a terrorist group to fabricate a crude nuclear device--one able to deliver at least a one-kiloton blast (1000 times the impact of the World Trade Center bomb). Taylor believes a single individual working alone could do it, given access to enough fissionable material. Taylor, who designed one of the largest as well as one of the smallest nuclear weapons ever developed by the United States, doesn't believe that industrial-grade machine tools would be required.
Another weapons specialist points out that many of the components needed to build a nuclear device are on a list of limited-access items, adding that "you can't buy a fast-firing fuse set by just walking into Sears." But this expert concedes that while the threat of someone building a nuclear bomb in a basement is low, it isn't nonexistent.
On the other hand, J. Carson Mark, former head of nuclear-weapons development at Los Alamos, doesn't think a lone individual could build a bomb unless that person could master several disciplines. Mark believes it would take a team of specialists about a year. The group would have to include a nuclear physicist, a mechanical engineer, a chemist, an explosives expert, a mathematician and others.
Although it might be possible to develop a bomb in a year, history suggests otherwise. Kelley points out that South Africa spent four years creating a gun-type device that used highly enriched uranium. A small team of 10 to 20 people designed the weapon, and a large infrastructure was required to produce the highly enriched uranium.
While the lone-wolf scenario is still taken seriously, the U.S. government is clearly more worried about state-sponsored terrorism or a rogue state developing a nuclear weapon. And if such a nation obtained enough nuclear material from smugglers to make a weapon, it wouldn't need the telltale reactors and reprocessing facilities that usually tip off intelligence agencies to a bomb-development effort.
Another worry is that terrorists might resort to a conventional bomb laced with radioactive material. Spread around by an explosion, the material would be a nightmare to clean up. "You really don't need to have a mushroom cloud to have an effective nuclear device," says Peter S. Probst, one of the authors of a recent Pentagon study on terrorism. He calls a radioactivity-dispersal device a "weapon of mass disruption" rather than a weapon of mass destruction.
ATOM robot rolls into airliftable trailer.
PHOTO BY LAWRENCE LIVERMORE NATIONAL LABORATORIES
Bomb Squad
The FBI would lead any response to nuclear terrorism in the United States, while the State Department would respond to any request for help abroad. In either case, these agencies would be backed up by a Department of Energy Nuclear Emergency Search Team (NEST). The role of NEST is to deal with a nuclear device in such a manner that it cannot produce a nuclear yield.
NEST members are all volunteers. They include scientists, engineers, technicians and support personnel from facilities such as Los Alamos, Sandia and Lawrence Livermore national laboratories. Because NEST includes weapon and firing-mechanism designers, it is capable of identifying and disabling a nuclear device. In conjunction, the Defense Department has explosive-ordnance disposal teams trained to handle U.S. nuclear-weapons accidents.
Lisa Gordon Hagerty, director of the Department of Energy's office of emergency response, has the authority to activate NEST. The team's size would depend on the threat, but its mission would be the same: search for the device, pinpoint its potential for a nuclear yield and disable it. That does not necessarily mean taking it apart.
According to Hagerty, NEST tries to neutralize a bomb without having its members come in physical contact with it. One way is to send out the Automated Tether-Operated Manipulator (ATOM), a wheeled robot with a remote-control arm. Via a long umbilical cord, ATOM can be managed from miles away. Stereo video cameras allow the teleoperator to see in front of the robot, while a third camera provides a closeup of the arm's gripping mechanism.
NEST can also call in the Department of Energy's aerial-surveillance aircraft--normally used to monitor nuclear powerplants and mining sites--to find radiation hot spots.
Funding for NEST's technologies--which also include remote diagnostic equipment that can characterize nuclear materials from afar--has increased nearly 50% over the past three years. But officials are concerned that a shrinking Department of Energy is causing many of the volunteer experts to walk out the door.
The threat of nuclear terrorism, meanwhile, has not gone unnoticed by Congress. The Comprehensive Antiterrorism Act of 1995 includes provisions for greater criminal penalties--up to life imprisonment--for any American citizen who obtains nuclear materials illegally.
So Theodore B. Taylor was clearly ahead of his time. In the early 1970s, he responded to questions from author John McPhee about nuclear terrorism by taking the writer on a tour of the World Trade Center. Back then, Taylor calculated that a crude, low-yield bomb of half a kiloton placed on the front steps could knock the twin towers into the Hudson River. It would take only a dozen kilos of plutonium-oxide powder, some high explosives and some items from a hardware store to kill 50,000 people.
"I think [nuclear terrorism] is a realistic possibility and one which becomes more likely as time goes by," says Taylor. "I am grateful for the acts of grace that have prevented it from happening so far."
Portable X-ray equipment identifies nuclear materials from a distance. PHOTO BY LOS ALAMOS NATIONAL LABORATORY
They are also not constrained to making efficient weapons. If they simply get enough material to exceed a critical mass, whether uranium or plutonium, they can make a viable and very destructive bomb. The simplest design is nothing more than a pipe bomb in which two or more slugs of material are driven together by explosives to form a critical mass, which then is contained by the pipe (aka explosive lens) and almost instantly creates a supercritical explosion (a giant KABOOM).
The lack of accountability for the whereabouts of fissionable materials is the greatest danger, but there are countries, such as North Korea, that pose an inherent danger. And the U.S. has agreed by treaty to help NK with its nuclear program. Gee, I wonder what they might build with fissionable material?
Imal
I think next time, I'll put the kiddies to bed, have a few beers and go after my wife.
The feeling I'll have afterwards will be the same.
There was a donut shaped mass of uranium at one end. The gun propelled a disk of uranium, that served to fill the donut hole. An elegant solution...
Yes. They even used cordite for the explosive trigger, I believe. A very crude, but obviously effective weapon, yielding about a 15-kiloton blast.
Looking at this bomb, Little Boy, and its Nagasaki follow-on, Fat Man, reveals how straightforward basic nuke construction can be if the materials are available. It also shows that you don't need a fancy spherical explosive lens to get results with 90% enriched U-235, although the implosion-type bombs such as Fat Man are definitely much more efficient and require less material for a chain reaction.
The most significant problems facing prospective nuclear club nations have been storing, containing and handling nuclear materials. By contrast, converting U-238 (which is the most common natural form of uranium) into Pu-239 can be accomplished with a low-tech breeder reactor (for a bizarre example of how low-tech fissionable materials projects can turn out, read the Tale of the Radioactive Boy Scout). Take away the concern for the health and well-being of the technicians, and a lot of radiological problems go away.
Thus it all comes down to keeping the goods out of the wrong hands. If our effort is at all as effective as the War on Drugs has been, duck and cover.
Imal
Now add money, say from Saudi Wahabbists (and there are far too many of these people!), for example, and observe the results from at least 50 miles away and underground.
Imal
Indeed, even U.S. government officials are beginning to say that. And unfortunately, it's true. The only way to at least delay the inevitable is with vigorous and ruthless preemption.
Although it's not getting a lot of ink right now (aside from tangential but important discussions about civil liberties), the U.S. government is, in fact, posturing itself to take the drastic sorts of measures needed when confronted by nuclear belligerents. At least, that's what I make of it.
Imal
A different kind of thunderclap.
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