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FreeRepublic , LLC PO BOX 9771 FRESNO, CA 93794
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Posted on 01/19/2003 6:07:50 AM PST by ex-Texan
How to make a dirty bomb
They say it's easy to build your own atomic weapon. Is it? Jon Ronson takes a crash course
By Jon Ronson
It is a Monday in July and I have been commanded by the Guardian to attempt to purchase the materials needed to build a nuclear bomb. The enduring rumour is that anyone with a fanatical resolve can build one in their "garage or basement". Is this true? Actually, I can report that it is not proving to be chillingly easy, which is good news for humanity, but bad news for me personally as I was hoping this article would provide a shocking insight.
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists writes: "Producing either uranium-235 or plutonium-239 in the quantities needed to make nuclear weapons is extraordinarily difficult and expensive. [Nuclear-bomb makers] must be prepared to spend hundreds of millions of dollars, or even billions."
I consequently downgrade my ambition to building a dirty bomb - a conventional bomb mixed with radioactive material - instead. I am a novice in this matter. Not only is my knowledge of the necessary physics sketchy at best (I got 9% in my mock physics O-level) but my resources are extremely limited. The Guardian has told me not to go crazy with the expenses. I don't even have a garage or a basement; those things are pricey in north London. Nor do I have good contacts with the keepers of already established nuclear arsenals. In short, my position is presumably akin to that of a fledgling, eager-to-impress al-Qaida operative. Admittedly I do not possess a fanatical resolve, but my determination to make this article a dramatic revelation is fanaticism of a sort.
When I call Matthew Bunn, of the Nuclear Threat Initiative thinktank in Washington DC, he says he is a little worried about this idea.
"One does not want to provide a cookbook for terrorists," he says. None the less, he recommends that I try Russia.
"If I was building a dirty bomb," he says, "that's what I would do. In the nuclear age, they were building nuclear airplanes and nuclear rocket-ships. They were digging canals using nuclear bombs. There was a great deal of nuclear enthusiasm, and now loads of these big, hulking, nasty radioactive sources are scattered around all over. Those are the absolute worst. And loads are still missing in breakaway republics."
He tells me about the Georgian woodcutters who were scouting around the forests of Lja last Christmas. "They saw this thing - the snow was melted all around it - and thought, hey, we'll take it back to our camp site and keep ourselves warm. Whoops." The thing was a thermonuclear generator. The woodcutters were in intensive care for months.
"A lot of the smugglers in Russia," he adds, "are guys who don't know shit from Shinola. We're talking about some guy who works in a power plant hiding some stuff in his pocket and wandering around aimlessly, chatting people up. One guy had an insulated glove filled with uranium in his freezer for months."
I call Imogen Edwards-Jones, author of the chick-lit novel about the London party circuit, My Canapé Hell. Edwards-Jones is also - unlike many chick-lit novelists - a long-standing chronicler of the Russian mafia. I ask her to put me in touch with a uranium smuggler. She seems a little reluctant. "The uranium guys are fucking frightening," she says, but she eventually agrees to try. A few days later she calls me back.
"Well, I spoke to my mafia contacts," she says.
"And?" I ask.
"They laughed," she says. "They laughed and said, 'Oh shut up.'" She pauses. "The uranium people are the absolute top level of criminality. One guy I know ended up being skinned alive in the back of his car. Another guy I know was beheaded in his office."
"OK," I say.
"Another guy's girlfriend was found chopped up in Sainsbury bags in Greece," she adds. "They keep going after you."
She tells me that if I persevere, I should watch out for men wearing good suits.
"The smarter someone's suit, the dirtier their soul," she says.
I resign myself to the task of heading to Chechnya to scout around the forests and make contact with frightening men. Then it dawns on me - I really don't need to go to all that trouble. A dirty-bomb maker who wants an easy life could get radioactive material in a far simpler way.
A few years ago, a nuclear burial ground was raided by Chechen militants. Nobody knows how much was stolen because the Russian authorities can't find anyone willing to dig the rest of it up to see what was missing. When castigated for their hamfistedness, the authorities responded by saying that the west should not feel too superior because, since 1996, US businesses have misplaced some 1,500 pieces of equipment that include radioactive parts. I call the National Nuclear Security Administration in Las Vegas, which is in charge of getting them back. Its surveillance teams are apparently patrolling cities with unmarked vans containing gamma-ray and neutron detectors on a daily basis.
"We have the wherewithal to search for these things," says Darwin Morgan, its public affairs spokesman, "and if we find them, we also have the resources to render them safe. We're a team made up of scientists. Eggheads, if you will."
"What kind of stuff has gone missing?" I ask.
"Density gauges," he says. "Local departments of transportation have a commonly used piece of equipment called a density gauge. It's used to test the compaction of recently compacted roads. It contains nuclear material."
"Do lots of density gauges go missing?" I ask.
"Quite a few," says Darwin. "There was one in Florida recently. They called on us."
"Did you find it?" I ask.
"No," says Darwin.
"How many density gauges would one need to make a dirty bomb?" I ask.
"I don't know," he says. "You'd have to ask someone who knows how to make bombs."
"Like who?" I ask.
"Well," he sniffs. "There are some 'thinktanks' in Washington who claim to have knowledge of such things."
I've never heard the phrase 'thinktanks' uttered with such disdain. I call Matthew Bunn back. "Is one density gauge enough to make a dirty bomb?" I ask him.
"It depends on your goal," he says. "Do you want to scare a lot of people?"
"I haven't really thought about it," I say. "OK. Yes." I think both of us are uncomfortable about me adopting the terrorist persona.
"At what level do you want to scare them?" he says.
"A lot," I say.
"Well," he says, "at any detectable level of radioactivity, people would get scared. So milligrams of the stuff would be sufficient. Just put it in a box with some Semtex and boom. Billions on clean-up, but hardly anybody dead, and life goes on. In a realistic dirty-bomb scenario, you'll have more people killed in traffic accidents fleeing from the scene than dying of cancer. You and I have a 20% chance of dying of cancer - although I can hear you smoking a cigarette, so your chances are substantially higher. With a dirty bomb, the chances rise to approximately 21%."
"And a density gauge?" I ask.
"Yes," says Matthew. "That would be enough to cause moderate annoyance. You'd have many city blocks evacuated."
I decide to try and buy some radioactive material on the internet. I learn of two auction houses based in Great Neck, New York - Uranium-Online and NukeAuction.com. Both are managed by something called the New York Nuclear Corporation (NYNC). It specialises, somewhat unnervingly, in real-time nuclear material online auctions. I get the corporation's number from directory enquiries. I expect to be transferred from department to department within some giant conglomerate, but when I call, it sounds as if the NYNC is actually a couple of men sitting in a room. The chief executive officer picks up the telephone himself. He says his name is Joe.
"We're just a few people," confirms Joe. "My partner is an attorney. I'm a nuclear engineer. We saw that other commodities were being auctioned online and we figured we could try the same thing with nuclear fuel."
I offer Joe the scenario that I am a fanatic with a nefarious intent, and I sternly explain that it is important for him to answer my questions candidly because my readers are concerned. He agrees.
"Can I, a fanatic, bid for uranium in one of your auctions?" I ask him.
"The auction is passworded and by invitation only," he replies. "I guess your scenario is theoretically possible if you managed to get yourself a password. But the buyers and sellers all know each other, it's a very private industry, and when the winner is selected, they talk to each other. They deal directly. So you could ruin the auction, but you could never take possession of the uranium."
I log on to Ask Jeeves and type, 'Where can I buy some uranium?' Jeeves responds, 'You can find anything at eBay. eBay has everything you're looking for. Find it all at eBay.'
So I type uranium into the eBay search box, and discover that by happy chance - I guess - there will be a uranium auction in exactly two hours and 46 minutes.
The description of the item being auctioned reads: "This is uranium-238. The vile [sic] and the uranium weighs 22 grams. I wouldn't breathe the stuff or use it as seasoning on food but other than that you shouldn't have any trouble. I'm moving to the Philippines next year and I know they would frown on this coming into their country. I am 73. I sold my .38 revolver because the only people allowed to have lethal weapons in the Philippines are terrorists. I got this vile [sic] as a going-away present when I worked at the Texas-Zinc Minerals Corporation in Mexican Hat, Utah."
There have already been three bidders, the top bid being $18.41. I call Matthew Bunn and ask him if 22g of uranium-238 would suffice for a dirty bomb.
"Not very interesting," he says. "It's used for ballast in ships. The US has thousands of tonnes of it that it is desperate to get rid of. I haven't even thought about uranium-238. If I was building a dirty bomb, you know what I'd get my hands on?"
"What?" I ask.
"One of those machines they use to kill bacteria in meat in a food-processing plant. It contains cobalt-60. If you burst one successfully, blam! That would be a really big disaster. Although they emit shards as opposed to inhalable particles. But there are clever things you can do to turn shards into inhalable particles."
I call the McDonald's corporation.
"I'm from the Guardian," I say, "and we're doing a special issue commemorating the horrific destruction in Hiroshima, so I'm calling McDonald's because..."
"Hmm?" says the press officer, a little defensively. She is clearly wondering in what way the Guardian is about to blame McDonald's for Hiroshima. I ask her if any of their meat processing plants use cobalt-60 and she says she will get back to me. She does, with unmistakable joy and relief in her voice.
"McDonald's does not use irradiated meat," she says. "And anyway, it's illegal in this country."
The Food Commission confirms this, although - it says - there is one plant in England that uses cobalt-60 to irradiate herbs and spices. The US, however, routinely zaps red meat with cobalt-60, and the Australian wool industry also zaps in bulk for export. The US alone has 40 food sterilisation centres, and there are 120 more worldwide. Thousands of cobalt-60 rods are used. The Organic Consumers Association reports that food- irradiation facilities are "poorly guarded", but Neil Sheehan of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission contends that "an individual physically handling an unshielded single-source rod would receive a lethal (death within weeks) dose in about a minute". I have now upgraded myself to a suicide dirty-bomb maker, so that's no longer an issue. I call Matthew Bunn.
"OK," I say. "Let's say I've got some cobalt-60. How do I cleverly turn the shards into inhalable particles?"
There is a short silence.
"I'm not going to tell you," he says.
Is this reticence due to his earlier warning that I ought not provide a "cookbook for terrorists," or is it something more embarrassing? Has it just crossed his mind that I am an actual terrorist pretending to be a Guardian journalist? Maybe, in the end, the best way for a terrorist to make a dirty bomb is to pretend to be a Guardian journalist and phone a bunch of scientists and academics for excellent insider tips.
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FreeRepublic , LLC PO BOX 9771 FRESNO, CA 93794
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I'll tell you what's unsettling, bud- the way you posted the F-word, above. We've got some gentle ladies here and they don't need to be reading that kind of language. How about reposting the piece, sans crudity?
They have them, mostly in the microcurie to millicurie range. Most of what hospitals have is 32P and tritium, both beta emitters, tritium decidedly so (very low energy beta). To get concentrations over a wide area (i.e., enough to cause a panicky-manicky response) you'd have to have a source term in the hundreds or thousands of curie range of a radionuclide that is a relatively strong gamma or alpha emitter. Those are hard to come by and much harder to handle with specialized equipment, lke a hot cell with remote manipulators. Not the kind of thing you'd have in a garage or basement (I know, I've used them).
To the best of my knowledge, this is pure fantasy. In other words, it is untrue.
The West looked at nuclear aircraft and found that they were impractical. We built several nuclear rocket engines and tested them but the program was cancelled.
The Russians designed at least one nuclear rocket engine (RD-501) but to my knowledge did nothing further. I am not sure if they tested it.
--Boris
You really think so? Its no mean trick to fabricate the explosive lenses and get them to work that will get you the amount of compression needed for a high-yield explosion. The firing circuits are not a toy, either. Setting off a fission weapon isn't like lighting a fuse on a firecracker, which is the impression some people seem to have.
Your group would have to have an explosives expert of reasonably good capability, an explosives fabricator to form the shaped charges (not someone to press C4 or some other plastic explosive into a random blob), an electronics expert, and a nuclear materials specialist. Not the kind of group you'd have in a garden variety terrorist group. I'm not saying it isn't impossible, but it is unlikely (Sum Of All Fears notwithstanding). The barbarians might be better off trying something else, like flying planes into buildings, or hijacking an LNG tanker as its pulling into port, whatever...
(Note to Moderator: This is not a "loose lips" posting, as these scenarios have all been discussed in the open literature, some right here on FR.)
In many cases, rent-a-cops and chain-link fence are all that separates you from 42-gallon drums of high-level waste.
Steal one and put it in a Ryder van packed with fertilizer/fuel oil or some other explosive.
This is not rocket science, alas.
--Boris
This is assuming you want an implosion bomb of the Nagasaki type. A gun-type bomb, of the Hiroshima type, would be much easier to build, although not nearly as efficient in use of fissionable material. ANALOG SCIENCE FICTION had a fact article on it several years ago. The point of the article was to show how hard it would be, but it wouldn't be impossible. Getting enough fissionable material would be much harder than building the bomb. The terrorist would assemble most of the bomb (concrete tamper, etc.) from material purchased commercially.
I am a hospital radiation safety officer and nuclear medicine specialist, and to my knowledge we have no significant quantitites of such isotopes.
In days of old P-32 was used for bone scans and therapy of metastatic tumors involving bone, and I have heard of it being used for treatment of polycythemia vera.
Nowadays we use Tc-99m phosphate compounds (pure gamma emitter) for the bone scans, and the beta emitters Sr-89 or Sm-153 for the bone therapy.
P-32 and tritium, as well as I-125 and C-14, are used in some biochemical analyses. The pathology department uses some of these but they are in such small quantities that they never come onto my radar.
Probably the most dangerous substance we have is iodine-131, which is a pretty robust beta emitter with a longer half life (8 days) than most of our other medical isotopes.
The quantities are fairly high as well. We will treat thyroid cancer with up to 200 mCi of I-131. We'd never have more than one or two doses on hand, but a radiopharmacy might have several curies.
This would make a pretty decent dirty bomb if your only intent were to frighten the public. I-131 has some high energy gammas that would peg the needle on a survey meter in curie quantities. Nobody would die right away, but a pregnant woman who ingested a high dose might have a mentally retarded baby due to destruction of the fetal thyroid gland (i.e. cretinism). And there would be a theoretical risk of thyroid cancer years down the road for anyone who ingested a high dose, but it would be a very low risk indeed.
The two medical isotopes that cause the most concern are cobalt-60 and cesium-137. We don't have any, except for a few tiny sources of Co-60 used for marking and calibration of nuclear cameras. Large sources were used in the past for radiation therapy, but nowadays they have pretty much been replaced by electron beam and X-ray generators that have no source within. But they are still used in Third World countries.
If we ever see a dirty bomb it will probably be one of these two isotopes. A relatively small number of people (dozens or hundreds at most) could be expected to die from radiation sickness, but the panic and long-term contamination would be substantial.
You can read about what happened in the Brazilian city of Goiania when a 1400 curie Cs-137 source from a radiotherapy machine was cracked open and spread around. Four people died and hundreds were sickened.
-ccm
Thanks, TP.
Keep in mind that very few people have been on the receiving end of the F-word as often as you, and therefore aren't as comfortable with it.
Wow. Thanks for letting me know, DB.
I still reckon that just because those Lefties have let their standards slip is no reason why we Freepers should follow suit. All the best, B.
One trick most everyone overlooks in these kinds of musings is the question of the initiator. That is also tricky business. You need to release an initiating burst of neutrons are just the right instant, very close to the moment of maximum compression. Someone ironically, its easier to do this with an implosion-type device, where the compressive forces are symmetric, that it is with a gun assembly, where there are assymetries and the dynamics are highly mon-linear.
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