Going Ballistic

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.”

But surely, the American nuclear laboratories must be among the most extraordinarily secured facilities anywhere on the planet! If there are any American assets that we can guarantee terrorists will never infiltrate, it must be these, right?

Not according to the people responsible for testing such security. In 2004, a U.S. government team of mock terrorists breached the boundaries of Oak Ridge, and managed to “kill” the entire lab security force in 90 seconds. Similar episodes have apparently taken place at Los Alamos as well. Richard Levernier, who led several such mock attacks there, says, “In more than 50 percent of our tests ... we got in, captured the plutonium, got out again, and in some cases didn’t fire a shot because we didn’t encounter any guards.” That astonishing revelation suggests the “dropping the bomb” scenario needn’t take place in a nuclear lab. It could just as easily be done in that Culver City garage.

Osama bin Laden: Scratching a Nuclear Itch

Osama bin Laden’s thirst for the atom bomb dates back at least to 1992, when he reportedly tried to purchase nuclear materials in South Africa. Al Qaeda operatives have apparently sought intact nuclear warheads from both Chechen separatists and Pakistani scientists – the latter most alarmingly in a chilling meeting in Afghanistan just weeks prior to the attacks of September 11, 2001. American troops in Afghanistan discovered drawings of rudimentary nuclear devices in Al Qaeda sanctuaries. The 9/11 Commission concluded, “Al Qaeda has tried to acquire or make nuclear weapons for at least 10 years [...] and continues to pursue its strategic goal of obtaining a nuclear capability.”

After his organization had murdered nearly 3,000 innocent souls on 9/11, Al Qaeda spokesman Sulaiman Abu Ghaith alleged that American policies, over the decades, had killed many more Muslims than that. He then drew what was for him a logical conclusion: “We have not yet reached parity with them. We have the right to kill four million Americans – two million of them children.”

Al Qaeda, of course, has its share of internal dissensions and disagreements. Lawrence Wright, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his masterful study The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, discussed some of them in the June 2 issue of The New Yorker. Wright described an ideological and theological civil war inside the worldwide terrorist organization. He pointed to the transformation of longtime bin Laden colleague Sayyid Imam al-Sharif, known as “Dr. Fadl,” who – writing from an Egyptian prison – now conclusively rejects all Islamic justification for Al Qaeda’s terror attacks, and also insists that 9/11 itself was, on balance, “a catastrophe for Muslims.”

However, it scarcely needs saying that complete internal unity and ideological unanimity are hardly essential to pulling off a successful nuclear terror attack on an American city. Zimmerman and Lewis say that no more than 19 individuals could pull it off! Few things could be more fatuous than to read the reports of investigative journalists like Wright and conclude that because some within the jihadist world have foresworn the terrorist road, no one else remains on the march.