[tt] AP: Suitcase nukes closer to fiction than reality

[Premise Checker]

I met a retired general and engineer who moved into the Manhattan Project 
in 1946 (after the scientists moved out). He said he had kept a workable 
bomb next to his desk for weeks without suffering any problems. This came 
after I told him that a military spokesman at the annual Government 
Employee Recognition Week on the National Mall told me that someone trying 
to sneak a bomb up the Washington Monument would die of radiation during 
the trip. The article below is so patently untruthful, but I'm still 
dubious. It is probably true that low IQ Iranians couldn't make an atom 
bomb themselves, and I'm not sure that even if cash-pressed North Koreans 
sold them one, they could actually get it to work.

Go back to sleep.

Suitcase nukes closer to fiction than reality
http://usatoday.printthis.clickability.com/pt/cpt?action=cpt&title=Suitcase+nukes+closer+to+fiction+than+reality+-+USATODAY.com&expire=&urlID=24871820&fb=Y&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.usatoday.com%2Ftech%2Fscience%2F2007-11-10-suitcasenukes_N.htm&partnerID=1665

By Katherine Shrader, Associated Press

WASHINGTON -- Members of Congress have warned about the dangers of
suitcase nuclear weapons. Hollywood has made television shows and
movies about them. Even the Federal Emergency Management Agency has
alerted Americans to a threat -- information the White House
includes on its website.

But government experts and intelligence officials say such a threat
gets vastly more attention than it deserves. These officials said a
true suitcase nuke would be highly complex to produce, require
significant upkeep and cost a small fortune.

Counterproliferation authorities do not completely rule out the
possibility that these portable devices once existed. But they do
not think the threat remains.

"The suitcase nuke is an exciting topic that really lends itself to
movies," said Vahid Majidi, the assistant director of the FBI's
Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate. "No one has been able to
truly identify the existence of these devices."

Majidi and other government officials say the real threat is from a
terrorist who does not care about the size of his nuclear
detonation and is willing to improvise, using a less deadly and
sophisticated device assembled from stolen or black-market nuclear
material.

Yet Hollywood has seized on the threat. For example, the Fox
thriller 24 devoted its entire last season to Jack Bauer's hunt for
suitcase nukes in Los Angeles.

Government officials have played up the threat, too.

Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., once said at a hearing that he thought
the least likely threat was from an intercontinental ballistic
missile. "Perhaps the most likely threat is from a suitcase nuclear
weapon in a rusty car on a dock in New York City," he said.

In a FEMA guide on terrorist disasters that is posted in part on
the White House's website, the agency warns that terrorists' use of
a nuclear weapon would "probably be limited to a single smaller
'suitcase' weapon."

"The strength of such a weapon would be in the range of the bombs
used during World War II. The nature of the effects would be the
same as a weapon delivered by an intercontinental missile, but the
area and severity of the effects would be significantly more
limited," the paper says.

The genie escapes

During the 1960s, intelligence agencies received reports from
defectors that Soviet military intelligence officers were carrying
portable nuclear devices in suitcases.

The threat was too scary to stay secret, government officials said,
and word leaked out. The genie was never put back in the bottle.

But current and former government officials who have not spoken out
publicly on the subject acknowledge that no U.S. officials have
seen a Soviet-made suitcase nuke.

The idea of portable nuclear devices was not a new one.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the U.S. made the first ones, known as the
Special Atomic Demolition Munition. It was a "backpack nuke" that
could be used to blow up dams, tunnels or bridges. While one person
could lug it on his back, it had to be placed by a two-man team.

These devices never were used and now exist -- minus their
explosive components -- only in a museum.

Following the U.S. lead, the Soviets are believed to have made
similar nuclear devices.

Suitcase nukes have been a separate problem. They attracted
considerable public attention in 1997, thanks to a 60 Minutes
interview and other public statements from retired Gen. Alexander
Lebed, once Russia's national security chief.

Lebed said the separatist government in Chechnya had portable
nuclear devices, which led him to create a commission to get to the
bottom of the Chechen arsenal, according to a Center for
Non-proliferation Studies report. He said that when he ran the
security service, the commission could find only 48 of 132 devices.

The numbers varied as he changed his story several times --
sometimes he stated that 100 or more were missing. The Russians
denied he was ever accurate.

Even more details emerged in the summer of 1998, when former
Russian military intelligence officer Stanislav Lunev -- a defector
in the U.S. witness protection program -- wrote in his book that
Russian agents were hiding suitcase nukes around the U.S. for use
in a possible future conflict.

"I had very clear instructions: These dead-drop positions would
need to be for all types of weapons, including nuclear weapons,"
Lunev testified during a congressional hearing in California in
2000, according to a Los Angeles Times account.

Naysayers noted that he was never able to pinpoint any specific
location.

In a 2004 interview with the Kremlin's Federal News Service,
Colonel-General Viktor Yesin, former head of the Russian strategic
rocket troops, said he believes that Lebed's commission may have
been misled by mock-ups of special mines used during training.

Yesin believed that a true suitcase nuke would be too expensive for
most countries to produce and would not last more than several
months because the nuclear core would decompose so quickly. "Nobody
at the present stage seeks to develop such devices," he asserted.

Some members of Congress remained convinced that the suitcase nuke
problem persists. Perhaps chief among these lawmakers was Curt
Weldon, a GOP representative from Pennsylvania who lost his seat in
2006.

Weldon was known for carrying around a mock-up of a suitcase nuke
made with a briefcase, foil and a pipe. But it was nowhere near the
weight of an actual atomic device.

The science

Majidi joined the FBI after leading Los Alamos National
Laboratory's prestigious chemistry division. He uses science to
make the case that suitcase nukes are not a top concern.

First, he defines what a Hollywood-esque suitcase nuke would look
like: a case about 24 inches by 10 inches by 12 inches, weighing
less than 50 pounds, that one person could carry. It would contain
a device that could cause a devastating blast.

Nuclear devices are either plutonium, which comes from reprocessing
the nuclear material from reactors, or uranium, which comes from
gradually enriching that naturally found element.

Majidi says it would take about 22 pounds of plutonium or 130
pounds of uranium to create a nuclear detonation. Both would
require explosives to set off the blast, but significantly more for
the uranium.

Although uranium is considered easier for terrorists to obtain, it
would be too heavy for one person to lug around in a suitcase.

Plutonium, he notes, would require the cooperation of a state with
a plutonium reprocessing program. It seems highly unlikely that a
country would knowingly cooperate with terrorists because the
device would bear the chemical fingerprints of that government. "I
don't think any nation is willing to participate in this type of
activity," Majidi said.

That means the fissile material probably would have to be stolen.
"It is very difficult for that much material to walk away," he
added.

There is one more wrinkle: Nuclear devices require a lot of
maintenance because the material that makes them so deadly also can
wreak havoc on their electrical systems.

"The more compact the devices are -- guess what? -- the more
frequently they need to be maintained. Everything is compactly
designed around that radiation source, which damages everything
over a period of time," Majidi said.

Proving a negative

A former CIA director, George Tenet, is convinced that al-Qaeda
wants to change history with the mushroom cloud of a nuclear
attack. In 1998, Osama bin Laden issued a statement called "The
Nuclear Bomb of Islam."

"It is the duty of Muslims to prepare as much force as possible to
terrorize the enemies of God," he said.

Among numerous of avenues of investigation after the Sept. 11
attacks, Tenet said in his memoir that President Bush asked Russian
President Vladamir Putin whether he could account for all of
Russia's nuclear material. Choosing his words carefully, Tenet
said, Putin replied that he could only account for everything under
his watch, leaving a void before 2000.

Intelligence officials continued digging deeper, hearing more
reports about al-Qaeda's efforts to get a weapon; that effort, it
is believed, has been to no avail, so far.

But intelligence officials are loath to dismiss a threat until they
are absolutely sure they have gotten to the bottom of it.

In the case of suitcase nukes, one official said, U.S. experts do
not have 100% certainty that they have a handle on the Russian
arsenal.

Laura Holgate, a vice president at the Nuclear Threat Initiative,
says the United States has not appropriately prioritized its
responses to the nuclear threat and, as a result, is poorly using
its scarce resources.

Much to many people's surprise, she noted, highly enriched uranium
-- outside of a weapon -- is so benign that a person can hold it in
his hands and not face any ill effects until years later, if at
all. It can also slip through U.S. safeguards, she says.

The Homeland Security Department is planning to spend more than $1
billion on radiation detectors at ports of entry. But government
auditors found that the devices cannot distinguish between benign
radiation sources, such as kitty litter, and potentially dangerous
ones, including highly enriched uranium.

Holgate considers the substance the greatest threat because it
exists not only at nuclear weapons sites worldwide, but also in
more than 100 civilian research facilities in dozens of countries,
often with inadequate security.

Her Washington-based non-proliferation organization wants to see
the United States get a better handle on the material that can be
used for bombs -- much of it is in Russia -- and secure it.

The big problem, she said, is not a fancy suitcase nuke, but rather
a terrorist cell with nuclear material that has enough knowledge to
make an improvised device.

How big would that be? "Like SUV-sized. Way bigger than a
suitcase," she said.