This is an off shoot of another thread. During the Cold War did the KGB have suitcase nukes in the USA ? Conversely did the CIA have them in the USSR?
The Soviets admit to having caches of weapons stored in various areas in North America, I believe. I dunno about nukes, but I wouldn’t expect them to admit it if they did.
I just went to a colloquim talk on this very subject (well, at least in part). An official in the Russian Armed Forces made a big stink a few years back saying that the USSR had such nuclear devices and they weren’t all accounted for. There is, however, no independent corroborating evidence that such suitcases actually exist. Many in the US intelligence community believe that they do not. There are, however, others in the government that are convinced this is a credible threat to US Security (incl. a prominent Repulican Representative who is famous for carrying a mock-up of a “suitcase” bomb around with him).
I was under the impression that sophisticated nuclear weapons, especially compact kiloton or sub-kiloton yield devices, were dependent on tritium and other “trigger” isotopes with comparitively short half-lives. So not only would you have to smuggle the bombs into the US to begin with, you would have to rotate the devices on a regular basis.
Maybe the Soviet embassy kept a couple in the basement planning to issue them to agents if a first strike was contemplated, but I doubt they had dozens or hundreds of planted bombs ready for a “sucker punch”.
I studied the Soviets for a while as an undergrad. Such an action (Soviet nukes on U.S. soil) would have been very out of character for them. They were extraordinarily conservative in their world outlook. While I can believe caches of small arms conventional weapons on enemy soil for local spy cells (these would basically be in the homes of cell members who were very stable), they would not have trusted people with their nukes, or contemplated such a provocation. Their mindset (other than psychos like Stalin and Beria) in the post WWII period was to not be caught with their pants down again. Remember that 20 to 30 million of their citizens died in WWII, this represented a close relative of every single citizen. It is a scar on their national conscience even today, and their own protection was paramount. The cold war eventually ended when the spies of both nations had such good access to the other side’s intentions and planning that each concluded that the other side had no intention of launching a first strike. Preposition a nuke on the potential enemies’ soil would have been unthinkable to Soviets as the risks easily outweigh the benefits.
I recently heard a program on NPR (don’t remember which one) and a guy from a national nuclear commission said that suitcase bombs were impossible; either it would weigh too much and need a BIG briefcase, or it wouldn’t work.
I can see such devices being developed during the Cold War, but I can’t see them being deployed. Suppose you’re a Soviet military officer responsible for planning a first strike against the US. You have 3 choices:
–Use land-based ICBMs which give the enemy a fair amount of advance warning.
–Use submarine-based missiles which give far less warning.
–Use suitcase bombs which give no advance warning.
So you use suitcase bombs, right? Probably not, because there’s a whole long laundry list of problems with using suitcase bombs as a first strike weapon.
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You probably won’t be able to use suitcase bombs to take out many prime military targets–NORAD, US missile launch sites, etc.–because your agents won’t be able to get close enough to them. That means you need to precision time a conventional missile strike to coincide with the suitcase bombs. (More accurately, you need to time it so that your missile are detected just after the suitcase bombs go off.) This may be extremely difficult, especially with 80s-era technology.
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You don’t have direct control over the agents responsible for the bombs, and there are many ways in which those agents can be compromised. US intelligence may be reading your communications. Your agents may have been turned by the US. Your agents may also decide that the US isn’t so bad after all, and they may not follow orders (a la the German army’s refusal to burn Paris in WW2.)
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If the US government or media finds out about suitcase bombs on US soil, it would create an international crisis that makes the Cuban Missile Crisis look like a minor tiff.
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Likewise, there’s a chance that these bombs will be lost/stolen/fall into the hands of a rogue element. Even if the US doesn’t find out about it, it’s enough to give Soviet leaders a heart attack.
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You have to turn over partial control of the country’s nuclear arsenal to the diplomatic service/intelligence agencies. I can’t imagine the Soviet Army liking this any more than the US army would.
Given all those uncertainties, good ol’ fashioned sub-based missiles sound a lot more reliable.
sethdallob, read this:
http://www.fas.org/nuke/hew/Nwfaq/Nfaq4-2.html#Nfaq4.2.3
You can make a nuke out of only 1 kilogram of plutonium, although conventional system designs have a theoretical minimum of about 10-15 kg. Suitcase nukes are easily possible, but probably fairly heavy.
The guy on NPR is mistaken. While it might be a big suitcase, and heavy, they have fit nukes in artillery shells. This might make for a long and heavy suitcase, but definitely doable. I seem to recall that these were not much bigger than regular howitzers.
Whether a nuclear device could actually fit into a suitcase misses the point.
All it need do is fit into an automobile, minivan, or Cessna.
Pursuant to a thread, probably read here on the Straight Dope, I purchased a book by Stanislav Lunev. Readily available through any book store called " Through the Eyes of the Enemy".
Lunev is supposedly the highest-ranking military defector who over the last 10 years has revealed why Russia is more dangerous than we ever thought.
Lunev, as I recall was not only an journalistic operative with the KGB but also involved with the ultra-secret GRU. A colonel with the Soviet and later Russian military, he was apparently a very valuable defection for the U.S.A.
I first heard of possible suitcase nukes 8 or 10 years ago, apparently from this man’s information. The stuff I heard was from the conventional press, warning of a possible small nuclear weapon located near Hungry Horse Dam in North Western Montana. The stories are probably related, but the contention at the time was that this was a Russian weapon, placed as a deterrent during the height of the cold war.
Hungry Horse is less than 200 miles from where I live, and down-stream, so I did take notice of the possibility!
Around the same time I happened to read a book entitled “Cadillac Desert”, which covered a lot of ground regarding the availability and the history of obtaining and providing water to much of the formerly arid West. (an excellent book by the way if you happen to live in California.)
A small portion of the book refers to a natural dam breach in the Teton Dam here in Idaho. The Teton Dam was a manmade earthen-filled dam located near Driggs, Idaho. The Teton Dam was the most upper major dam on the Columbia River System at the time. The failure of this particular dam occurred over at least a 24 hour period, you could almost imagine a local resident trying to plug the initial hole with his thumb. Fortunately, as it became obvious that the entire dam would fail, one of the engineers foresaw the implications of such a failure and warned the down-stream dam regulators with such a fervor that they immediately started to franticly empty their own reservoirs to make way for the oncoming rush of waters.
Although it is hard to imagine that no one had anticipated such a catastrophe while they were designing all of the numerous dams on the Columbia System, according to this well researched book, no one had done so. One dams failure could lead to the next one’s down-stream and so on. The domino theory. Take one out and watch the rest follow.
Such a scenario is hard to fathom, there are unquestionably millions of people who would be directly killed or seriously affected by such a failure. Thanks to the for sight of one engineer in Idaho, such a failure was potentially averted.
Back to the OP regarding suitcase nukes… It is Colonel Lunev’s contention that the former Soviet Republic had more that 250 suitcase nuclear bombs in their cold war arsenal, but that after the Soviet melt-down, between 75 and 100 of these bombs were unaccounted for and deployed, primarily in U.S. locations.
Lunev goes on to pretty well describe what the apparatus would look like and how the operatives were trained to deploy them. If any one is interested in the particulars, let me know and I will quote the book.
Bottom line, there is more than a possibility that these weapons exist and may be deployed. The damage caused at any one particular location by such a relatively small nuclear weapon may be underestimated by a long shot.
I fondly recall my carefree undergrad years as well. All six of 'em!
Perhaps you have a citation for this?
The amount of damage even the smallest nuclear weapon would be enormous. As bad as Sept 11 was, a day that will live in infamy far longer and sadder than Dec 7, the smallest nuclear weapon would have killed millions.
Think upon this the next time you debate non-proliferation, whichever side or extent you support.
Nope. Just ask Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where nukes that were decidedly not “the smallest” killed on the order of 200,000 each. A lot, to be sure, but certainly not “millions.”
Actually, the destructive force of the WTC collapse was about the equivalent of the smallest nuclear weapons, at about 1.7 kilotons.
And for the record, the Hiroshima bomb was 13 kilotons. “Suitcase” nukes are supposedly around 1 kiloton.
Yeah, and that bears repeating because it helps put the threat in perspective. If Bin Laden had a suitcase nuke and detonated it in Manhattan, it would do about the same thing as the WTC collapse did - blow a big hole in the ground with a radius of maybe 5 or 10 city blocks. And contaminate everything in the city downwind (and if the wind is blowing towards the rest of NYC, contaminate a lot of that as well).
So we’re probably not talking about hundreds of thousands of deaths, but certainly more than the WTC attack, because over 30,000 people managed to get out of those buildings before they went down. If a 10 block radius of large office buildings were brought down without warning, certainly tens of thousands would be killed.
But the small size of the weapons probably limits the number of targets as well, because he needs a high population density to kill a lot of people. For example, here in my home city of Edmonton there is probably no area where he could detonate a 1 kt bomb and kill more than a couple of thousand people. We just don’t have the density in our downtown area. The same probably goes for Los Angeles, Seattle, and a lot of other large cities. Chicago and New York would be much more likely as targets, with Washington being up there as well for symbolic value.
The claims of loose suitcase nukes stem from a 60
Minutes interview with Alexander Lebed in 1997. It is not clear whether he was telling the truth. For more information, see http://www.fas.org/nuke/hew/News/Lebedbomb.html
I don’t have anything to add to the OP except more questions:
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Weren’t there nuclear weapons small enough to be used in morter shells (I think the mortars were called ‘Davy Crocketts’)?
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How likely is it that whoever controls Lebed’s lost nukes (assuming they exist) would just have sat on them for so many years?
Don’t know about “suitcase” nukes, but I read recently (in American Heritage magazine, I believe) that Kennedy was convinced that the Russians had a nuclear device planted in Washington DC, assembled from parts brought over in diplomatic pouches. Apparently, the existence of this nuke was accepted wisdom in the intelligence community. I’ll try to track down the article for some quotes.