This week Uncle Cecil has lain to rest our fears of bio-terrorism, thus allowing Dopers to return to their customary state of bovine placidity. I, on the other hand, can’t stand to see you guys happy, so I’ve decided to stir up another fear, specifically nuclear terrorism. In keeping with my evil designs upon Uncle Cecil’s flock, my approach will be to ask open-ended questions which are bound to set the brethren quarreling amongst themselves, thus despoiling the simple pastoral tranquility of Uncle Cecil’s spiritual kingdom. My questions are as follows:
What plan would most likely succeed? Would it be best to simply scatter some highly radioactive materials? Would it be best to sabotage or attack a nuclear power plant in the hope of setting off a meltdown?* Or would it be best to acquire a thermonuclear bomb? What obstacles would our would be terrorists face in trying to execute any of these approaches? What counter-measures might the authorities take both to prevent such an incident and to deal with such an incident should it actually take place? Is there another approach I haven’t thought of? Should I invest heavily in lead longjohns?
Lonesome Polecat
The Anti-Cecil
(*Yes, I know it’s impossible to produce a nuclear explosion without a device specifically designed to explode.)
I can remember President Reagan said that nuclear war would never ever ever ever ever happen. I, on the other hand, think nuclear war and nuclear terrorism are certain. The only question is: When? 10 years; 200 years; 4000 years?
Rather than invest in lead longjohns, I suggest you invest in remote real estate, say northern Winipeg. Then, at the first sign of trouble, move. I personally knew some people who moved to New Zeland in the 60’s and some others who moved to the Falkland Islands in the 70’s.
I read an article five or six years years ago that I’ll never forget. If I recall correctly, it said about a half-a-dozen “suitcase nuclear bombs” were “missing” from a government facility in the (former) Soviet Union.
Two questions:
Is there such a thing as a “suitcase nuclear bomb”?
Is the story true?
If the answer is yes to both questions, then I think we should be concerned…
Since the first bomb was detonated, everyone who has attempted to build a nuclear bomb has succeeded. The only possible exception is Iraq, and it is not yet clear whether they succeeded or not. There is some suspicion that they’re sitting on a weapon right now, they just haven’t tested it.
You don’t need a nuclear weapon to wreak nuclear havoc. “Nuclear Salting” is a much easier technique. Just get some radioactive materials with a long halflife, grind it into dust, and disperse it throughout a city. Instant nuclear wasteland.
Countermeasures? I dunno. Nobody has been able to stop drugs from entering ANY country, so how are you going to stop someone with a bottle of radioactive dust? But then, cocaine doesn’t light up a neutron detector.
Boy that was a REAL smart idea, moving to the Falklands. You should remind your friends that more people have died from bullets than ever died in nuclear explosions.
But anything radioactive enough to do widespread damage would also be extremely difficult to handle and transport. Wouldn’t you need some awfully complicated means of handling and transporting something like a pint of powdered plutonium? I think (I’m not really sure) you’d need something like a lead-lined armored car to transport the stuff safely, and something like that is likely to attract unwelcome attention.
Yeah but we’re talking about people who think ‘suicide bomber’ is a valid career choice. Are they going to care if they die of radiation sickness in three weeks time?
According to the Emergency Response to Terrorism class that I took about 3 years ago, the potential for a nuclear detonation from a terrorist is somewhere between no-way and not-on-your-life. The threat comes from the terrorist dispersing nuclear materials around some type of population center with a conventional explosive. Or so FEMA told us…
This might be an urban-style legend, because I’ve heard something similar. What I heard was that there were agents HERE from the former USSR that had, and hid, suitcase nukes. No one knows where they are now.
Anyway, I too question the viability of a suitcase nuke, but mainly because I don’t know what the critical mass is for uranium or plutonium. But it seems like it would need to be much larger than what can be held in a suitcase.
Even if it wasn’t from what (little) I understand about how nukes are detonated, you’d need a decent explosive with the nuclear material.
So that’d have to be a pretty damn big and heavy suitcase, assuming it was shielded as well.
This is a suicide mission. You could easily get someone to transport a dispenser of plutonium in a small car and spray it over town. Or if you’re really determined, take it in a lead-lined backpack to the top of the some building and dump the dust into the air. Someone carrying a massively radioactive load would still get a few hours of work even in unshielded conditions. Your body wouldn’t break down immediately from the radioactivity, even under a massive dose. You’d be able to spread the dust widely before it got to you.
There’s a funny cyberpunk novel with a scenario vaguely like this, “Sex Sphere” by Rudy Rucker. Terrorists kidnap a scientist who can make their stolen plutonium into something they can detonate. He makes two hemispherical plutonium subcritical masses. But the incompetent terrorists can’t get them to detonate. So one of the suicidal terrorists tears the device apart, claps the two plutonium hemispheres together like a pair of cymbals, pushing it into a critical mass. It detonates poorly without an explosive compression, and they get a puny explosion about like 5 tons of TNT. But that’s enough to spray the city with plutonium particles. The city is thoroughly contaminated and as the smoke of burning plutonium particles spreads (yes plutonium burns).
You could easily do other similar schemes. Imagine it like a shrapnel bomb. Just put some radioactive material around some dynamite, or maybe an incendiary bomb. Maybe even a Tim McVey style truck bomb to disperse it even wider. You don’t need critical mass and you don’t need a nuke explosion, you just need to spread microscopic particles of dust.
Anyway, you can’t imagine what the real insane Dr. Evils of the world cook up. You should read about the Aum Shinrikyo cult in Japan, a good book is “The Cult at the End of the World.” The madman Shoko Asahara bought 3 medium sized radio-control helicopters used for light crop spraying. They planned to spray chemical weapons over Tokyo but they crashed all 3 of their helicopters in training. This is only one of dozens of deadly schemes they cooked up. Read the book and be afraid of what a truly insane mind with millions of bucks and a chemical factory can accomplish.
I don’t know whether such a thing actually exists, but I can address a couple of your points. First, Uranium and Plutonium are dense. We have a few 20-kg bricks of depleted Uranium and they’re about the size of a small paperback. A metric ton of U is a 15-inch cube. So fitting enough in a suitcase isn’t a problem; I think critical mass for a sphere of pure metallic [sup]235[/sup]U is on the order of 50 pounds, and less for [sup]239[/sup]Pu. Dunno about the explosives though.
Second, the fissile isotopes of U and Pu are not very radioactive, and they’re alpha-emitters at that. So shielding would be totally unnecessary; the suitcase itself would more than suffice.
There was a thread about this a few weeks ago, someone posted some cool web references on the declassified US nuclear demolition charges, I think they were called SADM or something… but the thread must have been over 30 days old, they expired off the SDMB search. Darn it!
Those bombs were about the size and shape of a big duffel bag (very imaginative Army design… ha) and about 150 pounds. Yield something like 5 kilotons, IIRC. They looked like they were designed as bridge or dam busters, I saw some online video clips of commandos parachute jumping with the SADM into a lake. 2-man frogman team deploys the bomb. I assume the 2-man team is more for nuclear command authority or backup in case 1 man gets killed, because 1 man could easily carry the thing. Set fuse, and run away. Boom.
Stands to reason that a Soviet counterpart were developed - this would be just the thing for special op against a point target.
BTW, Astroboy14, that was an - ehm - interesting link. Conspiracy theories, anyone ?
Anyway, why the focus on the suitcase aspect ? A nuke could be the size of an oil drum - or twice that - and there’d still be a gazillion ways to get it into almost any city you might care to mention. Besides, if my terrorist organization had gotten its hands on a suitcase bomb, I’d certainly explore the possibilities of using the fissile material for something with higher yield, even if it meant forgoing portability. Bring on the tritium!
It’s not an urban legend; it was, i believe, alleged in the book “The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB”. It was a book based on notes of a soviet defector who claimed to have worked for the kgb. He said he had copied, by hand, secret documents over many years, and sneaking them home.
This book came out 2-3 years ago, and I seem to remember 60 minutes (or perhaps another news magazine) doing a show on it.
I have no idea whether the guy is a fraud or not, or how recent history has judged his claims. Just trying to help
Ex-Soviet Loose Nukes – A rather skeptical discussion of claims by former Russian General Aleksandr Lebed that over 100 Soviet-built “suitcase bombs” are missing (as of 1996). There is a discussion in some detail of the design of miniaturized nuclear weapons at the end of this article.
Bootleg A-bombs – Discusses the opportunities and problems which would face a nation or group attempting to carry out a nuclear attack on the U.S. via smuggling.
Spiny Norman, you are correct… I didn’t read the link entirely before I posted it!
Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned…
I was playing around at work, and didn’t want my partner to catch me (we are starting a new business, and he thinks we should be doing work instead of fighting ignorance! WTF?? ), and that link was all I could come up with in the 3 mins. or so that he was in the bathroom!
wow, I was reading the “nuclear weapons FAQ” at http://www.fas.org/nuke/hew/Nwfaq/Nfaq4-2.html
In particular, “4.2.3.1 Minimum Size” notes the smallest practical nuke is about 15 kilograms, and the US tested a 16kg weapon but doesn’t list its yield. The smallest weapons they have yield data on is the W54 (davy Crockett) which had yields from 10 tons to 1kiloton, and used a minimum of 23kg of plutonium.
Yow. Now the idea of a 35 pound nuke doesn’t scare you, the FAQ goes on about some experimental technique they used to get plutonium masses as low as 1 kilogram to detonate, with yields like 100tons. You’re talking nuclear hand grenades here.
But these weapons sound like they’re terribly unstable, they’re not some briefcase bomb you can smuggle in and plant, and retrieve years later for a mission. I bet they’d have to be constantly monitored and only released for a mission when the weapon was in perfect condition.
I’m still going through the FAQ, it’s really interesting, but at about the limits of my physics knowledge, and really long.
