You’ve been watching too many James Bond movies, I think. Your theory would require an organization with vast resources… remember, first they actually have to get the bomb, then they have to get the tanker, then they have to get a tanker crew, then they have to get all the way from their destination to the US, then they actually have to get permission to ENTER the US, then they have to plant the bomb somewhere without looking suspicious (unless you want to suggest the entire tanker crew is suicidal), and then they have to get back out again.
Or are you suggesting that someone can sneak aboard the ship, weld the bomb to the ceiling in some deep chamber, and do that? Again, that’s an easy task if you live in a Tom Clancy novel…
Spoof, I don’t think Cal was thinking about SPECTRE. He was thinking about a state with the capacity to build an ICBM, eg Iraq or North Korea.
Sure, smuggling a nuke into the US would be tricky. But not probably not as difficult as deploying a nuclear tipped ICBM, the threat which SDI is designed to counter.
I think flowbark is right. Any state (or, for that matter, terrorist organization) that has the resources to launch a missile at us from half-way around the world also has the resources to buy a boat. Or, more realistically, they wouldn’t even need a boat of their own. How many tons of shipping do we unload and bring in the country every day? And how much of that do we crack open or scan with a geiger counter? How many trucks cross the border from Mexico or Canada each day? We have open borders and we trade (a lot) with everybody. A missile is probably the least likely (read: plausible) method for delivering a nuclear warhead to the U.S.
True, and since what we can do to prevent it is woefully inadequate, a missile defense system is an extremely costly way of preparing for something that we know will never happen (i.e. the launch of 1 or 2 missiles by a “rogue state” or terrorsit organization).
Preparing for a larger missile strike (from, for example, China) is not feasible for reasons that have already been discussed.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by VarlosZ *
**I think flowbark is right. Any state (or, for that matter, terrorist organization) that has the resources to launch a missile at us from half-way around the world also has the resources to buy a boat. Or, more realistically, they wouldn’t even need a boat of their own. How many tons of shipping do we unload and bring in the country every day? And how much of that do we crack open or scan with a geiger counter? How many trucks cross the border from Mexico or Canada each day? We have open borders and we trade (a lot) with everybody. A missile is probably the least likely (read: plausible) method for delivering a nuclear warhead to the U.S.
**
Agreed, but here’s something to dream about tonight. A nuclear-tipped SLCM fired on a “suppressed trajectory” from a sub could reach ground zero in Washington within 3-4 minutes. Same for New York City.
I’m tired and shagged out after a long day in the traces, but isn’t there a way to detect large masses of fissile material with a form of neutron detection? I seem to recall that there is a way to scan for this from a great distance. I’m pretty sure it can be foiled by lead shielding, but I’m still curious.
Spoofe: Flowbark has already provided the response I wuld have. Once you have the nuke – that’s the tricky, exensive part – arranging the shipping is cheap by comparison.
As for detecting it as it comes into the harbor, I have no idea what sort of detection they’r using currently. I suspect that even in major ports they are not doing a very thorogh job. Read John McPhee’s book “Looking for a Ship” to see how lax most port controls are. Heck, read Dave Barry’s account of returning from a boat trip to Bimini – they operate on what is essentially an honor system.
Even if you grant that they do a sterling job in New York, San Diego, San Francisco, and elsewhere, think of all the other ports that haven’t got that kind of budget. How hard would it be to sneak a nuke aboard ship coming into Portsmouth, N.H., for instance, or Providence, Rhode Island. Or any of a number of Southern port cities. What do you think the nuke-sniffing budget is in Mobile?
I’d rather not, thank you very much. I happen to live in New York City, which entails being in constant denial of the fact that I am in the perpetual #1 target for the world’s nuclear weapons (just as living in L.A. involves being in denial about earthquakes, I suppose).
– Jer
(Nukes? What nukes? Aw, come on – it’ll never happen. Your being ridiculous.)
SPOOFE: I think any nation-state with the capacity to build ICBMs could probably get a hold of a freighter, and slip in a nuke (maybe conveniently in a hold filled with a cargo of lead or tungsten for shielding… I don’t know about other means of detecting a nuclear bomb besides radiation, but shielding with heavy metals will reduce the detectable radiation), sail it into a U.S. harbor, and Customs or the Coast Guard would be hard-pressed to stop them.
The only reasonable use for the proposed SDI system that I can figure out is to shoot down an accidentally-launched missle. We should ask ourselves if there’s a cheaper and more effective way to do that. How far would $60 billion go towards producing safer and more reliable missiles and missile sites?
Who would have thought, 50 years ago, that we’d be spending money to help the Russians guard their nukes? But I think we should.
P.S. Zenster: heading over to that thread on the spring break now.
I would argue that SDI is not really meant to work at all. The entire program is corporate welfare at its best. Tax-payers pay for the R&D and corporations get the patents (not to mention the $600 dollar hammers and the like).
Didn’t a group of scientists come together in the 1980s to say that SDI doesn’t have a chance of working?
My guess is that Washington, D.C. is #1. New York is maybe #2. Go for command and control over population, unless it’s a coordinated binary attack. (There’s also the symbolic value.)
Also this: a laser-based anti-missile system makes more sense than comparatively glacial anti-missiles, especially in the boost phase. The U.S. and Israel are trying to iron out the bugs right now, but a reliable system is 10+ years away. The missile-based defense, then, is basically a very expensive, very ineffective) stop-gap measure to keep a narrow slice of the high-tech sector employed–and to create a legacy for Bush.
Of course, lasers can be defended against–to a point.
The New Republic just ran a cover story by Lawrence F. Kaplan, Offensive Line: Why the Best Offense is a Good Missile Defense. Kaplan argues that we don’t need a missile defense so much to keep other countries from actually nuking us as we do to keep other countries from deterring us from doing what we want to do by rattling their ICBM’s at us and threatening to trade their own existences for Los Angeles or New York or Washington, D.C. He’s arguing this point not so much with respect to Russia or even China, but rather WRT Iraq or North Korea or Libya. He may have something of a point there–in destructive terms, suitcase nukes may be more effective, but in terms of national prestige and making the whole world cower and kiss your ring, a nice big rocket is more effective; if the U.S can just shoot the damn thing down though, you look rather, ah, impotent. Kaplan also argues that for this purpose we don’t need the system everyone wants to build now, but rather a sea-based system which zaps missiles while they’re lifting off (as tsunamisurfer alludes to). This is more sensible from both a technological point of view and a geopolitical one (since such a system allows the U.S. to protect all its friends and allies around the world).
Now that’s a really interesting take on the whole issue that I hadn’t heard before, MEBuckner. Perhaps SDI is worth it on those grounds? Still seems like an extremely expensive option to me, but the US has grown accustomed to freedom of action in many parts of the world, and has probably already made comparable (if not greater) expenditures for essentially the same purpose, so SDI would just be in line with what the US has been doing all along.
I agree. While a sort of counter-measure to nuclear bombardment would be nice, it’s just not realistic right now.
I disagree. Such an operation would require lots of contact with people (in order to arrange for a legit shipping operation… an illegal approach of a mysterious ship will surely trigger the coast guard), and as such would greatly increase the probability that word of the transportation would get back to the authorities.
Of course, getting your hands on an ICBM would also trigger a lot of alarms in the states…
Either way, the fact remains that, 1. it’s hard to get a nuke without other people knowing about it, and 2. it’s hard to get it to your target without people knowing about it.
For the record, I’m hardly the biggest supporter of SDI… I don’t think it’s necessary and I don’t think we possess the capabilities right now. I just think that comparing the possibility of an ICBM attack with the possibility of a land-based covert insertion of a nuke is like comparing apples and oranges.
And I disagree with your disagreement. It might be somewhat complex, but we’re talking about a foreign state here, not some SPECTRE-like organzation. They ought to find it relativel easy to arrange for legt shipping. Certainly a lot easier than trying to arrange for an ICBM.
Well, at least for the ones still under direct Russian control (which may be all of them…Does anyone know if these other republics actually control any of the missiles?), probably the most important thing we could do is try to get these missiles de-alerted. Right now, U.S. and Russian missiles remain on a high-alert status. I read an article recently that talked about the fact that an experiment by a Cornell scientist firing a rocket up in Alaska just a few years ago (well after the end of the Cold War!) caused the Russians to go into high alert. They actually took more time than their official plans allot in order to determine that it was not a U.S. attack. In other words, if they had followed policy to the letter, they would have had to make a firing decision before they had confirmed it was not a U.S. attack. Going back to Cold War days, similar scenaris had played out in the U.S.
Clearly, this de-alerting of missiles is something that must be carried out by negotiations and making a decision to deploy a missile defense system is not going to help in that regard.
It seems that few people here are actually arguing for going ahead with deployment of a missile defense system, but since it something that will be coming up soon in the Bush administration and since I just attended a 3-hour dinner/seminar on this given by the Union of Concerned Scientists at the physics conference I attended last week, I will throw out a few points here.
The first is that there is an inherent advantage to the offense in this sort of thing that is hard to overcome. I.e., defense is inherently much more difficult. The second point is that the system proposed in the Clinton admininistration, involving ground based launch of rockets which then release a “hit-to-kill” vehicle that is guided to the missiles in their exo-atmospheric phase of flight, has actually been specified to remarkable detail in non-classified documents. Hence, system specifications are well-known, and a study has been released explaining several simple countermeasures that could be taken to defeat the system (see http://www.ucsusa.org/security/CM_exec.html )…countermeasures that require less technological prowess than building a nuclear, chemical, or biological weapon and delivery system. By the way, a sea-launched defense of this sort would suffer from the same problems.
Less is known about the feasibility of a defensive system that would shoot the missiles down in the boost phase, although the American Physical Society (APS) is now undertaking a study on this. Clearly, this has some disadvantages, such as the fact that the system must be deployed not too far from the launch site of the missiles and thus must anticipate specific threats, although at least in principle the problem of shooting down missiles during the boost phase is less difficult.
At any rate, the benefits of any such system must be weighed against the risks in terms of diplomacy, causing adversaries to develop more dangerous systems, encouraging nuclear proliferation, etc. As Robert Park of the APS likes to point out, the START agreements are the only proven way to destroy Russian missiles. Rushing to deploy a system before it had been sufficiently proven against realistic threats and countermeasures would thus likely cause more harm than good (besides being a collosal waste of money).
As for spin-offs from missile defense research, while some may come from the research end of things, it is probably not a very efficient use of research funds from that point of view, as others have pointed out. And, it is hard to imagine any serious spin-offs coming from a rush to deployment (which is really what the political debate is about…There is a fairly bipartisan agreement on continuing to do research on these sorts of things.)
Well, again, you’re comparing apples and oranges. “Arranging for covert shipment” is a helluva lot different from getting your hands on a long-range missile.
What I’m saying is twofold:
We’d most likely know if any other countries got their hands on a nuke. The only way they could acquire one would be if they built one themselves (in which case they’d probably want to test it… and it’s hard to hide a massive mushroom cloud) or if they bought one from someone else. And for the latter point, billions of your tax dollars go towards finding out fun little tidbits of information like that.
If there were any mysterious and suspicious transports coming in from a country suspected of having nuclear capabilities, you can bet your sweet patooty that they’d be intercepted 'fore they got halfway here.
I’m not claiming that it’d be harder than getting an ICBM… I’m saying that BOTH would be really, really, really tough.
That, I believe, is an agreed-upon point by almost everyone. All the funding for SDI would be better-used for NASA, in my oh-so-humble opinion.
It appears that all of the Soviet strategic nuclear weapons formerly stationed in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus have been physically transferred to Russian territory. From this report, it appears that Soviet tactical nuclear weapons were also transferred to Russian territory.
Would smuggling a nuclear weapon into the United States require an entire ship? Couldn’t some nefarious Foreign Power just put the thing in a box (with appropriate shielding), then have it shipped via normal channels (i.e., on some perfectly ordinary container ship, marked as VCR’s or auto parts or athletic shoes or plaster statues of Jesus on the manifest), then have it picked up by agents in-country and driven in a van to Washington or New York City or wherever? Or is every shipping crate which is brought into this country physically inspected?
I don’t get your point about apples and oranges. Of COURSE they’re different. And getting an old ship that floats is infinitely easier than getting an ICBM that flies (and gets where it’s supposed to get).
As for “Mysterious and suspicious transports” being intercepted, I’d count on that. My point is that they WOULDN’T be mysterious and suspicious. They’d look like normal, everyday traffic. That’s what would make them difficult to spot.
And they might not want to test it, that being a dead giveaway. Even underground tests can be spotted by seismologists, and distinguished from earthquakes (I’ve done some work in this area).But, as Richard Rhodes pointed out, every country that has attempted to build an atomic bomb has succceeded on its first attempt. So why not make your first test blast at your target? Risky, yes, but riskier things have been done in the name of belligerence.
It wouldn’t even neet to be lead. A few inches of hydrogenous material saturated with boron would mask neutron emissions quite effectively.
Oh and about smuggling a nuke into the country:
Did the terrorists board the Achille Lauro as regular passengers, or did they overtake the ship on the high seas. If the latter, was the ship quarantined and inspected for bombs before being allowed to return to port? If not, how hard would it be to stage a “red herring” attack at sea, with the purpose of planting a suitcase nuke aboard? After all, it’s a terror tactic that’s being discussed here, with all this talk of container ships and manifests. Percision targeting of military assets doesn’t seem to enter into it.
Not just any freighter from a foreign country has permission to enter US territorial waters. If some random boat appeared on the radar screens rushing towards the States, without any identification or notification to the US Coast Guard, they’d have a destroyer heading on an intercept course in five minutes.
