So if I bought, say, some yellow cake from Niger and me Evil Minions in Baghdad put together a nuke which was then detonated in London the fallout would tell you…?
-Joe
Yellow cake is raw uranium oxide, useless for a bomb without further work. After you enrich it, stick it in a breeder reactor, let it cool, and extract the plutonium, you have something that can be used in a weapon. It also has a chemical and isotopic signature that can tell you where it was produced, say reactor #2 in Pyongyang. The detonation of the weapon adds its own fingerprint in the form of the chemical and isotopic nature of the fallout, which can tell an expert what design was used for the weapon.
I’ve read Tom Clancy, too. How do you get samples from these reactors to say they were the ones that did it? Are all reactors sampled? If you had a hidden reactor? Would anyone know it came from there?
Say they came from a former soviet state and the people there ‘lost’ them. Maybe they were’nt all accounted for in the first place. In any case, the terrorists have them now and you don’t know exactly how many they have and your cities are going up in flames. One after the other. You can’t find the terrorists, but you know they have widespread support in the ME even from the governments there who claim to be your ‘allies’.
That’s why we have the CIA, to collect intelligence on foreign weapons programs. You don’t have to have a sample from the reactor. If you know the operating regime of the reactor and its design, you can make good predictions about the composition of the output products. This isn’t new, the USA has 60+ years of experience in operating its own nuclear weapons program and collecting intelligence on foreign nuclear weapons programs. Fallout analysis was part of every atmospheric test, so we have a great deal of data on the fallout signatures of various design features. Isotopic analysis has also become a widely used and valuable tool in many other areas of scientific research. Only a tiny fraction of a nuclear weapon’s mass is converted to energy, the rest is vaporized, irradiated, transmuted and spread over a wide area.
These would be the same guys who said there were WMD’s in Iraq, etc?
…and I was going to ask how you know where it was bred without getting a sample from that location, but I see that Uzi has already got that covered…
-Joe
Not necessarily. If it was believed to be ‘excusable’ (i.e. preceded by a frantic call on the hotline going ‘ohshitohshitohshit something’s gone wrong and one of our birds has launched by mistake’) then possibly it would have been settled by an equivalent soviet city getting smoked in exchange and a whole lotta very stressed ‘discussions’.
And to** mks57**s point, no-one is going to assemble a bomb in a basement, the isotopes will give you a pretty good idea where the bombs came from originally, and whoever gets that finger pointed at them is pretty unlikely to go “well gee shucks, we must have lost a couple down the back of the sofa, we didn’t do anything, what are you gonna do about it?” for obvious reasons.
Any country who might concievably be in the frame for having supplied the nukes, or possibly be a recipient of the next mushroom cloud, or in the same neigbourhood as either, is going to be rounding up everyone who might know anything and hooking their genitalia up the national grid at double-quick speed. And someone will know something - nukes are not something a five-man cell operating out of a garage can obtain and distribute.
Buckling at the knees and giving in won’t be on the cards, for the simple reason that it would guarantee a repeat of the experience pretty soon.
So…does this mean that the idea of a “Rogue State” giving a nuke to “Terrorists” is actually a “Load of Shit”?
After all, the only reason to pass on a weapon in that way is for the sake of deniability.
-Joe
I can’t conceive of a scenario where such an action would make any sense. If you’re a rogue country that managed at great cost to eventually get some nuclear weapons, why on earth would you want to hand them to an uncontrolable “terrorist group” to use them as they see fit? You want to keep them to threaten and/or deter and/or blackmail potential ennemies of your choice, if need be, not have them exploding right and left in random places, especially since you’ll be the one who will have to deal with the consequences. Actually, how would you know for sure they won’t end up being used against your own country?
Then it stands to reason that we have two possiblities:
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A nuke’s origins can be made impossible to trace, and therefore a nation-state would have a reason (ie. deniability) to give it to a third party for use in a mutual goal
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A nuke can, with all confidence, be traced back to its place of origin, making handing over control of a nuke to a third party total suicide - not only can that third party use that nuke against YOU, they can also use it anywhere else and YOU get to suffer the retaliation.
Which is it, then?
-Joe
But this would be done only if the nation-state knew with certainty against whom how and when the nuke would be used, and that it would fit its political goals, hence if it had a perfect control of the so-called “terrorist group” (it’s not like the rulers would want anybody else than themselves decide where and when to use it, would risk it being “lost” or misused, would hand it out to people of unknown competence and reliability, etc…) So, this “terrorist group” would be actually a tool, or an extension of its intelligence services. And the attack would in reality be an attack by a nation against another, albeit secretly.
And I still find difficult to conceive a scenario where a “rogue state” would want a nuke to detonate in a foreign country and the attack to be attributed to terrorists. Plus, even if the origins of the nuke can’t be detected by scientific methods, there’s still a high risk that the plot will discovered by other intelligence methods, before or after the attack. And the stakes are so incredibly high that I’ve hard time thinking of a motive worth such a risk.
You’re making a few flawed assumptions here.
The first is that a ‘nation-state’ is a monolithic entity with its own interests. In fact, most the states of the sort we’re talking about are rather unstable, with power blocs within the country that are at odds with each other.
So I don’t think ‘Pakistan’ would attack the U.S. using covert means. But would a military faction within Pakistan do so?
A perfect example of what I’m talking about can be seen in Saudi Arabia today. Officially, the Saudis are allies in the War on Terror, and in fact have cooperated to a great extent with the U.S. However, at the same time the Saudis are one of the biggest problems. This seeming conundrum can be explained when you consider that the Saudi Royal Family is huge, and that the government itself is not ruled by constitutional law but subject to the whims of its leaders, who do not act in a uniform or monolithic way.
The second mistake is assuming that these states will behave rationally. This is generally a good assumption when dealing with a democracy or a modern state with a well worked out power structure. But when you’re dealing with a dictatorship, the sanity of the regime is the combination of the sanity of the ruler and the strength of his grip on power. North Korea, for example, has done insane things that could have led to an invasion for almost no rational gain whatsoever. For example, kidnapping a famous movie director and actress so that they could make movies for Kim Jong Il. And of course, Saddam took a number of incredibly stupid risks over the past 15 years, which ultimately led to the invasion of Iraq and the destruction of his regime.
In a region of religious fanatics and tribalism and unstable governments, trusting that the possessors of nuclear weapons will act rationally with them is a risk I certainly would not be willing to take.
But what would any faction have to gain by exposing their country to a high risk of retailiatory annihilation? Granted, there might be an “apocalyptic martyr” faction but I have to assume that if they were about to get their hands on something really dangerous at least one of their countrymen would blow the whistle.
Kidnapping a few people isn’t going to get you into a war unless they are senior members of a government or similarly important. All countries understand very well that wars don’t flare up overnight and that there is a reasonably well choreographed dance that leads up to the commencement of hostilities. Wars break out when someone flunks a move or two, fails to understand what their rivals are up to, or just plain wants to have a fight. Saddam underestimated just how keen Bush was to have his scalp (or alternatively, understood that nothing he did was going to make a difference), the Argentinians underestimated the British willingness to fight, the Serbs misread the signals they were getting from Nato. Kim Jong Il has been a master of treading the line and getting away with it - despite the long long long list of ‘insane’ things he has done, he’s still sitting pretty. If Kim really was a mad dog, the Chinese would have destroyed him a long time ago.
Now this I can’t argue with. Despite my quibbles above, I think proliferation is horribly dangerous, not because of the whole ‘rogue state gives nukes to terrorists’ line but because of the risk of a nuclear regime collapsing or getting itself involved in an existential conflict where it feels the nuclear option is unavoidable. Israel and Pakistan are probably the two countries most likely to use a nuke, simply because they are the most likely to end up with their backs against the wall. If NK has a bomb, it probably goes to the top of the list. And having people pitching nukes around is a BAD THING even if it’s not in my neighbourhood.