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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: FaultLine who wrote (30977)	5/28/2002 1:12:07 PM
From: Win Smith	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Nuclear Nightmares By BILL KELLER nytimes.com [ In which Times military beat guy Keller takes on the terrorists with nukes topic. Pakistan is troubling : ] Eight countries are known to have nuclear weapons -- the United States, Russia, China, Great Britain, France, India, Pakistan and Israel. David Albright, a nuclear-weapons expert and president of the Institute for Science and International Security, points out that Pakistan's program in particular was built almost entirely through black markets and industrial espionage, aimed at circumventing Western export controls. Defeating the discipline of nuclear nonproliferation is ingrained in the culture. Disaffected individuals in Pakistan (which, remember, was intimate with the Taliban) would have no trouble finding the illicit channels or the rationalization for diverting materials, expertise -- even, conceivably, a warhead. [On the stray Russian warhead front, there's this:] If a terrorist did get his hands on a nuclear warhead, he would still face the problem of setting it off. American warheads are rigged with multiple PAL's ( ''permissive action links'') -- codes and self-disabling devices designed to frustrate an unauthorized person from triggering the explosion. General Habiger says that when he examined Russian strategic weapons he found the level of protection comparable to our own. ''You'd have to literally break the weapon apart to get into the gut,'' he told me. ''I would submit that a more likely scenario is that there'd be an attempt to get hold of a warhead and not explode the warhead but extract the plutonium or highly enriched uranium.'' In other words, it's easier to take the fuel and build an entire weapon from scratch than it is to make one of these things go off. [ One assessment of the most probable scenario, perhaps somewhat contrary to popular consensus: ] One of the more interesting facts about the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima is that it had never been tested. All of those spectral images of nuclear coronas brightening the desert of New Mexico -- those were to perfect the more complicated plutonium device that was dropped on Nagasaki. ''Little Boy,'' the Hiroshima bomb, was a rudimentary gunlike device that shot one projectile of highly enriched uranium into another, creating a critical mass that exploded. The mechanics were so simple that few doubted it would work, so the first experiment was in the sky over Japan. The closest thing to a consensus I heard among those who study nuclear terror was this: building a nuclear bomb is easier than you think, probably easier than stealing one. In the rejuvenated effort to prevent a terrorist from striking a nuclear blow, this is where most of the attention and money are focused. A nuclear explosion of any kind ''is not a sort of high-probability thing,'' said a White House official who follows the subject closely. ''But getting your hands on enough fissile material to build an improvised nuclear device, to my mind, is the least improbable of them all, and particularly if that material is highly enriched uranium in metallic form. Then I'm really worried. That's the one.'' To build a nuclear explosive you need material capable of explosive nuclear fission, you need expertise, you need some equipment, and you need a way to deliver it. Delivering it to the target is, by most reckoning, the simplest part. People in the field generally scoff at the mythologized suitcase bomb; instead they talk of a ''conex bomb,'' using the name of those shack-size steel containers that bring most cargo into the United States. Two thousand containers enter America every hour, on trucks and trains and especially on ships sailing into more than 300 American ports. Fewer than 2 percent are cracked open for inspection, and the great majority never pass through an X-ray machine. Containers delivered to upriver ports like St. Louis or Chicago pass many miles of potential targets before they even reach customs. ''How do you protect against that?'' mused Habiger, the former chief of our nuclear arsenal. ''You can't. That's scary. That's very, very scary. You set one of those off in Philadelphia, in New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and you're going to kill tens of thousands of people, if not more.'' Habiger's view is ''It's not a matter of if; it's a matter of when'' -- which may explain why he now lives in San Antonio.