#5
Wall Street Journal
November 8, 2001
Do the Terrorists Have Nukes?
By Pavel Felgenhauer. Mr. Felgenhauer is an independent defense
analyst in Moscow.
MOSCOW -- The threat of nuclear terrorism suddenly seems more real. People who slam passenger jets into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon would surely not hesitate to use nuclear weapons against big cities if they had them. But do they? And if not, can terrorists soon get hold of usable nuclear devices?
During a joint news conference with French President Jacques Chirac on Tuesday, President Bush said that Osama bin Laden has threatened in the past to use chemical, biological and even nuclear weapons, adding, "he is an evil man and I wouldn't put it past him to develop evil weapons to try to harm civilization as we know it."
President Bush also said that there is no evidence that bin Laden or his al Qaeda organization possess such weaponry. But just last month a three-star Russian general told reporters that terrorists had attempted to penetrate Russia's nuclear weapons facilities.
Gen. Igor Volynkin -- chief the 12th Main Department of the Russian Defense Ministry, which is in charge of the delivery, security, maintenance and testing of all Russian nuclear weapons -- told reporters there were recently two "attempts" by some unnamed "terrorists" to penetrate Russian nuclear storage facilities, known as "S-shelters." The attempts, according to Gen. Volynkin, were repelled.
The S-shelters are strongly fortified concrete bunkers in which nuclear warheads are stored and maintained when they are not attached to delivery systems. These bunkers were built in Soviet times. They are spread across Russia in the vicinity of large airfields and missile bases. The location of S-shelters is top secret and was not disclosed in arms-reduction talks with the U.S. The fact that some hostile outsiders had discovered these facilities and stalked them is highly discomfiting.
It has also been reported that bin Laden may have already obtained Russian nuclear weapons. In 1997 retired Gen. Alexander Lebed (today the governor of one of Russia's largest provinces) surprised and alarmed the world when he announced that at the time of the demise of the Soviet Union Moscow lost track of more than 100 suitcase-sized nuclear weapons. Mr. Lebed said that he learned about the "loose nukes" when he served for several months in 1996 as head of national security. Mr. Lebed said they were RA-115 and RA-115-01 nuclear weapons, which have one kiloton of explosive power and weigh up to 50 kilograms. It was alleged that these portable weapons were developed for the KGB to be used for attacks behind enemy lines in time of war.
The Russian military denied the charge that any nuclear weapons were unaccounted for, and declared that all Soviet nukes were moved safely back to Russia as the Soviet bloc and the Soviet Union collapsed. The Russian authorities also denied having ever mass-produced or deployed suitcase-sized nuclear bombs.
At the time, the U.S. officially supported the Russian denials. The State Department announced in 1997 that the U.S. did not place much credence in Mr. Lebed's remarks: "there is no evidence other than hearsay to support claims of portable Russian nuclear weapons gone missing."
If bin Laden or his supporters indeed obtained a genuine suitcase-sized Russian nuclear weapon (and not some fake traded on the black market), it is virtually impossible that they would be able to make it explode. Outsiders cannot directly use modern Russian and American nuclear weapons because they have security codes that fully deactivate them when there is an attempt at unauthorized penetration or activation. It is also not easy to use the core nuclear materials of a sophisticated nuke to make a clandestine bomb.
If there is any serious threat that bin Laden may get a usable nuke, its origin would likely be Pakistan, not Russia. Pakistan's nuclear weapons are armed with only weapons-grade uranium and are, apparently, not much more sophisticated than the bomb the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. Such weapons tend to be bulky and their explosive yield is relatively low, but they are easy to reassemble. Bin Laden supporters in the Pakistani nuclear program (and such people, apparently, do exist) can, possibly, pass on the material and the knowledge to make a crude nuclear explosive.
Bin Laden and al Qaeda may have no usable nuclear weapons yet, as U.S. authorities assume. But experts from the International Atomic Energy Agency warn that there is a weapons category that is in many respects worse than nukes and much easier to make -- radioactive bombs.
Such a weapon is a device to spread deadly radioactive contamination over a large area without a nuclear explosion. It may rely on a mix of conventional explosives with some highly radioactive substance like spent nuclear fuel, cesium that is used in medicine or in industry, plutonium from a nuclear weapon, or plutonium from a conventional nuclear power station that is not suitable for weapons production.
The explosion of such a bomb would create a radioactive cloud and cause severe and long-lasting contamination. If such a thing happened in New York, humans might have to abandon parts of Manhattan for hundreds, if not thousands of years, as they have the town of Pripyat in Ukraine, near the Chernobyl disaster area. The Soviets tried to clean up Pripyat, but it is practically impossible to clean a modern city of radioactive dust.
In the 1950s, when Russia and the U.S. did not have many nukes, radioactive weapons were developed and tested. Later they were withdrawn and replaced by tens of thousands of regular nuclear bombs. But now the relative ease of making radioactive weapons and their terrifying power may attract terrorists.
It's much easier to obtain radioactive materials in the republics of the former Soviet Union than true nuclear bombs. Radioactive materials are plentiful and they are poorly guarded. As a scientist in Soviet times, I easily obtained relatively large amounts of radioactive isotopes for research and no one ever seriously inquired what I did with them.
Almost all recorded cases of nuclear smuggling from the former Soviet Union have involved radioactive substances, not weapons-grade nuclear materials. The use of radioactive weapons by terrorists would probably not cause mass deaths of civilians, but the ensuing panic and economic losses make radioactivity an effective terrorist weapon -- as devastating, if not more so, than anthrax, smallpox or other bioweapons.
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