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Experts Sum Up Their Fears of a Nuke Attack Dave Eberhart, NewsMax.comEditor’s note: This is part one of a five-part series that will go on to examine the real dirt on "dirty bombs," what your government is doing to prepare for a nuclear attack of the first or second kind, what other countries are doing to prepare for the same, and what you can do. The screen dramatization of Tom Clancy’s "The Sum of All Fears" features terrorists nuking the fans at the Super Bowl in Baltimore. This odd escape vehicle for a terror-warning-overdosed American public is raking in millions at the box office and graphically depicts the "inevitable" nuclear phase of the War on Terrorism described by such administration luminaries as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. "Hundreds of thousands" of Americans are potentially at risk of nuclear attack, no-nonsense Rumsfeld chillingly says. Rice, whose job it is to know about these things, grimly forecasts that the next terror shoe to drop will "make September 11 look like child’s play, by using some terrible weapon." But what do more neutral experts and institutions say – especially those that do not have to justify to taxpayers the expenditure of billions in a terror war? And by neutral we don’t mean folks such as investment guru Warren Buffett, who will gladly shock any sentient being in earshot with the unwelcome news flash: A nuke attack on American soil is "virtually a certainty.” Neither do we mean Graham Allison, Harvard egghead and an assistant secretary of defense in the Clinton administration, who predicts with the tools of a seer, "bin Laden’s final act could be a nuclear attack on America.” Among the more benign experts, there is some general agreement on basics. Homemade Nuke 'Can Be Ruled Out' Starting with the good news, it’s mighty unlikely that any terror group can build a nuclear weapon from scratch. One senior scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory opines that the possibility of such an achievement is "so remote that it can be essentially ruled out.” To manufacture weapons-grade uranium, a terrorist would require thousands of sophisticated high-speed gas centrifuges, not to mention a safe haven in which to operate them. Even Iraq could not produce highly enriched uranium for a bomb after a 10-year, $10 billion program, which was eventually trumped by the Gulf War in 1991. Basing a bomb on plutonium is just as onerous. Even with access to a reactor, the process to extract the plutonium necessitates a specially constructed plutonium extraction plant: chopping up radioactive fuel rods, dissolving them in acid and finally extracting the plutonium from the acid. And it’s not likely the terrorist group is going to find such a plant by rummaging through the newspaper classifieds as if scanning for flight training schools or rental crop dusters. However, once one gets away from the scratch recipes, the experts agree that the probabilities increase exponentially. Woeful Russia a Source Our duty terrorist could certainly look to Russia for its supply of ready-to-rock-and-roll plutonium. The retired Evil Empire has tons of the stuff and, what’s more, a poor accounting system, a tradition of smuggling and plenty of underpaid scientists to bribe and undermine. The penny-pinching terrorist plotter could eschew plutonium altogether and go with buying or stealing the cheaper bomb-grade uranium, just like Uncle Sam used in "Fat Man” and "Little Boy” back in 1945. One wrinkle: the usual requirement of uranium is a daunting 120 pounds a bomb. Experts say that such an amount is not available on the black market, and if it were, our crack intelligence agencies would know about it in a New York minute. However, despite the dearth of atomic goods on the shelf, the terrorists are certainly out there trying their level best to steal some of the good stuff or buy it from some thief who has. In 1993 about 6 pounds of weapon-grade uranium almost went astray in St. Petersburg. In 1998, another effort to steal about 40 pounds of former Soviet Union bomb-grade uranium was nipped in the bud. Our frank Russian friends tell us that terrorists are now staking out their nuclear-weapon sites. In any event, most experts agree that one day the terrorists will get their hands on that magic quantity of 120 pounds of bomb-ready uranium and lash it up with a so-called "gun-barrel” trigger where bullets of the fissionable stuff are fired at one another to crank up the runaway reaction that gives you the nuclear mushroom and fireball that figure in that sum of all our fears. Like reactors and plutonium extraction plants, buying or stealing bomb-grade plutonium is improbable as well. If you believe Russian President Vladimir Putin, there just isn’t the product out there to buy. Putin has guaranteed President Bush that none of his country’s warheads are unaccounted for. But some folks in the U.S. Department of Energy were of the opinion a decade ago that 603 metric tons of nuclear materials were stored in 53 sites in the former Soviet Union where security was euphemistically rated "poor.” That tonnage, some guarded mightily by locks and chains, is enough to crank out 41,000 nuclear weapons. The atomic energy agency counts 18 incidents of trafficking in plutonium or uranium since 1993 – none, thankfully, involving enough material to make The Bomb. There is more bad news about the poor man’s uranium nuke. Makeshift as it may be, it works first time, every time. There’s no need to ever test it, or for that matter to give away the fact that you have it.
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