Are “nuclear suitcases” floating around to be bought by terrorists?

George Tenet, the man who served as the director of the Central Intelligence Agency on the day of the 9/11 terrorist attack—indeed, a man who held that stressful job for nearly eight years under two presidents—tells the fascinating story in his memoir about how Saudi intelligence captured a handful of top al Qaeda officials in 2003, a group that included the notorious Shaykh Nasir bin Hamin al-Fahd. It was a real blow.

What made Al-Fahd fall on the radar of all intelligence services in Europe and the United States was a document he wrote with the terrifying title “Treaty on the legal status of the use of weapons of mass destruction against infidels.” The weapons he refers to are atomic bombs. Where the hell would al Qaeda terrorists get atomic bombs?

Al-Fahd had clearly made a credible call, from the highest level of al Qaeda’s top management, to use nuclear weapons against Western targets. And now he was in a Saudi dungeon.

Under ruthless interrogation by the Saudi Mukhabarat (the secret police), using methods that would have been frowned upon even at Guantánamo, Al-Fahd confessed that al Qaeda had been negotiating with black market arms dealers in Moscow for nuclear weapons.” portable”. Although under extreme harshness, Al-Fahd was unwilling (more likely, unable) to reveal useful details.

We tend to think of nuclear weapons as very large objects, devices like “Fat Boy,” the bomb that partially Nagasaki: large, heavy objects that need submarines or missiles or Air Force flying fortresses to move. But a subcategory of much smaller nuclear weapons has long existed, including various US-made designs. They are often referred to in the media as “suitcase nukes” or “pocket nukes”.

The two most famous of these produced by the US were the “Davy Crockett”, a rifle-launched nuclear device that was fired like a mortar at an enemy a few miles away, and the Mk-54 SADM Atomic Demolition Special) a 60 pound bomb that was small enough to fit in a large trunk or trunk.

Although these weapons were pipsqueaks in comparison to the multi-megaton hydrogen bombs that destroyed developed nations in the 1950s and 1960s, any atomic bomb, even the smallest one, is capable of killing millions of human beings in urban settings.

The least complex device, in theory, would simply be a blob of purified plutonium approaching criticality under normal conditions at room temperature. If you accumulate 20 to 22 pounds of elemental plutonium in a sphere, the internal level of radiation soon becomes strong enough to cause the entire mass to spontaneously fission; In a matter of nanoseconds, the reaction goes out of control and you have a nuclear explosion. Such a bomb would require no detonator, just the accumulation of plutonium in one place. It would probably also incinerate anyone wrong enough to gather that much plutonium in one place.

Even a half-dollar-sized piece of plutonium is hot to the touch, so a lot of internal fission is going on, releasing energy all the time.

Actual US-built “suitcase” weapons could deliver something close to five kilotons of explosive force (compared to 16 kilotons for the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima and 21 kilotons for the bomb dropped on Nagasaki).

A fifteen kiloton device detonated in midtown Manhattan would vaporize everything within a radius of just over a mile. Anyone within a five to 10 mile radius would likely be a victim of radiation poisoning, burns, or injuries from flying debris. Multiple millions would die in such a scenario. Compare that to the 3,000 who died on 9/11.

These small arms are called “tactical” in the sense that they would be used on the battlefield to change the course of a skirmish rather than define the outcome of a war. Its value was its portability and size. But that was also his main responsibility. They were likely to explode so close to the people who deployed them that nuclear recoil and radioactive fallout could hit the wrong troops.

A 1994 US law (rejected after 9/11) prohibited nuclear weapons with a yield of five kilotons or less, but in 1994 the Pentagon had suspended such weapons as impractical and nearly useless.

All US “suitcase” weapons can be taken into account. But what happened to those made in the former USSR? Several Soviet-era defectors, including Stanislav Lunev, have described the Russian devices with great specificity. Lunev assured American spy agencies that many of them were lost in the period of perestroika, when Gorbachev and the first President Bush agreed to far-reaching nuclear arms reductions. In that period, some 30,000 nuclear weapons were reportedly withdrawn from Moscow.

If just one percent of them slipped through the net, then 300 of those weapons could be floating around on the black market for terrorists to buy. Even the most optimistic scenarios do not suggest that 99 percent of the weapons were safeguarded, so the actual number is certainly much higher than 300 weapons.

Although critics today regularly dismiss talk of “nuclear suitcases” as fodder for thriller writers, George Tenet reports in his autobiography that the CIA was unable to obtain good leads on the hundreds of missing Soviet-era nuclear bombs that they certainly never returned to the United States. Moscow for disassembly.

“Of all al-Qaeda’s efforts to obtain other forms of weapons of mass destruction, the number one threat is nuclear. I am convinced that this is where Osama bin Laden and his agents desperately wanted to go. They understand that car bombings Trucks, trains and planes will get them some headlines, no doubt, but if they manage to unleash a mushroom cloud, they will make history: Such an event would put al Qaeda on a par with the superpowers and fulfill bin Laden’s threat to destroy our economy and bring death to every American home.”

Tenet went on to say that it was not “beyond the realm of possibility” for any terrorist group, not just al Qaeda, to obtain a nuclear weapon.

“A mushroom cloud would change history,” he wrote.

Another analyst, Paul Williams, has claimed in “Osama’s Revenge: The Next 9/11” that Al Qaeda has been planning a spectacular nuclear fire show using half a dozen portable nuclear weapons that would be detonated simultaneously in major US urban centers.

So where are the missing Russian bombs? Retired Russian generals and colonels who were in positions of authority when Gorbachev ordered the withdrawal of nuclear technology have claimed that at least fifty ADMs (atomic demolition devices, the smallest size nuclear bomb) definitely could not be counted and were supposed to that they were in the hands of bad actors, probably for sale to the highest bidder. Such accusations are difficult to prove, but equally difficult to disprove.

And what would it take to keep a “nuclear suitcase” in operational condition, even thirty or forty years after it was manufactured?

The primary requirement would be a permanent source of electricity to keep the internal electrical mechanics running and the batteries charged. A simple wall socket in any home or office would work great.