From: Harka <root@DosLinux> US Sees No KGB Role in Russia's Nuclear Arms
WASHINGTON (Reuter) - The United States Friday rejected the claim of a Russian scientist that Moscow had secretly developed nuclear "suitcase bombs" under KGB orders in the 1970s specifically for terrorist purposes.
[...]
Testifying before Congress Thursday, Alexei Yablokov, a respected scientist who served on the Russian National Security Council, contradicted statements by Russian officials denying the existence of the weapons and buttressed claims that many of them have gone missing.
"I am absolutely sure that they have been made," he told the House Military Research and Development subcommittee.
The issue arose when former Russian National Security Adviser Alexandr Lebed alleged that up to 100 portable suitcase-sized bombs were unaccounted for since the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union.
According to Lebed, who has agreed to testify before the House committee later this month, the devices have an explosive capacity of one kiloton -- the equivalent of 1,000 tons of TNT -- can be activated by a single person and could kill as many as 100,000 people.
Yablokov said he had spoken to the scientists who worked on the weapons and so was certain of their existence.
[...] I saw part of this on CSPAN. Yablokov made one point that I felt was interesting. These devices were made during the Cold War period, and it's extremely unlikely that any could have been made since the Soviet Union fell apart. The plutonium cores of thermonuclear devices have a limited shelf life - he claimed 6 years, which jibes with what I've heard from other open sources. Fission products build up in the cores which can poison a chain reaction. Thus all Pu based devices need to have the cores periodically removed and replaced with new ones, while the old ones have to go through a non-trivial reprocessing stage to remove the fission products. Thus, a nuke left on the shelf eventually turns into a dud. The time since the Soviet Union fell (which is the upper limit of the last time these particular 'suitcases' could plausibly have been repacked) is long enough ago that they are now either duds or becoming unreliable (I don't know if the degredation results in gradually decreasing yield, or if one day they simply don't work). Of course, even contaminated Pu in the hands of a terrorist (or a State) is a disquieting notion. Peter Trei trei@Process.com