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Date: Mon, 31 Oct 2005 07:24:09 -0500
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From: "R.A. Hettinga"
Subject: [Clips] The myth of "suitcase nukes."
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http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110007478
OpinionJournal
WSJ Online
AT WAR
Baggage Claim
The myth of "suitcase nukes."
BY RICHARD MINITER
Monday, October 31, 2005 12:01 a.m. EST
"It is the duty of Muslims to prepare as much force as possible to
terrorize the enemies of God."
--Osama bin Laden, May 1998
"Bin Laden's final act could be a nuclear attack on America."
--Graham Allison, Washington Post
"One hundred suitcase-size nuclear bombs were lost by Russia."
--Gerald Celente, "professional futurist," Boston Globe
Like everyone else rushing off the Washington subway one rush-hour
morning, Ibrahim carried a small leather briefcase. No one paid him or his
case much mind, except for the intern in the new Brooks Brothers suit who
pushed past him on the escalator and banged his shin. "What do you have in
there? Rocks?"
Ibrahim's training had taught him to ignore all provocations. You will
see, he thought.
The escalator carried him up and out into the strong September sunlight.
It was, as countless commentators would later say, a perfect day. As he
walked from the Capitol South metro stop, he saw the Republican National
Committee headquarters to his right. Two congressional office buildings
loomed in front of him. Between the five-story structures, the U.S. Capitol
dome winked in the sun. It was walled off in a mini-Green Zone of jersey
barriers and armed police. He wouldn't trouble them. He was close enough.
He put the heavy case down on the sidewalk and pressed a sequence of
buttons on what looked like standard attachi-case locks. It would be just a
matter of seconds. When he thought he had waited long enough, he shouted in
Arabic: "God is great!" He was too soon. Some passersby stared at him.
Two-tenths of a second later, a nuclear explosion erased the entire scene.
Birds were incinerated midflight. Nearly 100,000 people--lawmakers, judges,
tourists--became superheated dust. Only raindrop-sized dollops of
metal--their dental fillings--remained as proof of their existence. In
tenths of a second--less time than the blink of a human eye--the 10-kiloton
blast wave pushed down the Capitol (toppling the Indian statute known as
"Freedom" at the dome's top), punched through the pillars of the U.S.
Supreme Court, smashed down the three palatial Library of Congress
buildings, and flattened the House and Senate office buildings.
The blast wave raced outward, decapitating the Washington Monument,
incinerating the Smithsonian and its treasures, and reducing to rubble the
White House and every office tower north to Dupont Circle and south to the
Anacostia River. The secondary, or overpressure, wave jumped over the
Potomac, spreading unstoppable fires to the Pentagon and Arlington, Va.
Planes bound for Reagan and Dulles airports tumbled from the sky.
Tens of thousands were killed instantly. By nightfall, another 250,000
people were dying in overcrowded hospitals and impromptu emergency rooms
set up in high school gymnasiums. Radiation poisoning would kill tens of
thousands more in the decades to come. America's political, diplomatic and
military leadership was simply wiped away. As the highest-ranking survivor,
the agriculture secretary took charge. He moved the capital to Cheyenne,
Wyo.
That is the nightmare--or one version, anyway--of the nuclear suitcase. In
the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, this nuclear nightmare did not
seem so fanciful.
A month after September 11, senior Bush administration officials were told
that an al Qaeda terrorist cell had control of a 10-kiloton atomic bomb
from Russia and was plotting to detonate it in New York City. CIA director
George Tenet told President Bush that the source, code-named "Dragonfire,"
had said the nuclear device was already on American soil. After anxious
weeks of investigation, including surreptitious tests for radioactive
material in New York and other major cities, Dragonfire's report was found
to be false. New York's mayor and police chief would not learn of the
threat for another year.
The specter of the nuclear suitcase bomb is particularly potent because it
fuses two kinds of terror: the horrible images of Hiroshima and the suicide
bomber, the unseen shark amid the swimmers. The fear of a suitcase nuke,
like the bomb itself, packs a powerful punch in a small package. It also
has a sense of inevitability. A December 2001 article in the Boston Globe
speculated that terrorists would explode suitcase nukes in Chicago, Sydney
and Jerusalem . . . in 2004.
Every version of the nuclear suitcase bomb scare relies on one or more
strands of evidence, two from different Russians and one from a former
assistant secretary of defense. The scare started, in its current form,
with Russian general Alexander Lebed, who told a U.S. congressional
delegation visiting Moscow in 1997--and, later that year, CBS's series "60
Minutes"--that a number of Soviet-era nuclear suitcase bombs were missing.
It was amplified when Stanislav Lunev, the highest-ranking Soviet military
intelligence officer ever to defect to the United States, told a
congressional panel that same year that Soviet special forces might have
smuggled a number of portable nuclear bombs onto the U.S. mainland to be
detonated if the Cold War ever got hot. The scare grew when Graham Allison,
a Harvard professor who served as an assistant secretary of defense under
President Clinton, wrote a book called "Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate
Preventable Catastrophe." In that slim volume, Mr. Allison worries about
stolen warheads, self-made bombs and suitcase nukes. Published in 2004, the
work has been widely cited by the press and across the blogosphere.
Let's walk back the cat, as they say in intelligence circles. The
foundation of all main nuclear suitcase stories is a string of interviews
given by Gen. Lebed in 1997. Lebed told a visiting congressional delegation
in June 1997 that the Kremlin was concerned that its arsenal of 100
suitcase-size nuclear bombs would find their way to Chechen rebels or other
Islamic terrorists. He said that he had tried to account for all 100 but
could find only 48. That meant 52 were missing. He said the bombs would fit
"in a 60-by-40-by-20 centimeter case"--in inches, roughly
24-by-16-by-8--and would be "an ideal weapon for nuclear terror. The
warhead is activated by one person and easy to transport." It would later
emerge that none of these statements were true.
Later that year, the Russian general sat down with Steve Kroft of "60
Minutes." The exchange could hardly have been more alarming.
Kroft: Are you confident that all of these weapons are secure and accounted
for?
Lebed: (through a translator) Not at all. Not at all.
Kroft: How easy would it be to steal one?
Lebed: It's suitcase-sized.
Kroft: You could put it in a suitcase and carry it off?
Lebed: It is made in the form of a suitcase. It is a suitcase, actually.
You can carry it. You can put it into another suitcase if you want to.
Kroft: But it's already in a suitcase.
Lebed: Yes.
Kroft: I could walk down the streets of Moscow or Washington or New York,
and people would think I'm carrying a suitcase?
Lebed: Yes, indeed.
Kroft: How easy is it to detonate?
Lebed: It would take twenty, thirty minutes to prepare.
Kroft: But you don't need secret codes from the Kremlin or anything like that.
Lebed: No.
Kroft: You are saying that there are a significant number that are missing
and unaccounted for?
Lebed: Yes, there is. More than one hundred.
Kroft: Where are they?
Lebed: Somewhere in Georgia, somewhere in Ukraine, somewhere in the Baltic
countries. Perhaps some of them are even outside those countries. One
person is capable of actuating this nuclear weapon--one person.
Kroft: So you're saying these weapons are no longer under the control of
the Russian military.
Lebed: I'm saying that more than one hundred weapons out of the supposed
number of 250 are not under the control of the armed forces of Russia. I
don't know their location. I don't know whether they have been destroyed or
whether they are stored or whether they've been sold or stolen. I don't
know.
Nearly everything Lebed told visiting congressmen and "60 Minutes" was
later contradicted, sometimes by Lebed himself. In subsequent news
accounts, he said 41 bombs were missing, at other times he pegged the
number at 52 or 62, 84 or even 100. When asked about this disparity, he
told the Washington Post that he "did not have time to find out how many
such weapons there were." If this sounds breezy or cavalier, that is
because it is.
Indeed, Lebed never seemed to have made a serious investigation at all. A
Russian official later pointed out that Lebed never visited the facility
that houses all of Russia's nuclear weapons or met with its staff. And
Lebed--who died in a plane crash in 2002--had a history of telling tall
tales.
As for the small size of the weapons and the notion that they can be
detonated by one person, those claims also been authoritatively dismissed.
The only U.S. government official to publicly admit seeing a suitcase-sized
nuclear device is Rose Gottemoeller. As a Defense Department official, she
visited Russia and Ukraine to monitor compliance with disarmament treaties
in the early 1990s. The Soviet-era weapon "actually required three
footlockers and a team of several people to detonate," she said. "It was
not something you could toss in your shoulder bag and carry on a plane or
bus"
Lebed's onetime deputy, Vladimir Denisov, said he headed a special
investigation in July 1996--almost a year before Lebed made his
charges--and found that no army field units had portable nuclear weapons of
any kind. All portable nuclear devices--which are much bigger than a
suitcase--were stored at a central facility under heavy guard. Lt. Gen.
Igor Valynkin, chief of the Russian Defense Ministry's 12th Main
Directorate, which oversees all nuclear weapons, denied that any weapons
were missing. "Nuclear suitcases . . . were never produced and are not
produced," he said. While he acknowledged that they were technically
possible to make, he said the weapon would have "a lifespan of only several
months" and would therefore be too costly to maintain.
Gen. Valynkin is referring to the fact that radioactive weapons require a
lot of shielding. To fit the radioactive material and the appropriate
shielding into a suitcase would mean that a very small amount of material
would have to be used. Radioactive material decays at a steady, certain
rate, expressed as "half-life," or the length of time it takes for half of
the material to decay into harmless elements. The half-life of the most
likely materials in the infinitesimal weights necessary to fit in a
suitcase is a few months. So as a matter of physics and engineering, the
nuclear suitcase is an impractical weapon. It would have to be rebuilt with
new radioactive elements every few months.
Gen. Valynkin's answer was later expanded by Viktor Yesin, former chief of
staff of Russia's Strategic Missile Forces. Mr. Yesin was asked by
Alexander Golts, a reporter at the Russian newspaper Ezhenedelny Zhurnal:
"The nuclear suitcases--are they myth or reality?"
Let's start by noting that "nuclear suitcase" is a term coined by
journalists. Journalistic parlance, if you wish. The matter concerns
special compact nuclear devices of knapsack type. Igor Valynkin, commander
of the 12th Main Directorate of the Defense Ministry responsible for
nuclear ordnance storage, was absolutely honest when he was saying in an
interview with Nezavisimaya Gazeta in 1997 that "there have never been any
nuclear suitcases, grips, handbags or other carryalls."
As for special compact nuclear devices, the Americans were the first to
assemble them. They were called Special Atomic Demolition Munitions (SADM).
As of 1964, the U.S. Army and Marine Corps had two models of SADM at their
disposal--M-129 and M-159. Each SADM measured 87 x 65 x 67 centimeters [34
by 26 by 26 inches]. A container with the backpack weighed 70 kilograms
[154 pounds]. There were about 300 SADMs in all. The foreign media reported
that all these devices were dismantled and disposed of within the framework
of the unilateral disarmament initiatives declared by the first President
Bush in late 1991 and early 1992.
The Soviet Union initiated production of special compact nuclear devices in
1967. These munitions were called special mines. There were fewer models of
them in the Soviet Union than in the United States. All of these munitions
were to be dismantled before 2000 in accordance with the Russian and
American commitments concerning reduction of tactical nuclear weapons dated
1991. [When the Soviet Union collapsed, Boris Yeltsin reiterated the
commitment in January 1992.] Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov said at the
conference on the Nuclear Weapons Nonproliferation Treaty in April 2000
that Russia had practically completed dismantling "nuclear mines." It means
that Russia kept the promise Yeltsin once made to the international
community.
Mr. Yesin added that all "portable" nuclear weapons were strictly
controlled by the KGB in the Soviet era and were held in a single facility
on Russian soil, where they were regularly counted before they were
dismantled. The special mines that the press calls "nuclear suitcases" are
no more. American officials, including Ms. Gottemoeller, insist that there
is no evidence that any are missing, stolen or sold. American experts
charged with monitoring the destruction of these weapons have repeatedly
testified to Congress that no special mines are unaccounted for.
What about the Russian army units trained to use the special mines? Is it
possible that a few such weapons remain in their hands? According to Mr.
Yesin, "they always used simulators and dummy weapons. Needless to say, the
latter looked like the real thing--the same size and weight, the same
control panel. Instead of nuclear materials, however, they contained sand."
Despite Lebed's many changing accounts, his reputation for exaggeration,
and the denial of nearly every Russian official with knowledge of Russian
nuclear weapons, his tale lives on in breathless newspaper articles and Web
posts. Perhaps the most amusing was an article in London's Sunday Express
claiming that al Qaeda bought twenty "nuclear suitcases for 25 million
pounds" (roughly $45 million) from "Boris" and "Alexy." What, not Natasha?
Still, Graham Allison puts his faith in Lebed's story. How does Mr. Allison
account for the high-level rebuttals? He makes two brief arguments.
"Moscow's assurance that 'all nuclear weapons are accounted for' is wishful
thinking, since at least four nuclear submarines with nuclear warheads sank
and were never recovered by the Soviet Union." (One was recovered by the
U.S. in 1974.) This is true, but beside the point; the subs were carrying
nuclear missiles, not nuclear suitcases.
Mr. Allison's more pointed rebuttal is this:
The Russian government reacted to Lebed's claim in classic Soviet style,
combining wholesale denial with efforts to discredit the messenger. In the
days and months that followed, official government spokesmen claimed that
(1) no such weapons ever existed; (2) any weapons of this sort had been
destroyed; (3) all Russian weapons were secure and properly accounted for;
and (4) it was inconceivable that the Russian government could lose a
nuclear weapon. Assertions to the contrary, or even questions about the
matter, were dismissed as anti-Russian propaganda or efforts at personal
aggrandizement.
Mr. Allison is unfairly summarizing the official Russian view. There is no
contradiction between points (1) and (2) because (1) refers to suitcase
nukes, a journalist term for a weapon that never existed. The portable
nuclear devices--the special mines that filled three footlockers and
weighed hundreds of pounds--were destroyed as required by U.S.--Russia
treaties.
We don't have to take Russia's word for this; the disposal and destruction
of these weapons were supervised by expert American officials like Ms.
Gottemoeller. So point (2) checks out. As for points (3) and (4), Russia's
claims have been independently verified by U.S. officials. If Mr. Allison
has specific evidence of misplaced nuclear suitcases, he doesn't provide it
in either the hardcover or paperback edition of his book or in his speeches
to the Council on Foreign Relations or elsewhere.
What about the testimony of Soviet defector Stanislav Lunev? Certainly his
tale is cloaked in high drama. Mr. Lunev entered the congressional hearing
room in a black ski mask and testified behind a tall screen. He described a
portable nuclear device that was "the size of a golf-club bag" and
testified that "one of my main directives was to find drop sites for mass
destruction weapons" that would be smuggled into the U.S. using drug routes
and detonated by special teams. Mr. Lunev did not testify that he saw those
weapons, only that, as a TASS reporter working in Washington (his cover as
a military intelligence officer), his job was to scout for "drop sites."
I tracked Mr. Lunev down in suburban Maryland, where he is battling
lymphatic cancer. Over the phone, he sounds like a bear of a man, with a
charming Russian accent. He calls me "Riche," as in "Riche, you must switch
off all recording devices." When I say I have no such devices, only a bad
line, he agrees to call back. When he does, I ask him if he has ever seen a
portable nuclear device. "No," he says.
Then he asks if I have ever heard of Albuquerque, N.M. There is a museum
there, he explains, that displays America's portable nuclear device, the
SADM. "The Soviet model probably looks similar," he says, adding that he is
not an expert in such things.
Finally, there is Graham Allison's book. It is a serious and valuable
work, with many practical suggestions for arresting the spread of nuclear
technology. Still, Mr. Allison's concerns about a nuclear suitcase-sized
device rest on three shaky pillars: that Lebed was right about the missing
suitcase nukes, that Stanislev Lunev's account is persuasive, and that
Russian nuclear security is lax.
As we have seen, Lebed's changing story is highly questionable, and the
nuclear mines have long since been dismantled. Mr. Allison himself concedes
that nuclear suitcases might not be operative. Speaking at a Council on
Foreign Relations conference in September 2004, Mr. Allison said that the
weapons Lebed referred to are now at least seven years old and that "many
of these would be beyond warranty," requiring extensive refurbishing to
function at full power.
Allison does not refer to Mr. Lunev by name, possibly because he does not
know it. Mr. Lunev is not named in his congressional testimony and
discovering his identity requires a bit of sleuthing. Mr. Allison does not
cite Mr. Lunev's book or even acknowledge talking to him. (Mr. Lunev, a
friendly and direct fellow, has never heard of Mr. Allison.)
As for Mr. Allison's contention that the Russians do not keep their
nuclear weapons as secure as we do, he is quite right. But the Russians
probably do well enough. Allison cites a number of cases in which nuclear
material--though not bombs--was stolen from Russian reactors. Yet in each
of the cases he cites, the thieves were caught before they could transfer
the material. And the small amounts stolen could not have been, even if
combined, converted into a single bomb. And there is no evidence that any
of the Soviet Union's "special mines" have gone missing.
No one seriously doubts Osama bin Laden's intense desire for nuclear
weapons, suitcase-size or otherwise. Michael Scheuer, the former head of
the CIA's bin Laden station (and an outspoken critic of the Bush
administration's conduct of the war on terror), said that the CIA was aware
of "the careful, professional manner in which al Qaeda was seeking to
acquire nuclear weapons" since 1996. There is a plethora of human and
documentary intelligence to support Mr. Scheuer's conclusion. Perhaps the
most chilling is a fatwa that bin Laden asked for and received from Shaykh
Nasir bin Hamid al-Fahd in May 2003. It was called "A Treatise on the Legal
Status of Using Weapons of Mass Destruction Against Infidels." The Saudi
cleric concludes: "If a bomb that killed 10 million of them and burned as
much of their land as they have burned Muslims' land were dropped on them,
it would be permissible."
Fatwas are not enough. There are only three ways for al Qaeda to realize
its atomic dreams: buy nuclear weapons, steal them or make them. Each
approach is virtually impossible. Buying the bomb has not worked out well
for al Qaeda. The terror organization has tried and, according to
detainees, been scammed repeatedly. In Sudan's decrepit capital of
Khartoum, an al Qaeda operative paid $1.5 million for a three-foot-long
metal canister with South African markings. Allegedly it was uranium from
South Africa's recently decommissioned nuclear program. According to Jamal
al-Fadl, an al Qaeda leader later detained by U.S. forces, bin Laden
ordered that it be tested in a safe house in Cyprus. It was indeed
radioactive, but not of sufficient quality to be weapons-grade. One
American intelligence analyst said that he believed the material was taken
from the innards of an X-ray machine. It is not clear what it actually was,
but the canister was ultimately discarded by al Qaeda.
Al Qaeda's next attempt to buy bomb-making material involved Mamduh Mahmud
Salim, a nuclear engineer. He was captured in Germany in 1998, before he
could obtain any nuclear material. In a third case, al Qaeda paid the
Islamic Army of Uzbekistan for some radioactive material. It turned out
that the uranium al Qaeda received was not sufficiently enriched to create
an atomic blast, though it could be used in a "dirty bomb."
For what it is worth, there are actually no documented cases of the
Russian Mafia or Russian officials selling nuclear weapons or material.
Given that Russian gangsters have sold everything from small arms to
aircraft carriers, this might seem surprising. Michael Crowley and Eric
Adams, writing in Popular Science magazine, theorize that Russian security
forces may be less tempted by money than is commonly assumed or that
Russian mobsters find other illicit material more profitable than nuclear
material. Whatever the reason, there is simply no known case of the Russian
mob selling nuclear devices or parts to anyone, let alone to al Qaeda.
What about theft? Stealing a bomb--or its component parts--is far more
difficult than it sounds. The International Atomic Energy Agency maintains
a detailed database of thefts of highly enriched uranium, the kind needed
to make an atomic bomb. There have been 10 known cases of highly enriched
uranium theft between 1994 and 2004. Each amounted to "a few grams or
less." The total loss is less than eight grams, and even these eight grams,
which have differing levels of purity, could not be productively combined.
To put these quantities in perspective, it takes some 15,900 grams--roughly
35 pounds--to make a highly enriched uranium bomb.
Stealing highly enriched uranium is extremely difficult. Every nation with
an active nuclear weapons program guards access to its breeder reactors and
enrichment plants. Employee backgrounds are scrutinized and workers are
under near-constant surveillance. Transporting radioactive material invites
detection and is a constant danger to those moving it without shielding. If
it were shielded, the immense weight of the small container would be a
giveaway to authorities. Could terrorists storm a reactor and steal the
radioactive material? Not likely. An investigation by Forbes magazine
reveals the difficulties:
Assuming attackers could shoot their way past the beefed-up phalanx of
armed guards, traffic barriers and guard towers that now surround every
nuclear plant, they'd still have to fight their way into the reactor
building through multiple levels of remote-activated blast doors--where
access requires the right key card and palm print--to get to the spent-fuel
pond, says Michael Wallace, president of Constellation Energy's generation
group, which operates five nuclear reactors. The pond where highly
radioactive used fuel rods sit in 14-foot-long stainless steel assemblies
cooling under 40 feet of water. Terrorists couldn't just grab this stuff
and run because, unshielded, it gives off a lethal dose of radiation in
less than a minute. To avoid exposure, terrorists would have to force
workers to use a giant crane inside the reactor to load the assemblies into
huge transfer casks, then open the mammoth doors of the reactor building
and use another crane to lift the cask onto a waiting truck--all the while
being shot at by the National Guard. It may be easier to steal radioactive
material outside the U.S.--but not much.
What about hijacking a plane and crash-diving it into a nuclear reactor?
It would make a spectacular movie scene, but as Forbes explains, it would
not cause much harm to those outside the plane:
Assume that terrorists could get past tightened airport security and fight
off passengers to get through new, improved cockpit doors and take control
of a plane. Even then they'd have to crash the jet directly into a reactor
to have any chance of breaking containment. In 2002 the Electric Power
Research Institute performed a $1 million computer simulation to assess
such a risk. Conclusion: A direct hit from a 450,000-pound Boeing 767
flying low to the ground at 350 mph would ruin a plant's ability to make
electricity but not break the reactor's cement shield. Reason: A reactor,
smaller in profile than the Pentagon or World Trade Center, would not
absorb the full force of the plane's impact. And, for all the force behind
it, a plane, built of aluminum and titanium, has far less mass than the
20-foot-thick steel-and-concrete sarcophagus enclosing a nuclear reactor.
It would be like dropping a watermelon on a fire hydrant from 100 feet.
Another problem with theft is fencing the goods. Most uranium thieves have
been caught when they tried to sell the small amounts of radioactive
material they have stolen. And the difficulties of theft do not end once al
Qaeda gets its prize. Even if al Qaeda terrorists managed to steal a
nuclear device or bought one from those standby villains of choice, Russian
mobsters, they would still have to figure out how to break the codes and
overturn the fail-safes. All Russian and American devices have temperature
and pressure sensors to defeat unauthorized use. Since intercontinental
missiles are designed to pass through the upper atmosphere before
descending to their targets, the terrorists would have to find a laboratory
facility that could mimic the environment of the outer stratosphere. Good
luck. Council on Foreign Relations fellow Charles Ferguson told the
Washington Post that "you don't just get it [a nuclear weapon] off the
shelf, enter a code, and have it go off."
So could al Qaeda make its own bomb? It appears that the terror network
has tried and failed.
In August 2001, bin Laden was envisioning attacks bigger than what
happened on September 11. Almost a month before the attacks on New York and
Washington, bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri met with Sultan
Bashiruddin Mahmood and Abdul Majeed, two officials once part of Pakistan's
nuclear program. Mr. Mahmood had supervised the plant that enriched uranium
for Pakistan's first bomb and later managed efforts to produce
weapons-grade plutonium. Both scientists were arrested on Oct. 23, 2001.
They remain under house arrest in Pakistan. At their meeting with bin
Laden, they discussed plans to mine uranium from plentiful deposits in
Afghanistan and talked about the technology needed to turn the uranium into
bomb fuel. It was these scientists who informed bin Laden that the uranium
from Uzbekistan was too impure to be useful for bomb making.
Al Qaeda will keep trying, no doubt. But there is no evidence that they are
near succeeding. A wide array of documents and computer hard drives found
in al Qaeda safe houses reveals a serious effort to build weapons of mass
destruction. The U.S. military also obtained a document with the sinister
title of "Superbomb."
In addition, CNN discovered a cache of documents at an al Qaeda safe house
that outlined the terror network's WMD plans. David Albright, a physicist
and president of the Institute for Science and International Security, was
retained by CNN to evaluate the al Qaeda documents.
In "Al Qaeda's Nuclear Program: Through the Window of Seized Documents," a
research paper for a think tank linked to the University of California at
Berkeley, Albright concluded: "Whatever al Qaeda had accomplished towards
nuclear weapon capabilities, its effort in Afghanistan was 'nipped in the
bud' with the fall of the Taliban government. The international community
is fortunate that the war in Afghanistan set back al Qaeda's effort to
obtain nuclear weapons."
For now, suitcase-sized nuclear bombs remain in the realm of James Bond
movies. Given the limitations of physics and engineering, no nation seems
to have invested the time and money to make them. Both U.S. and the USSR
built nuclear mines (as well as artillery shells), which were small but
hardly portable--and all were dismantled by treaty by 2000. Alexander
Lebed's claims and those of defector Stanislev Lunev were not based on
direct observation. The one U.S. official who saw a small nuclear device
said it was the size of three footlockers--hardly a suitcase. The desire to
obliterate cities is portable--inside the heads of believers--while,
thankfully, the nuclear devices to bring that about are not.
Mr. Miniter is author of "Disinformation: 22 Media Myths That Undermine the
War on Terror" (Regnery, 2005), from which this article is excerpted. It is
available from the OpinionJournal bookstore.
--
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation http://www.ibuc.com/
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
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-----------------
R. A. Hettinga
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation http://www.ibuc.com/
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'