03/27/2003
The Biggest Threat, Part II
WARNING: In all seriousness, some of the following is incredibly depressing stuff. You may want to tune in next week when I try and come up with something a bit lighter.
[If you''ve been watching ''24'' on television, however, it dovetails nicely.]
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Continuing with our look at the latest report from the Nuclear Threat Initiative, the authors cite a comment once made by former Senator Sam Nunn. “A gazelle running from a cheetah is taking a step in the right direction,” but the question is whether the steps being taken are fast enough to avoid a fatal catastrophe. In the case of the weapons threat, the authors believe the answer is no.
Other observations:
“Mother Nature has been both kind and cruel in setting the laws of physics that frame the nuclear predicament the world faces. Kind, in that the essential ingredients of nuclear weapons, highly enriched uranium (HEU) and plutonium, do not occur in significant quantities in nature, and are quite difficult to produce. Making them is well beyond the plausible capabilities of terrorist groups .Cruel, in that, while it is not easy to make a nuclear bomb, it is not as difficult as many believe, once the needed materials are in hand .And cruel, in that HEU and plutonium, while radioactive, are not radioactive enough to make them difficult to steal and carry away, or to make them easy to detect when being smuggled across borders.
“ Detailed analysis of al Qaeda’s efforts suggests that, had they not been deprived of their Afghanistan sanctuary, their quest for a nuclear weapon might have succeeded within a few years – and the danger that it could succeed elsewhere still remains.”
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There are well-documented instances of al Qaeda attempting to secure HEU since 1993, at least, though in many early instances the group itself was scammed. Al Qaeda has attempted many times to purchase materials in the former Soviet Union.
As far as the issue of controlling nuclear warheads and materials, the authors write, “Many of the more than 130 HEU-fueled research reactors around the world have little more security on- site than a night watchman and a chain-link fence. At some facilities where the essential ingredients of nuclear weapons reside, there are literally no armed guards on duty; at some, there is no security camera in the area where the material is stored, and no detector at the door to sound an alarm if someone was carrying out nuclear material in their briefcase; a few of these facilities are so impoverished that they have dead rats floating in the spent fuel pool.”
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“Nuclear materials could readily be smuggled across U.S. borders, or other nations’ borders .Today, none of the major ports that ship cargo to the United States are equipped to inspect that cargo for nuclear weapons or weapons material, and few of the points of entry into the United States have an effective ability to carry out routine searches for nuclear materials either .
“Those seeking material for a nuclear bomb will go wherever it is easiest to steal, or buy it from anyone willing to sell. Thus insecure nuclear bomb material anywhere is a threat to everyone, everywhere. The world has the warning it needs to know what needs to be done. Failing to act on this clear warning would simply be irresponsible.”
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The following is particularly depressing, but while I mentioned the scenario of an explosion in New York’s Grand Central Station in last week’s piece, the Nuclear Threat Initiative report has far greater detail on a potential 10-kiloton nuclear bomb.
“Some 550,000 people work within a half-mile radius of the station. This figure does not include the tourists and visitors present on an average day, and hence is quite conservative. Within this radius, the blast overpressure would be over five pounds per square inch (psi), enough to destroy wood, brick, and cinderblock buildings. The heat from the blast would be enough to ignite paper and other combustibles throughout the area, and to give everyone not protected by a building second degree burns over much of their body. The possibility of a firestorm – a coalescence of the many fires that would be set by the blast into a raging storm of fire consuming everything and everyone within it, as occurred at Hiroshima, Dresden, and Tokyo in World War II – would be very real. The prompt radiation from the blast would be enough to sicken everyone in this zone, and kill most of those not protected by buildings. If the skyscrapers fell, those inside would virtually all be killed. Falling would be a near certainty for all the buildings within roughly 500 meters of the blast (where the blast wave pressure would be over 15 psi, with winds of 400 miles per hour), and a serious possibility for every building in this half-mile zone, given the combination of blast overpressure and fire. From the combination of these effects, the vast majority of the people in this zone would die, as would a substantial number of the people beyond. More than half a million people would likely be killed by the immediate effects of the explosion .
“In addition to those killed, there would be hundreds of thousands of people injured – burned, battered, irradiated, hit by flying glass and debris. Every bed in every hospital for a hundred miles would not be remotely sufficient to handle the casualties. Tens of thousands, or perhaps hundreds of thousands, of injured people would likely go without treatment for day, and many would die.
“Such a blast would also draw thousands of tons of rock and debris into the fireball, to be distributed as a cloud of lethal radioactive fallout extending miles downwind from the blast. If the blast occurred in late afternoon, with the wind headed north, all of Manhattan that remained would have to be evacuated. Depending on factors such as wind, weather, the effectiveness of the evacuation, and the degree to which people were able to take shelter from the radioactive fallout, tens to hundreds of thousands more people downwind from the blast might suffer a lingering death from radiation exposure .
The economic consequences would, of course, be staggering.
“The New York City Comptroller has estimated that the direct cost of the September 11 attacks to the city of New York alone was approximately $93 billion – measured only by the income those killed would have received in the remainder of their lives, the value of the property destroyed, and the first three years of the reduction in economic output resulting from the destruction in the city.”
Using a formula similar to that used for September 11 and applying it to the Grand Central nuclear bomb example would result in total lost future income of $875 billion, but the direct costs would be well over $1 trillion, including potentially hundreds of billions in cleanup costs. This figure is roughly 10% of total gross domestic product in America.
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“Dirty Bombs” vs. Nuclear Bombs
Both U.S. and British intelligence have reportedly concluded that al Qaeda has succeeded in making a radiological “dirty bomb.” But this is a far cry from an actual nuclear explosive. A dirty bomb, instead, would be “more of a weapon of mass disruption than a weapon of mass destruction, designed to sow panic and chaos. By forcing the evacuation of many blocks of a city, it could potentially cause billions of dollars in economic disruption, and billions more in cleanup costs, but it would not kill tens of thousands of people in a flash or obliterate a major section of a city as an actual nuclear bomb could.
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So what to do? The Nuclear Threat Initiative has a large number of proposals, but in listing just the basics, you can see how daunting the task will be let alone the fact that we need an ongoing commitment from world leaders, and it’s this last point that depresses me.
-Securing nuclear warheads and materials. -Interdicting nuclear smuggling. -Stabilizing employment for nuclear personnel. -Monitoring stockpiles and reductions. -Ending production. -Reducing stockpiles.
Lastly, in a totally separate report from the past few days, Greenpeace in Russia, along with other activists there, recently blasted the Russian government for what Greenpeace feels is a huge crisis at the nuclear facilities in the country. And what specifically may it be? Alcoholism and drug abuse among plant workers.
[Source: Matthew Bunn, Anthony Wier, and John P. Holdren of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, former Senator Sam Nunn, Senator Richard Lugar; AP]
Hott Spotts will return next week.
Brian Trumbore
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