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Petronas

05-08-2005, 04:13 PM

Radioactive rockets 'for sale' in breakaway Soviet republic
May 08, 2005

THE arms dealer’s instructions on the telephone were curt and concise. The meeting would take place at noon, he said, on a bridge in the breakaway east European republic of Transdniester. “Come alone and don’t wear any eavesdropping equipment. We are serious people,” he added before hanging up. At the appointed time a Sunday Times reporter posing as a middleman for an Islamic terrorist group stood at one end of the bridge near an army checkpoint, waiting nervously as a colleague watched from afar.

The dealer, who had introduced himself on the phone simply as Dimitri, had chosen the rendezvous well. From the broad banks of the Dniester river, a dark expanse of mud-coloured water lined by dilapidated Soviet-era apartment blocks, he could see a person on the bridge from hundreds of yards away without being spotted himself. After half an hour the reporter’s mobile rang. The display showed no number, only the word “private”. “Cross to the other lane. I am coming,” Dimitri said. Seconds later a black BMW with tinted windows drove on to the bridge and pulled up by the side of the road. The passenger door was flung open and Dimitri, in his mid-thirties with receding dark hair and a black leather jacket, beckoned the reporter inside, ordering him to unbutton his jacket to show that he was not “wired up”.

Dimitri spoke fluent English with an American accent. He was tough and businesslike. “The Alazan rocket will cost $200,000 (£105,000),” he said. “The price is not negotiable. It’s a very special thing.” The Alazan he offered, a slender rocket 4ft 7in long with a range of eight miles and a radioactive “warhead”, is considered by defence specialists to be an ideal weapon for terrorists. In communist times, standard Alazans were fired at clouds in experiments to make hail fall from the sky away from crops that might otherwise be damaged. But in 2003 it emerged that at least 38 Alazans were fitted with warheads containing up to 400g of caesium-137 and strontium-90, apparently to help scientists track the clouds. Specialists said that if they fell into terrorist hands and were fired into a city centre, they would spread contamination for miles, causing widespread panic and economic disruption that would cost many millions of pounds.

The rockets are believed to be part of a huge stockpile of ageing, unwanted weapons guarded by Russian soldiers in Transdniester, a 129-mile-long sliver of land on Moldova’s border with Ukraine. Thirteen years ago Transdniester broke away from Moldova after a brief war in which 1,500 people died. The authoritarian regime of President Igor Smirnov — who is said to have achieved the improbable feat of gaining 103% of the votes in some areas in elections four years ago — has yet to be recognised by any other country in the world. It has been accused of arbitrary arrests and torture, and of presiding over a thriving illegal trade in weapons.

It was while investigating this trade that The Sunday Times learnt of a senior officer of Transdniester’s KGB — known as the MGB — who had confided to a UN consultant that some radioactive rockets could be for sale at the right price. The reporter approached the MGB officer two months ago, pretending to represent a militant Islamic group from Algeria. The officer confirmed that the rockets were being held at the sprawling former Soviet arms dump of Kolbasna. The dump contains an estimated 50,000 tons of weapons, including artillery shells, mines and shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missiles, making it the biggest such stockpile in Europe. It was left behind when the Russian army withdrew from the former Soviet republics at the end of the cold war.

The weapons, including the Alazans, have been slowly deteriorating ever since. A Russian military report in the 1990s said they were leaking radiation. The MGB officer contacted by The Sunday Times put the reporter in touch with Dimitri, who telephoned him from an untraceable number to arrange the rendezvous.

Entering the enclave is like stepping into a black and white film. At its unrecognised border with Moldova, guards in shabby black uniforms require visitors to pay the equivalent of 26p. They are greeted by statues of Lenin and banners with patriotic slogans such as: “The Transdniestrian Moldovan Republic: the People’s Pride.” During recent Independence Day celebrations, soldiers from the 5,000-strong army goose-stepped down the main avenue of the drab capital, Tiraspol. They were watched by uniformed children singing: “Our army is the best army.”

The first brief meeting with Dimitri took place on the bridge in Bender, a small, rundown town of crumbling tower blocks whose poverty is reflected in the prevalence of ageing Soviet-model cars on the potholed roads. The average income in Transdniester is £55 a month, forcing many young people among the 600,000 mainly Russian-speaking inhabitants to seek work elsewhere or rely on the black market. The meeting with Dimitri ended with a request to check into the Dedeman Grand, the most expensive hotel in the nearby Moldovan capital of Chisinau, six days later and await his instructions.

Four hours after checking into the hotel, the reporter received another call from Dimitri. His flight had been delayed and Dimitri was unhappy about his late arrival. He told the reporter to return the following month, but he set out how the deal would proceed from that point onwards. “You will be delivered a secure mobile on which we can talk freely,” Dimitri said. “I will give you the number of a bank account in Cyprus. The buyers are to pay 1% of the total price — $2,000 — into the account.” The rocket would be made available for inspection, he explained. “Once we have checked that the money has been transferred, I will call you again to set up another meeting to view the Alazan.”

Dimitri told him he could bring an expert to check it with a Geiger counter, “but only one person will be allowed to see the rocket”. Asked about the material inside the warhead, he said it contained caesium and strontium. It was agreed that the inspection would take place on May 2 in Ribnitsa, a small town in northern Transdniester. “Then you will make a payment of $8,000 to a company in Ukraine which will arrange for documents to provide a cover to move the Alazan across the border into Ukraine,” Dimitri said. “The paperwork will show that it’s a cargo of machine parts.”

The reporter and his expert should return to Chisinau this weekend, Dimitri explained. It would be easier to move the Alazan at this time because security would be lax during a national holiday tomorrow to mark the 60th anniversary of the defeat of the Nazis. The rocket would be transferred to an airfield in Ivano-Frankovsk, in southwestern Ukraine. The expert who had verified its radioactive content would accompany it across the border and would hand over $90,000 in unsigned travellers’ cheques. The remaining $100,000 would be paid when the reporter took possession of the rocket. “You will be waiting at the airfield in Ukraine with the rest of the money, also in travellers’ cheques,” Dimitri said. “Once the money has been handed over, it will be up to you to arrange for the rocket to be flown to wherever you want.”

As agreed, the reporter returned to Chisinau last Sunday. In the evening there was a knock on the door of his hotel room. Dimitri, wearing Ray-Ban sunglasses and dressed in a black suit and blue shirt, had entered the hotel from its underground car park rather than the lobby, perhaps to avoid the possibility of detection. Looking slightly nervous, he searched the reporter for hidden microphones before sitting on the bed. “My people want to sell three Alazans, for a total sum of $500,000,” he said. “The terms of the deal have changed. I will be in touch later to give you a bank account number. You must now transfer $5,000 to see the rockets and then we will proceed as agreed earlier. On May 9 we will move the rockets across the border.” He added that a bank transfer to cover the cost of the forged documents for the cargo would have to be made from inside Transdniester using his satellite telephone. “You have 24 hours to talk to your people about the new terms,” he said.

Following this meeting the reporter was followed on the streets of Chisinau by a man believed to be working for Dimitri. The man at one point sat two tables away from him at an outdoor cafe for more than an hour. The Sunday Times withdrew that night because taking the investigation any further would have required making a substantial payment to an arms smuggler who had no compunction about dealing with terrorists.

However, Dimitri’s willingness to let the rockets be tested with a Geiger counter strongly indicated that he had access to them and believed they could be moved at short notice. The offer to sell the Alazans appears to confirm fears in the West that deadly weapons could be acquired by terrorists in Transdniester with relative ease. In 1999 a truck halted by Moldovan police as it emerged from Transdniester was found to contain shoulder-launched anti-aircraft missiles, plastic explosives and detonators. The driver was from the Transdniestrian army. He was accompanied by a deputy commander of Russian peacekeeping forces stationed in the enclave. “Transdniester is making most of its money from smuggling arms,” said a former Moldovan military official. “It’s a black hole — no real laws, no controls and a lot of weapons, the perfect place to buy arms illegally.”

Andy Oppenheimer, a consultant on radiological and nuclear weapons to Jane’s Information Group, calculated that 50g of caesium could drift for more than 20 miles across a target such as London. “The clearing up process would be very difficult,” he said. “It would be a huge operation. Terrorists would create fear and panic if they used such a weapon.” His concerns were echoed by Frank Barnaby, a nuclear physicist and weapons specialist. “It’s a nightmare scenario,” he said. “Only a few grams of this kind of radioactive material could shut down a vast city area.” Under the procedures for dealing with such disasters, the area around the blast would be sealed off while the emergency services dealt with casualties and assessed the level of radiation. “Within 45 minutes, 20 mass decontamination tents would be set up by the fire service, processing 200 people per hour per tent,” said a London Fire Brigade spokesman.

Cobra, the Cabinet Office committee that deals with terrorist incidents, would be convened under Whitehall and the prime minister would be expected to broadcast an appeal for calm. Military, security and nuclear specialists would join the Civil Contingencies Reaction Force to cope with the aftermath on the ground. Those in the path of the radiation would be warned to stay indoors and listen to broadcasts. A mass evacuation would begin once the likely spread of the radiation had been assessed, taking into account wind speed, rainfall and other factors. The clean-up could take weeks or months. Measures could range from hosing down some buildings to destroying others and resurfacing roads.

The Sunday Times investigation will strengthen demands for Transdniester’s authorities to curb arms trafficking. “There is clearly a problem with weapons that originate from Transdniester,” said Adrian Wilkinson, head of a United Nations body that monitors the region. Peter Kilfoyle, a Labour MP and former defence minister, said he had long been concerned about the stockpiles of weaponry in the former Soviet republics. “It is up to the Russians to do something,” he said. Patrick Mercer, a Tory MP and specialist in homeland security, said: “It clearly demonstrates why Russian and British intelligence links have got to receive priority.”

Moldovan officials who have seen documents relating to the 38 radioactive Alazans thought to be in Transdniester believe three of them are controlled by the local army and the rest by Russian troops. “It is very disturbing that unscrupulous people are willing to sell a radioactive Alazan to the highest bidder,” said a Moldovan expert. “Effectively this is a flying ‘dirty bomb’. It’s high time the world realised that we have an open arms bazaar in the middle of Europe which needs to be shut down.”

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0%2C%2C2087-1603602%2C00.html

Petronas

06-09-2005, 02:06 AM

UN alert as nuclear plans go missing
Thursday June 9, 2005

Electronic drawings that give comprehensive details of how to build and test equipment essential for making nuclear bombs have vanished and could be put up for sale on the international black market, according to UN investigators. The blueprints, running to hundreds of pages, show how to make centrifuges for enriching uranium. In addition, the investigators have been unable to trace key components for uranium centrifuge rigs and fear that drawings for a nuclear warhead have been secreted away and could be for sale.

Inspectors at the UN's nuclear authority, the International Atomic Energy Agency, have been investigating the worst nuclear smuggling racket ever uncovered, headed by the Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan. The operation was discovered two years ago to be selling sensitive nuclear technology to Libya and Iran. A senior official said several sets of blueprints for uranium centrifuges - the so-called P-1 and more advanced P-2 systems which were peddled by the Khan network - have gone missing. "We know there were several sets of them prepared," said the official. "So who got those electronic drawings? We have only actually got to the one full set from Libya. So who got the rest, the copies?

"We have no evidence they were destroyed. One possibility is another client. We just don't know where they are." A European diplomat privy to western intelligence on the Khan network added: "This is what keeps people awake at night. It's very sensitive. The fact that there are [nuclear] proliferation manuals kicking around is deeply disturbing."

The blueprints detail how to manufacture the components for a uranium centrifuge, what materials are needed, how to assemble the machines, and how to test them. The centrifuges are the main route to producing bomb-grade uranium. Uranium concentrate is converted into uranium hexafluoride gas which can be spun through cascades of centrifuges at super-high speeds to be enriched to weapons grade.

"The big question is who else got this stuff [apart from Iran and Libya]," the European diplomat said. Another diplomat pointed out that the Khan network was based in the Middle East and that Khan was known as the father of the Islamic bomb. He suggested that Syria and Egypt could be potential customers for the materials if they were still being offered.

Khan is a national hero for creating the Pakistani nuclear bomb but is under house arrest in Islamabad since confessing to heading the network and being pardoned in February last year. Although the network's operations extended to Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and the far east, its headquarters were in Dubai. Khan maintained a luxury apartment in Dubai. Following the uncovering of the network in October 2003, investigators went to the Dubai apartment only to find that it had been emptied, apparently by Khan's daughter Dina.

The Libyan leader, Colonel Muammar Gadafy, confessed to his secret nuclear bomb programme and gave it up in December 2003. Three months later in Tripoli, the UN inspectors were given two CD-roms and one computer hard drive. One CD contained aset of drawings and manuals for the P-1 centrifuge system, the other for the more advanced P-2.

The instructions are in English, Dutch and German, and the designs are from Urenco, the Dutch-British-German consortium which is a leader in centrifuge technology and is the source of Khan's knowhow from his time working there in the 1970s. The CDs and hard drive are at IAEA headquarters in Vienna, where they have been analysed. The investigators now know that the scanning of the original blueprints was done in Dubai and when.

In addition to these blueprints, Khan also supplied Libya with drawings for an old Chinese nuclear warhead design. The drawings, now in Washington under IAEA seal, were not complete, say sources, but were adequate to construct a crude nuclear device. Investigators suspect that the warhead design was also copied into electronic form and is still available to prospective clients. "There is reason to believe that there might even be some drawings related to nuclear weaponisation in electronic form," said the senior official.

It is now also clear that multiple components secretly made for Libya's $100m (£54.6m) centrifuge programme did not reach Libya and have gone missing. From their investigations of the nuclear programmes in Libya and Iran, the IAEA has concluded that pieces of the nuclear jigsaw have not been located. "We are still missing something from the picture in terms of critical equipment, certain parts of centrifuges ... There is equipment missing important enough for us to search, an amount that makes us worried," said the official.

Around a dozen individuals, including engineers, businessmen, and middlemen, were key figures in the Khan network, with dozens of other companies operating at a secondary level, according to those familiar with the investigation. Alleged Khan associates have been arrested in the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, South Africa, Dubai, and Malaysia, although none of those cases has yet come to full trial. British customs is also conducting an investigation into a British suspect.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0%2C3604%2C1502378%2C00.html

Petronas

10-04-2005, 01:57 AM

Nuclear option escalates jihad threat

October 01, 2005
IN the past 12 months, influential Islamist jihadist websites have carried an increased discussion on the ethics and strategy of using weapons of mass destruction as part of the global terror campaign. In the week when state and federal governments in Australia have announced tougher rules to monitor and restrict possible and suspected terrorists, we have to take this discussion very seriously.

The Western policy-makers who deal with this do so cautiously. Virtually nobody in authority is being alarmist. But it is the WMD, especially the nuclear, dimension that raises terrorism from the spectrum of gruesome criminality through sustained insurgency and up to genuine strategic threat.

In an opinion piece for The Wall Street Journal two weeks ago Prime Minister John Howard, in expressing bitter disappointment at the UN's failure to do anything serious about nuclear non-proliferation, noted that "al-Qa'ida has made no secret of its ambitions to acquire -- and to use -- WMD".

The authoritative discussion of this option among several key religious figures in the global jihadist network should give us serious pause. Former foreign minister Gareth Evans, now head of the International Crisis Group, while acknowledging the real dangers, was this week urging caution and restraint in our response to terrorism.

But his words on nuclear terrorism were sobering: "We know very well how limited our capacity is, and always will be, to deny access to terrorist groups to chemical and especially biological weapons. But the same is true of nuclear weapons."

He spoke of the "stockpiles of fissile material that litter the landscape of the former Soviet Russia, and after the exposure in Pakistan we know far more than we did about the global market for nuclear technology, materials and expertise, and all of it is alarming ... the level of technical sophistication required to make a nuclear explosive device is certainly above the backyard level but it is not beyond competent professionals ... and there is enough [highly enriched] uranium and plutonium lying around now to make some 240,000 such weapons. Much of it -- particularly in Russia -- is not just poorly but appallingly guarded."

In a new volume, Current Trends in Islamist Ideology, published by the Hudson Institution, Reuven Paz of the Israeli Herzliya Centre for the Study of Terrorism, examines several definitive discussions and religious rulings on the use of WMDs in jihadist websites.

Again, Paz is not remotely alarmist. He notes the technical difficulty for terrorists in using nuclear weapons and the relatively small number of such discussions in the jihadist world. Nonetheless, they are disturbing.

In 2003 Saudi Sheikh Naser bin Hamad al-Fahd published the first fatwa on the use of nuclear weapons (he is now in jail in Saudi Arabia). Al-Fahd wrote: "If the Muslims could defeat the infidels only by using these kinds of weapons, it is allowed to use them, even if they kill all."

In a highly significant move, he later published a long, theological defence, citing all the relevant Islamic authorities and providing the kind of scholarly argument for his position that is so important to the committed jihadist. He discounted international law as this was not part of Islamic law. He argued that the US had used WMDs in the past and it and its allies possessed WMDs. He argued, with many recondite references, that Muslims were enjoined to act to the full limit of their ability and this logically necessitated the use of WMDs. His justification covered the general question of using WMDs and the specific case of using them now against the US.

As Paz comments: "Were any Islamist group planning to use WMDs, they have now received the necessary endorsement to do so from an Islamic point of view."

More recently, in December last year, Abu Mus'ab al-Suri, a former leading theorist of al-Qa'ida, published two documents on the "Islamist Global Resistance". He argues that using WMDs is the only way for jihadists to fight the West on equal terms and even goes so far as to urge Iran and North Korea to keep developing their nuclear weapons, seeing them as potential allies. This is particularly surprising as North Korea and Iran are generally regarded as infidel regimes. Their mention in this context demonstrates the flexibility and operational pragmatism even of global jihadism's theoreticians.

He even criticises the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the US for not using WMDs, and comments: "If I were consulted in the case of that operation I would advise the use of planes from outside the US that would carry WMDs. Hitting the US with WMDs was and is still very complicated. Yet it is possible after all, with Allah's help, and more important than being possible, it is vital ... the Muslim resistance elements [must] seriously consider this difficult yet vital direction."

He is sceptical of the ultimate strategic value of continued guerilla operations in Iraq, believing they will not inflict a severe enough blow on the US.

He therefore writes: "The ultimate choice is the destruction of the US by operations of strategic symmetry through weapons of mass destruction, namely nuclear, chemical, or biological means, if the mujaheddin can achieve it with the help of those who possess them or through buying them."

Most of this discussion focuses on the US as the ultimate target. However, other nations in the West are routinely mentioned and in many cases secular Muslim regimes are demonised. While naturally what one may call the theoretical discussions of the jihadists focus on the US, it is clear that Australia, along with countless other nations, is a target.

Global jihadism is truly protean; it keeps changing into something new. Suicide terrorism has been a devastating and effective tactic, as well as a kind of quasi-ideology of its own. But there is no reason to think it is the end point of terrorist evolution.

None of this means nuclear terrorism is just around the corner. But these sorts of discussions have been pivotal to the development of terrorist tactics in the past. That they are now concerning themselves with nuclear terrorism in such a considered and comprehensive fashion commands our closest attention.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,16774533%5E25377,00.html

Petronas

10-08-2005, 02:15 PM

MI5 unmasks covert arms programmes
Saturday October 8, 2005

The determination of countries across the Middle East and Asia to develop nuclear arsenals and other weapons of mass destruction is laid bare by a secret British intelligence document which has been seen by the Guardian.
More than 360 private companies, university departments and government organisations in eight countries, including the Pakistan high commission in London, are identified as having procured goods or technology for use in weapons programmes. The length of the list, compiled by MI5, suggests that the arms trade supermarket is bigger than has so far been publicly realised. MI5 warns against exports to organisations in Iran, Pakistan, India, Israel, Syria and Egypt and to beware of front companies in the United Arab Emirates, which appears to be a hub for the trade.

The disclosure of the list comes as the Nobel peace prize was yesterday awarded to Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the UN watchdog responsible for combating proliferation. The Nobel committee said they had made the award because of the apparent deadlock in disarmament and the danger that nuclear weapons could spread "both to states and to terrorist groups".
The MI5 document, entitled Companies and Organisations of Proliferation Concern, has been compiled in an attempt to prevent British companies inadvertently exporting sensitive goods or expertise to organisations covertly involved in WMD programmes. Despite the large number of bodies identified, the document says the list is not exhaustive. It states: "It is not suggested that the companies and organisations on the list have committed an offence under UK legislation. However, in addition to conducting non-proliferation related business, they have procured goods and/or technology for weapons of mass destruction programmes."

The 17-page document identifies 95 Pakistani organisations and government bodies, including the Pakistan high commission in London, as having assisted in the country's nuclear programme. The list was compiled two years ago, shortly after the security service mounted a surveillance operation at the high commission which is the only diplomatic institution on the list. Abdul Basit, the deputy high commissioner, said: "It is absolute rubbish for Pakistan to be included. We take exception to these links."

Some 114 Iranian organisations, including chemical and pharmaceutical companies and university medical schools, are identified as having acquired nuclear, chemical, biological or missile technology. The document also attempts to shed some light on the nuclear ambitions of Egypt and Syria: a private chemical company in Egypt is identified as having procured technology for use in a nuclear weapons programme, while the Syrian atomic energy commission faces a similar charge. Eleven Israeli organisations appear on the list, along with 73 Indian bodies, which are said to have been involved in WMD programmes.

The document also highlights concerns that companies in Malta and Cyprus could have been used as fronts for WMD programmes. The United Arab Emirates is named as "the most important" of the countries where front companies may have been used, and 24 private firms there are identified as having acquired WMD technology for Iran, Pakistan and India. A spokesman for the UAE government said it had always worked "very closely" with the British authorities to counter the proliferation of WMD.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/nuclear/article/0,2763,1587752,00.html

Petronas

10-09-2005, 11:54 AM

Al-Qaida nuke reactor threat
October 8, 2005

An Internet posting at an Islamic forum relayed what purports to be a command to the al-Qaida organization in America to strike nuclear power plants inside the country. U.S. Central Command, which translated the original message, says it is skeptical of the authenticity of the message, calling it a "fantasy threat" that would "go unfulfilled." However, Centcom's statement also threatened to destroy the terrorist network should al-Qaida carry out a successful nuclear attack on U.S. soil.

The message from "Ayef," who claims to be working under the direction of an al-Qaida leader named "Abu-Jandal," was directed to "Abu-Azzam al-Amriki," – Abu Azzam, the American – and other al-Qaida members in the U.S., Europe and the Middle East. "Azzam al-Armiki" is the nickname of Adam Gadahn, the Orange County, Calif., native who appeared in an al-Qaida propaganda film last year.

Ayef claims to be an aide to Iraq's al-Qaida leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The statement also claimed al-Qaida has not been in communication with "Ja'far al-Tayyar," who had been previously assigned the task of blowing up a nuclear reactor in the U.S. Ja'far al-Tayyar is the pseudonym of Adnan El-Shukrijumah, a naturalized U.S. citizen who set off alarms last year when the FBI announced he was the leader of a suspected plot to detonate a dirty bomb in the U.S. ...

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=46726

JustAVoice

10-10-2005, 03:45 AM

I would hate to be ANYWHERE in the Middle East should a nuclear attack by Al-Qaeda happen on U.S. soil.

I would rather take my chances here with their attack, than take my chances anywhere in that hemisphere awaiting our GUARANTEED response.

Petronas

11-03-2005, 11:47 PM

UK 'cannot rule out nuclear attack by terrorists'
03/11/2005

The suicide bombings in London on July 7 were not the worst attacks that we could expect in Britain, according to the former head of MI6. Sir Richard Dearlove, who retired last year as head of the Secret Intelligence Service, said chemical, biological and genetic terrorism was in prospect and a nuclear attack could not be ruled out. Acknowledging that the July bombings had been "very lethal", he said they did not amount to a "strategic terrorist event".

Sir Richard, who was taking part in a debate on terrorism arranged by the City law firm Ashurst, said the July attacks "bore the characteristic of a locally planned and carried-out event". However we probably had to conclude that "the clock is running on some much more dreadful events that could occur". In the medium to long term, terrorists would have access through the internet to "some quite frightening dual-use technologies," he said. These had not yet been used in the context of terrorism, but Sir Richard thought that they would probably eventually be used.

"There is no question that bits of al-Qa'eda would have been extremely interested in biological weapons technology, chemical weapons technology, radiological devices and, ultimately, nuclear devices." Sir Richard expressed "some sympathy" for the Government's approach to fighting terrorism through legislation, adding that there was "extensive complacency" in Britain about the nature of the terrorist threat

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/11/03/nterr03.xml&sSheet=/news/2005/11/03/ixnewstop.html

Petronas

11-14-2005, 02:49 PM

Al-Qaeda woos recruits with nuclear bomb website
November 06, 2005

AN Al-Qaeda website containing detailed instructions in Arabic on how to make nuclear, “dirty” and biological bombs has attracted more than 57,000 hits and hundreds of readers’ inquiries. Terrorism experts are warning that the site could be boosting the organisation’s appeal to would-be assassins in Britain and abroad. The manual, posted on October 6 on a forum titled Al-Firdaws, or Paradise, contains 80 pages of instructions and pictures of kitchen bomb-making techniques. It is divided into nine lessons under the overall heading The Nuclear Bomb of Jihad and the Way to Enrich Uranium, and is dedicated as a “gift to the commander of the jihad fighters, Sheikh Osama Bin Laden, for the purpose of jihad for the sake of Allah”.

As well as describing how to make a nuclear bomb from enriched uranium — impossible for the layman — the manual explains how to make simple bombs that can blow up anything from electrical generators to petrol stations. The site encourages its readers to look for materials such as radium, which it says is an “effective alternative to uranium and available on the market”. It is unclear who the author is or where he is based: he describes himself simply as “Layth al-Islam”, or the “Lion of Islam”, belonging to a group called “the Black Flags”.

“Fight them so that Allah will punish them at your hands and will put them to shame and will give you victory over them,” he writes, quoting the Koran. “Perhaps nuclear weapons represent a technology of the 1940s. However, the Crusaders, the allies of the Satan, Allah’s curse be upon them, insist on depriving the jihad fighters of the right to have these weapons.”

The site’s appeal is evident from the enthusiasm of its correspondents. One of the most recent, Mariyam al-Jihadiyya, writes: “God bless you for this precious topic . . . fight them, through your hands God tortures them . . . and heal the hearts of the faithful people.” Beneath she includes a couple of pictures for her hero. “I love you, Osama,” she writes.

Other users complain that not all the site’s links are activated, and several urge caution. “Don’t talk about things you don’t understand,” writes one. For enthusiasts there are links to a mailing service that provides regular updates on bomb-making techniques.

Nuclear physicists were alarmed by the site. “Normally you just get generic principles, but this appears to be more like a proper instruction manual,” said John Hassard, reader in physics at Imperial College, London. “The thing about this website that is striking is that it is very particular. A lot of effort has been put into it.” He said that while it was highly unlikely that amateur bomb-builders could get hold of fissile material, smuggling networks with access to nuclear materials from the break-up of the Soviet Union could use the information. “It is a very real threat and one which we can’t afford to ignore,” he said. “I would say this is public enemy No 1.”

Experts on Al-Qaeda said the organisation appeared to be moving from a phase where it preached a fatwa permitting the use of weapons of mass destruction — issued two years ago — to one where it encourages its followers to produce both “dirty” bombs and smaller devices similar to those used in the London Tube attacks.

“Al-Qaeda strives to move directly from the stage of obtaining the WMD to the stage of using it,” said Matti Steinberg, an Israeli expert on the organisation. He said efforts by Al-Qaeda, whose members are Sunni Muslims, to produce a nuclear weapon also reflected its fear that Shi’ite Iran was on the brink of producing a bomb. Bin Laden wanted to “balance the efforts by Iran to obtain the first Shi’ite bomb by building the first Sunni one”. While assessing the website’s influence on young British Muslims is difficult, terror experts believe it is an important potential recruiting tool.

Jeevan Deol, a terrorism analyst at the London School of Oriental and African Studies, said that while Al-Qaeda could not match western military capabilities and intelligence, its use of “cyberwarfare” helped redress the balance. “They are using the web in a focused way for propaganda and recruiting,” said Deol. “Some jihadi kid in Leeds clicks on it and thinks, ‘Wow, 50,000 hits — we don’t see Osama on telly any longer but we’re big, we’re bad and extremely engaged in all these things’.”

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-1859222,00.html

Petronas

11-24-2005, 12:23 AM

U.S. seen vulnerable to space 'pulse' attack
November 22, 2005

The United States is highly vulnerable to attack from electronic pulses caused by a nuclear blast in space, according to a new book on threats to U.S. security. A single nuclear weapon carried by a ballistic missile and detonated a few hundred miles over the United States would cause "catastrophe for the nation" by damaging electricity-based networks and infrastructure, including computers and telecommunications, according to "War Footing: 10 Steps America Must Take to Prevail in the War for the Free World." "This is the single most serious national-security challenge and certainly the least known," said Frank J. Gaffney Jr. of the Center for Security Policy, a former Pentagon official and lead author of the book, which includes contributions by 34 security and intelligence specialists.

An electromagnetic-pulse (EMP) attack uses X-rays and gamma rays produced in a nuclear blast in three separate waves of pulses, each with more damaging effects, and would take months or years to repair, the book states. The damage to unshielded electronics would be irreversible. The EMP danger was highlighted recently by a special congressional commission that has received little public attention and is considered a unique way for rogue states such as North Korea and Iran, or other enemies such as al Qaeda, to use nuclear weapons in the future.

Al Qaeda is known to be seeking nuclear weapons, according to documents uncovered at the terrorist group's facilities in Afghanistan. The group could use a freighter equipped with a short-range ballistic missile to fire a nuclear missile over the United States, the book said, noting that North Korea sells its own version of the Scud for around $100,000. North Korea, in recent nuclear talks in Beijing, threatened to export its nuclear weapons, and Iran already has tested a Scud-missile launch from a ship.

An EMP attack would damage the national power grid, unprotected computers and all devices containing microchips, from medical instruments to military communications, and knock out electronic systems in cars, airplanes and those used in banking and finance and emergency services. "An EMP attack potentially represents a high-tech means for terrorists to kill millions of Americans the old-fashioned way, through starvation and disease," the book said. "Although the direct physical effects of EMP are harmless to people, a well-designed and well-executed EMP attack could kill indirectly far more Americans than a nuclear weapon detonated in our most populous city."

North Korea has been learning about EMP weapons from Russia, which is believed to have worked on EMPs for decades. China is also working on EMP arms, according to a recent Pentagon report. The book calls for taking 10 actions to protect the free world from an array of 21st-century threats, including hardening U.S. infrastructures against an EMP attack and countering Islamist fascism through ideological counterproposals.

http://www.washtimes.com/national/20051121-103434-8775r.htm

Petronas

11-25-2005, 12:42 PM

German found guilty of supplying nuclear technology to Pakistan
Friday, November 25, 2005

MUNICH: A German businessman was sentenced to seven years and three months in prison on Thursday for illegally supplying Pakistan with equipment to build nuclear weapons. Rainer V, 61, was found guilty by a Munich court on a range of charges, including providing false information to the German authorities in order to obtain the necessary authorisation to supply “dual use” equipment to Pakistani companies. Prosecutors said that between 1999 and 2004, Rainer V’s Munich-based company, Vacom GmbH, bought pumps, special ventilators and other equipment to be used for enriching uranium and shipped it to Pakistan in violation of German laws governing foreign trade and weapons restrictions.

Experts told the court that the equipment, worth around 400,000 euros (470,000 dollars), could have been used to produce nuclear weapons. Judge Wolf-Stefan Wiegand told the accused that he had acted dangerously because “while Pakistan currently has a relatively moderate leadership, who knows what will come next”. Reports in the German press say that the equipment was sent to the Khan Research Laboratories in Kahuta. Abdul Qadeer Khan, the disgraced father of Pakistan’s nuclear programme, has admitted involvement in transferring nuclear secrets to Iran, Libya and North Korea.

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2005\11\25\story_25-11-2005_pg7_49

Petronas

12-11-2005, 11:26 PM

U.S. official warns of 'catastrophic' weapons use
December 11, 2005

A senior State Department official is warning that terrorists are continuing to seek nuclear, chemical and biological weapons for use in future attacks. "If terrorists acquire these weapons, they are likely to employ them, with potentially catastrophic effects," said Robert Joseph, undersecretary of state for arms control and the senior Bush administration arms proliferation policy-maker. ...

On terrorism, Mr. Joseph said a well-organized terrorist group with technical expertise could fashion a crude nuclear device once it obtains the fissile material for the bomb's fuel. Biological weapons also would be used in an attack by terrorists because of the availability of dual-use equipment and access to pathogens, some of which occur naturally, he said. "The bioterror challenge presents a low-cost means of a potentially high-impact attack," Mr. Joseph said in a speech Friday at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. A copy of his remarks was obtained by The Washington Times. "We cannot rest as long as enough material for even one nuclear weapon remains unsecured," he said.

U.S. intelligence officials have said al Qaeda was working on developing nuclear, chemical and biological weapons in Afghanistan under the Taliban regime. Documents obtained from al Qaeda facilities there showed that the group had conducted research and some experiments. Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden also has said that obtaining nuclear arms is a religious duty for his extremist followers. ...

http://www.washtimes.com/national/20051210-103635-1375r.htm

Petronas

01-25-2006, 01:41 AM

Another nuke exercise in Charleston
January 23, 2006

The Defense Department has scheduled a second major, three-day exercise to combat nuclear terrorism in the Charleston, S.C. area. The goal is not prevention, but coping with the catastrophic results of a terrorist nuclear attack on a major U.S. port city.

The military's Joint Task Force-Civil Support, headquartered at Ft. Monroe, Va., will host the three-day drill for commanders and representatives of other federal agencies that would be involved in managing the consequences of a 10-megaton nuclear blast, enough to inflict mass causalities and devastation on an American city.

Like last summer's exercise, the Jan. 31 to Feb. 2 drill is centered around a hypothetical blast that affects nearly half a million people across a 900-square mile section of tidewater South Carolina. The scenario assumes 10,000 fatalities and more than 30,000 injuries. Officials from the Department of Homeland Security, including the Federal Emergency Management Agency and senior Coast Guard brass will be on hand.

Though the target of the attack is Charleston, no part of the exercise will actually take place there. Maj. Gen. Bruce Davis, the task force's commander, will oversee the exercise from Fort Monroe. Joint Task Force-Civil Support – part of U.S. Northern Command, which oversees the Defense Department's domestic military activity – is a standing joint task force composed of active, reserve and National Guard members from the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and Coast Guard, as well as civilian personnel.

Last summer, a similar exercise, "Sudden Respond '05," was led by Virginia's Fort Monroe-based Joint Task Force-Civil Support. It, too, was designed to simulate a nuclear terrorist attack that the highest U.S. officials, including President Bush, have said is the No. 1 threat facing the nation. Organizers say the nuclear drills should not frighten civilians but instead encourage them to learn how to protect themselves if such an attack – which some officials have referred to as inevitable – should occur.

The drill is strikingly similar to a scenario detailed by Graham Allison, former Pentagon assistant secretary for plans and policy and current Harvard professor, in his book, "Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe." A month after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Allison wrote, the Central Intelligence Agency presented Bush with a report that al-Qaida had smuggled a 10-kiloton nuclear bomb into New York City. The president, according to the book, dispatched Nuclear Emergency Support Teams of scientists and engineers to New York to search for the weapon, which was never found.

Allison described the devastation that a 10-kiloton nuclear bomb would visit on Manhattan, were it detonated in the middle of historic Times Square: some 1 million people would die almost immediately. "The resulting fireball and blast wave would destroy instantaneously the theater district, the New York Times building, Grand Central Terminal, and every other structure within a third of a mile to the point of detonation," he wrote. "The ensuring firestorm would engulf Rockefeller Center, Carnegie Hall, the Empire State Building, and Madison Square Garden, leaving a landscape resembling the World Trade Center site. From the United Nations headquarters on the East River and the Lincoln Tunnel under the Hudson River, to the Metropolitan Museum in the eighties and the Flatiron Building in the twenties, structures would remind one of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Office Building following the Oklahoma City Bombing."

http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=48454

Petronas

02-25-2006, 12:02 PM

At Special Ops Forum, Experts Weigh Prospect of WMD Attacks
March 2006

As military leaders devote increasing attention to neutralizing roadside bombs in Iraq, specialists caution that it would be a mistake to dismiss the threat posed by weapons of mass destruction.

These experts contend that terrorists are bent on using WMD against civilian populations in the United States and allied nations.

Many Americans have let down their guard after U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq failed to uncover WMD—which include chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear explosive devices—experts told a recent conference in Tampa, Fla., sponsored by the U.S. Special Operations Command, or SOCOM.

Instead, they noted, the Defense Department is focusing now on defeating improvised explosive devices, the handmade conventional bombs that have been taking a heavy toll among U.S. and coalition service personnel and civilians in Iraq.

Officials at the special operations conference acknowledged the importance of the counter-IED project, but they warned military leaders not to downplay the threats posed by the possibility of a chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear weapon falling into the hands of terrorists.

The devastation from such a weapon detonated in a major city would dwarf the impact of any single conventional IED, said Army Lt. Col. John Campbell, the chief of SOCOM’s chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear branch. And if terrorists are able to acquire a particularly destructive weapon, they are likely to use it, he said. “The threat is real, and we have to be prepared for it,” he said. ...

http://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/issues/2006/march/special_ops.htm

al-Canine

03-27-2006, 09:09 PM

Government investigators were able to smuggle radioactive materials into U.S.

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Two teams of government investigators using fake documents were able to enter the United States with enough radioactive sources to make two dirty bombs, according to a federal report made available Monday.

The investigators purchased a "small quantity" of radioactive materials from a commercial source while posing as employees of a fictitious company and brought the materials into the United States through checkpoints on the northern and southern borders, according to a Government Accountability Office report prepared for Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations Chairman Norm Coleman, a Minnesota Republican.

"It's just an indictment of the system that it's easier to get radiological material than it is to get cold medicine," said a senior subcommittee staffer about the findings.

The report, along with two others by the GAO on the subject of smuggling and detection of nuclear materials, were provided to reporters by congressional sources in advance of the first of two hearings by the subcommittee scheduled to begin Tuesday.

The focus will be on what the federal government has done to protect the country against nuclear terrorism. This week's hearings come after almost three years of bipartisan and bicameral investigations into the subject.

A second GAO report notes that while the departments of State, Energy and Defense have provided radiation-detection equipment to 36 countries since 1994 to combat nuclear smuggling, operating the equipment has proven challenging.

Those challenges include technical limitations of some of the equipment, a lack of supporting infrastructure at some border sites and corruption of some foreign border security officials.

The report also notes that the State Department, the lead interagency coordinator in this effort, has not maintained a master list of U.S.-funded radiation-detection equipment in foreign countries.

Without such a list, program managers at the agencies involved "cannot accurately assess if equipment is operational and being used as intended; determine the equipment needs of countries where they plan to provide assistance; or detect if an agency has unknowingly supplied duplicative equipment," the report says.

It further criticizes the State Department, saying that "without taking steps to ensure that all previously provided radiation-detection equipment, specifically hand-held equipment, is adequately maintained and remains operational, State cannot ensure the continued effectiveness or long-term sustainability of this equipment."

A third GAO report observes that, while the Department of Homeland Security has made progress in deploying radiation-detection equipment at U.S. ports -- which include 670 portal monitors and more than 19,000 pieces of hand-held radiation detection equipment as of last December -- the agency's program goals are "unrealistic" and its cost estimate is "uncertain."

GAO's analysis concluded that the program may exceed its budget by $342 million.

David McIntyre, a spokesman for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, told CNN that the agency disagreed with the GAO over the risk significance of the materials taken across the border, but then said he didn't know what materials were involved.

The NRC ranks radioactive materials by order of their security significance, such as radioactivity, dispersability and how attractive they might be to terrorists.

On the issue of the fake NRC documents downloaded from the Internet and doctored by the GAO investigators to get their shipment past border officials, McIntyre said, "We are concerned about their ability to counterfeit an NRC document, and we are taking steps to address that."

The steps include finding ways to make NRC documents more difficult to counterfeit and working with customs officials if they need information about NRC licenses or licensees.

http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/03/27/radioactive.smuggling/index.html

candypreet

03-27-2006, 09:50 PM

scarythread

al-Canine

04-15-2006, 11:06 AM

U.S. Weighs How Best to Defend Against Nuclear Threats

Proven Technology Vs. New Advances

By Spencer S. Hsu

Beset by delays, cost overruns and technical problems, the U.S. government's quest to defend the nation against a smuggled nuclear weapon or radiological "dirty" bomb is approaching a crossroads.

In coming weeks, the Bush administration will award or initiate contracts worth $3 billion to develop a new generation of rugged and precise radiation monitors and imaging scanners designed to sniff out radioactive material at the nation's borders.

Authorities must choose in part between older, reliable technology of limited effectiveness and new, more costly, less proven devices that promise greater accuracy.

The stakes could hardly be higher: securing U.S. cities from a catastrophic attack with a weapon of mass destruction -- "the biggest threat we face today," as Vice President Cheney said often during the 2004 campaign.

The government has stumbled repeatedly with similar choices, costing taxpayers billions. In the nearly five years since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the Bush administration and Congress have poured more than $5 billion into homeland security detection systems, radiological and otherwise, only to find that the best available equipment at the time was often of limited use. It has spent $300 million on an early class of radiation monitors that couldn't tell uranium from cat litter and invested $1.2 billion in airport baggage screening systems that initially were no more effective than the equipment screeners used before.

"A lot of the money we threw out there was wasted because the technology was not so good," said James Jay Carafano, senior fellow for national and homeland security at the Heritage Foundation.

Last month congressional investigators reported that the United States is "unlikely" to meet its goal of installing 3,000 next-generation detectors by September 2009 and projected it will be about $342 million above its anticipated $1.2 billion cost. At the same time, initial testing of new technology produced "mixed" results, while costing more.

The struggle to complete what Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff calls a "mini-Manhattan Project" provides a case study of America's challenges in dealing with the 21st-century perils of terrorism and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

To skeptics, even some close to the administration, the focus on stopping a nuclear bomb hidden in a container at the border is a costly fixation on a scenario that -- while nightmarish -- is not supported by intelligence and is overshadowed by other threats.

"This is the equivalent of a comet hitting the planet. Of all the things that are in the world, why are we fixated on this one thing?" Carafano asked. "Scanning containers full of sneakers for a 'nuke in a box' is not a really thoughtful thing."

Former Virginia governor James S. Gilmore III, who led a congressional commission on weapons of mass destruction, said the Dubai port controversy showed how the Bush administration has profited politically from fears of terrorism at ports yet given Americans a false sense of security about conventional attacks, which are more likely.

"They have hyped the threat, and that has been a political advantage," said Gilmore, a former Republican National Committee chairman. "You can't rule out the possibility of something like this happening, but there isn't any evidence that I'm aware of that al-Qaeda or other terrorists have their hands on these weapons."

But many other analysts looking at the data, such as Harvard University proliferation expert Graham T. Allison, conclude otherwise.

Vayl Oxford, director of the Homeland Security office Bush created a year ago today to put nuclear detection efforts back on track, said critics' concerns reflect a Cold War assumption that solid intelligence can be obtained against a terror group. The country must also consider its vulnerabilities and the consequences of the worst catastrophes, he said, which in this case tip the scale toward action.

"If you don't see a direct intelligence report that says there is something there, someone will leap to the conclusion the threat is not there," Oxford said. "But I don't think it's political hype. It's prudent planning to take action on this count. Sitting in hindsight saying 'Why didn't we see it in the intelligence?' is not the kind of hearing I want to go to."

Prompted by influential advocates including Cheney, former NATO ambassador David M. Abshire and former Lockheed Martin Corp. chief Norman R. Augustine, President Bush signed the 14th Homeland Security Presidential Directive last April 15. It consolidated development of countermeasures to a smuggled radioactive weapon that had been split among the Pentagon, the Energy Department and other federal agencies into the new Domestic Nuclear Detection Office, headed by Oxford. The office is designing a national detection system and a global strategy.

The emerging effort calls for thousands of scanners of all types throughout the country. These include backpack or handheld "cellphone" devices, units mounted on vehicles, and stationary portals to scan railcars and shipping containers, Oxford said.

The United States is also working with Canada and Mexico on strategies to deploy detectors and with the United Kingdom to exchange technology, he said.

As spending in the area grows -- from about $20 million in 2000 to a proposed $536 million in 2007, the largest increase for any Homeland Security agency -- the question is whether the government can learn from its mistakes. A post-Sept. 11 program to install more than 470 radiation monitors at checkpoints, ports and mail facilities has built a troubled legacy.

"That was not based on any scientific, technical or cost-benefit analysis that was the next best place to spend our dollars," said one senior federal scientist at a national laboratory. "Somewhere in there, just the importance of showing that you're doing something . . . came into play."

The early devices cannot distinguish between sources of radioactivity and are prone to false alarms. Some 10,000 such false hits occurred between May 2002 and March 2005, U.S. customs officials said last year.

Closing one terminal for one hour can cost $500,000, according to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which averaged 150 nuisance alarms a day last summer. As a result, the machines' sensitivity was often turned down to a threshold that compromised their ability to detect actual threats, congressional auditors reported last year.

Rivalry among government agencies also hobbled the effort, as did poor leadership, underfunding and political meddling by Congress, former Homeland Security inspector general Clark Kent Ervin said.

Experts also say the nuclear detection effort at U.S. borders must be only one component in a more aggressive effort to secure weapons-grade material at its source from places such as the former Soviet Union and Pakistan and to detect the flow of illicit materials along foreign trade routes.

In the face of such challenges, the Domestic Nuclear Detection Office expects to choose next month from 11 vendors competing for a $1.5 billion contract to deploy thousands of Advanced Spectroscopic Portals (ASP) by 2011, Oxford said. The goal of ASP is technology that cuts down false alarms and distinguishes among natural occurring radioactive materials.

But such detectors are not as effective at picking up highly enriched uranium or weapons-grade plutonium or at detecting shielded material. So this month the detection office also is accepting proposals for a second, similarly sized program to develop prototypes and eventually deploy automated cargo imaging systems that can actively scan for the presence of nuclear material, or shielding, such as lead, Oxford said.

The projects present a microcosm of technical questions that have bedeviled the effort.

Should the government throw tax dollars into increasing the use of existing technology, flaws and all, or put its eggs in the basket of breakthrough research? What are the limits of the technology? How much would improvements cost?

In 2004, a panel of physicists split on the answer. So the government both funded long-range research and deployed existing technology.

Having learned the limits of the equipment, Oxford said, his office has conducted extensive field tests, developed plans to cut down on false alarms and committed itself to speeding the acquisition of more sophisticated devices.

But scientists from one of 11 competitors for the lucrative new contracts, Ametek Inc., say the government is in danger of repeating past mistakes. Ametek says it has engineered ASP radiation detectors relying on high-purity germanium technology that are 20 times more accurate than sodium-iodide sensors used now.

"Post-9/11, money has been spent on nuclear radiation measurement technology that doesn't work. Here we are again," said William J. Burke, a spokesman for Ametek and its lunch-pail-size entrant, the "Detective." "Are we going to . . . take the technology that will actually do the job?"

Germanium detectors probably will cost 10 to 20 percent more than competing technology, Oxford said. Considered the gold-standard in the laboratory, they have been difficult to use because they require cooling to 280 degrees below zero. Computing advances, meanwhile, are improving other technology, Oxford said, which may be integrated.

Richard L. Wagner Jr., leader of the Nuclear Vision Project at Los Alamos National Laboratory and a leader in the effort, estimated that a domestic nuclear detection system can be built for about $20 billion over two decades, a bargain compared with such programs as the "Star Wars" missile defense system.

Matthew Bunn, senior research associate of Harvard's Managing the Atom project, supports spending on detection but added, "We shouldn't fool ourselves into thinking that provides a very reliable defense."

"These materials are small and easy to hide," Bunn said. "It's really like a football team defending on its own goal line, but the goal line is thousands of miles wide, and millions of legitimate vehicles and passengers pass over it every year."

The Washington Post (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/14/AR2006041401369.html)

Petronas

09-03-2006, 08:24 PM

Proliferation: the case of radioactive isotopes to Iran
30 August 2006

On 22 July, a truck containing 10 lead-lined boxes was intercepted at the Bulgarian-Romanian border, after Bulgarian scanning detectors measured radiation 200 times the normal background radiation. The consignment, destined for Iran, was discovered by the Bulgarian Nuclear Regulatory Agency (NPA) to contain soil-measuring devices incorporating the radioisotopes cesium-137 and americium-beryllium. In the light of the continuing controversy over Iran's record of nondisclosure about its nuclear activities, questions arise as to the intended purpose of such a consignment.

The acquisition of such a cargo would allow its end users to construct, or experiment with, radiological weapons. Under strict safety conditions, the radioisotopes inside the soil gauges could be removed to make a radiological dispersal device (RDD), which is likely to be used by non-state actors rather than nation states seeking a nuclear weapons capability, as the West suspects Iran is moving toward.

A link with Hizbullah?
As the Bulgarian interception involved radiological rather than nuclear-weapons-related materials, it is possible that non-state actors were the intended beneficiaries. As Hizbullah is the main non-state group with access to an increasingly devastating range of Iranian-supplied weapons and is backed by an intransigent and extremist Iranian president willing to fight a proxy war against Israel, it cannot be ruled out that it would be a possible recipient of non-conventional weapons or the materials to fabricate them.
Much has been postulated about possible terrorist expertise in chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear (CBRN) weapons acquisition and manufacture, particularly regarding Al-Qaeda and its affiliates, but little is known about the CBRN capabilities of Middle Eastern groups. The looting of radioactive materials and containers from disused Iraqi nuclear facilities, including the al-Tuwaitha Nuclear Research Centre, the Ash Shaykhili Nuclear Facility, the Baghdad New Nuclear Design Centre and the Tahadi Nuclear Establishment, following the 2003 US-led invasion means the possibility of future RDD use by insurgents cannot be discounted.

http://www.janes.com/security/international_security/news/jcbw/jcbw060830_1_n.shtml

Petronas

09-15-2006, 08:25 PM

‘Muslim nations must have nukes'
Updated: Friday, September 15, 2006 at 1904 hours IST

Muslim nations in the Middle East should arm themselves with nuclear weapons to deter Western enemies from attacking them, former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad said Friday. "They should have tanks, warplanes, warships, guns and missiles," Mahathir said. "Yes, they need to have nuclear weapons too, because only with the possession of such would their enemies be deterred from attacking them." Mahathir, 81, who retired as prime minister in 2003, remains highly respected and influential throughout the Muslim world. ...

http://www.expressindia.com/fullstory.php?newsid=73944

Petronas

09-23-2006, 11:40 PM

Frustrated by U.S. inaction, locals prepare for nuke terror
Posted: September 23, 2006 1:00 a.m. Eastern

Fearing terrorist attacks on nuclear power plants, states and cities around the country are actively distributing free doses of potassium iodide, known for its ability to fend off some effects of radiation, to nearby residents. Some officials are claiming federal ineptitude is leaving citizens without the tablets promised in 2002 when Congress passed the Bioterrorism Preparedness Response Act, which set out to provide KI pills to those living within 20 miles of a nuclear reactor to fight off the effects of radioactivity in the event of an accident or attack. "We know that al-Qaida has long considered nuclear power plants to be a potential target for future attacks, said Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., in a letter to President Bush. "It is now long past time for the final guidelines for potassium iodide stockpiling and distribution to be finished.

Some local governments aren't waiting for Washington to cut through the red tape. In Massachusetts, for instance, the state legislature passed an amendment calling for the distribution of potassium iodide tablets to all Cape Cod-area towns surrounding the Pilgrim Nuclear Reactor. The first pills are expected to be handed out next month.

In Montgomery County, Pa., officials are distributing KI to schools, businesses and anyone living within a 10-mile radius of the Limerick Generating Station. They are also using the county's website to advise citizens about emergency planning. The Pennsylvania Department of Health is offering KI tablets at 15 locations for anyone living 10 miles from one of the state's five nuclear power plants.

Every person within 10 miles of Minnesota's two nuclear power plants is receiving vouchers for two free doses of potassium iodide from the state, which received supplies from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

But not everyone is persuaded the distribution of potassium iodide is a good idea. In Ohio, for instance, the Perry School District is debating whether to restock its aging supplies of KI tablets. Because of the Proximity of the Perry Nuclear Power Plant, the school district stocked up on potassium iodide five years ago. But the shelf life of the product is five years. That means the pills expire in 2007. Administrators and school board officials don't want to spend another $1,000 to restock the pills that can prevent thyroid cancer due to exposure from radiation.

While some 20 states already have been involved in the distribution effort to some extent, others flatly refused to participate – even to the point of refusing to accept free potassium iodide from the federal government. Kansas and Missouri are two such states. Why?

State officials in Kansas argue that providing the potentially life-saving tablets to residents can give them a false sense of security. Some residents, they say, might dismiss evacuation warnings believing they are immune from harm.

Potassium iodide floods the thyroid to prevent the gland from absorbing radioactive iodine. One 130-milligram tablet a day is considered the proper dose in the event of a radiation threat.

The Ukraine government did not distribute potassium iodide after the world's worst nuclear accident in Chernobyl in 1986. Since then, some 3,000 cases of thyroid cancer, mostly among young people, have been blamed on radiation exposure. Meanwhile, in Poland, downwind from Chernobyl, the government distributed potassium iodide and witnessed no increase in thyroid cancer. The American Thyroid Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the National Academy of Sciences all endorse keeping preventive doses of potassium iodide around.

Despite efforts to secure nuclear power plants from terrorist attack, the General Accountability Office issued a report in April finding that most plants were not prepared to repel a terrorist attack staged by a dozen or more heavily armed men. A well-coordinated assault with 50-caliber rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers could easily take out security at most nuclear facilities in the U.S., say experts.

"Despite new security provisions – including expanded disaster coordination, more extensive background checks on personnel and stronger criminal penalties for those involved in wrongdoing – I remain concerned that the state of nuclear power plant security is not at the level it should be five years after September 11," said Sen, Chris Dodd, D-Conn.

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=52085

Petronas

10-09-2006, 01:19 PM

Seizures of radioactive materials fuel 'dirty bomb' fears
October 06, 2006

SEIZURES of smuggled radioactive material capable of making a terrorist “dirty bomb” have doubled in the past four years, according to official figures seen by The Times. Smugglers have been caught trying to traffick dangerous radioactive material more than 300 times since 2002, statistics from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) show. Most of the incidents are understood to have occurred in Europe.

The disclosures come as al-Qaeda is known to be intensfiying its efforts to obtain a radoactive device. Last year, Western security services, including MI5 and MI6, thwarted 16 attempts to smuggle plutonium or uranium. On two occasions small quantities of highly enriched uranium were reported missing. All were feared to have been destined for terror groups.

Scientists responsible for analysing the seizures have given warning that traffickers are turning to hospital X-ray equipment and laboratory supplies as an illicit source of radioactive material. Investigators believe that the smugglers, who come mainly from the former Eastern bloc, are interested only in making a swift fortune and believe that they may have no compunction in selling to jihadist groups. Most undercover operations and recent seizures have been kept secret to protect the activities of Western security services.

Rigorous controls on nuclear processors, especially with Russia co-operating to stop the trafficking of enriched plutonium and uranium, have limited smugglers’ access to weapons-grade nuclear materials. But medical and laboratory sources, including waste, remain vulnerable. Such radioactive waste can be used to make a dirty bomb.

A dirty bomb combines a conventional explosive, such as dynamite, with radioactive material such as spent nuclear fuel like highly enriched uranium and plutonium. In most instances the conventional explosive would kill more bystanders but the dispersion of the radioactive material would have a hugely damaging “fear” factor.

There were 103 cases of illicit trafficking last year, compared with fewer than 30 in 1996. Fifty-eight incidents were reported in 2002, rising to 90 in 2003 and 130 in 2004. Experts point out that seizures in the past three years equal the same amount of trafficking in the previous seven years.

Olli Heinonen, deputy director-general of the IAEA, which monitors trafficking and inspects nuclear plants to audit their radioactive materials, said that while weapons-grade nuclear material smuggling was now rare there were serious concerns about other radioactive substances. “A dirty bomb is something that needs to be taken seriously. We need to be prepared for anything because anything could happen,” he said. “Terrorists look for the weakest link. We need to be alert and we need to be prepared.”

Al-Qaeda makes no secret of its desire to obtain a dirty bomb. Last month its leader in Iraq, Abu Hamza alMuhajer, called for scientists to join it and experiment with radioactive devices for use against coalition troops. Even before 9/11, Osama bin Laden invited two Pakistani atomic scientists to visit a training camp in Afghanistan to discuss how to assemble a bomb using stolen plutonium. Captured al-Qaeda leaders have since confessed to the CIA of their attempts to smuggle a radioactive device into the US.

Professor Klaus Lützenkirchen, who helps to analyse the seized substances, said that even small quantities of radio-active material could be of use to terrorists. “If someone gets hold of it, it is possible it could be used in a dirty bomb,” he said. He added that if such a dirty bomb were detonated in a town centre the physical effect would be comparatively small and unlikely to cause huge loss of life but would have an enormously damaging “fear factor”.

One of the most serious seizures since 9/11 was that of several kilograms of a radioactive substance known as yellow cake that was found in a consignment of scrap metal at the port of Rotterdam in December 2003.

Professor Lützenkirchen said that seizures have been made across Europe, usually at borders and sea ports. Most of the trafficked material originated from the Caucasus region where he said that there was “considerable activity” among smugglers. Seizures have continued this year, though overall figures for 2006 are not yet available. They include the discovery in Germany of a small quantity of highly enriched uranium.

High-level representatives from the US, Britain, France, Germany, China and Russia will meet today in London, where they are expected to refer the Iranian nuclear case to the UN Security Council after a defiant Tehran refused to suspend uranium enrichment.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-2391574,00.html

Petronas

10-17-2006, 02:22 PM

Olmert Warns an Iranian Nuclear Weapon Could Fall into Hizbullah Hands
15:15 Oct 15, '06 / 23 Tishrei 5767

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told cabinet ministers during Sunday’s weekly cabinet meeting that a nuclear weapon in Iranian hands would make its way to Hizbullah. “Anyone taking the North Korea situation lightly will most likely find a nuclear weapon in Iran, and then al-Qaeda,” warned the prime minister.

http://www.israelnn.com/news.php3?id=113562

candypreet

10-19-2006, 02:12 AM

good posts here

candypreet

10-20-2006, 11:07 AM

LeT Threat to Indian Nuclear Facilities Remains a Serious Concern

By Robert Wesley

During the past year, nuclear security has leapfrogged up the political agenda in India after a series of intelligence leaks revealed that terrorists might be targeting India's expanding nuclear infrastructure. These threats and possible security breaches have led the Indian government to reorganize and enhance security at vital civilian nuclear installations throughout the country. Principle among the suspected plotters has been the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) organization.

The indiscriminant small arms fire on the campus of the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore on December 28, 2005 led to an investigation that netted several suspected LeT operatives along with various detonators, explosives and other armaments. During interrogations, the operatives reportedly revealed that the Kaigan nuclear power plant was among their critical infrastructure targets (The Times of India, January 22). Although it is not clear how advanced the planning stage had progressed, the revelations were met with serious concern.

Since early this year, high-ranking Indian officials have continued to comment specifically on the persistent terrorist threat to nuclear installations. National Security Advisor MK Narayanan, in a July 28 address, made a point to emphasize that this threat specifically originated from the LeT. He stated "it's [a] LeT operation…it is a very serious threat…one of our atomic energy installations could be the target" (Hindustan Times, July 28).

Fears were heightened again in August over the possibility of the LeT infiltrating a nuclear plant when three Muslim men were arrested for entering the Narora nuclear power plant with fake IDs (The Hindu, August 16). Although the men most likely did not have terrorist connections, the disclosure stimulated calls of inadequate security procedures a month after the deadly train bombings in Mumbai that left many Indians doubting whether officials could keep pace with terrorist infiltrations.

Later in August, local residences reported seeing two armed men breaching security at the Kakarapar nuclear power complex near Surat. The event prompted a massive security force response that included the deployment of commandos throughout sensitive areas (Hindustan Times, August 22). Although the suspects were not encountered, the upgraded security procedures evidenced in the response showed that planners have designed security procedures based on a significant perceived threat, most likely intelligence feeds related to LeT operations.

Although by themselves these potential security breaches do not represent a further threat, what is clear from the events during the past year is that various levels of government have received intelligence on the actions of LeT or other groups targeting nuclear facilities. India Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has even found the threat serious enough to comment publicly, saying that "intelligence agencies warn of a further intensification of violent activities…targeting of vital installations, including nuclear establishments" (India Defense, September 5).

Lashkar-e-Toiba and other jihadist groups maintain a persistent network of cells throughout India and have the potential to mount complex assaults and sabotage operations on defended installations in the region, including nuclear facilities. While the perceived threat appears to be high, the publicly visible security enhancements might also have a deterrent value such that groups like LeT will deem nuclear facilities inaccessible targets.
http://jamestown.org/terrorism/news/article.php?articleid=2370126

Petronas

11-04-2006, 12:04 PM

Al Qaeda Leader: Materials Smuggled Across Border
Thursday, November 02, 2006 Posted: 10:31 PM

A NEWSCHANNEL 5 investigation reveals what the feds don't want you to know. Suspected terrorists are hiding inside the U.S. and they got here by sneaking across the Mexican border. What we've been reporting for more than a year has been confirmed by a government report just released. http://www.newschannel5.tv/pdf/investigations.pdf

And a brand new interview by Pakistani investigative reporter Hamid Mir is bringing in more information. Mir has interviewed some of America's most dangerous terrorist enemies. This time the Al Qaeda commander he talked to gave a grim warning that another attack on America is coming very soon. "We can attack America anytime," says Abu Dawood during the interview. He also told the reporter that Muslims must leave America. Mir says, "Abu Dawood told me, 'We are determined to attack America again and that attack will be bigger than 9/11."

The Al Qaeda commander says the attack will be led by Adnan El Shukrijumah. He goes by many aliases but is called Brother Adnan by his terrorist friends. Brother Adnan is wanted by the feds for possible terrorist threats against the U.S. He's considered armed and dangerous. According to the Pakistani reporter, Dawood said Brother Adnan "had smuggled some dangerous materials from the Mexican border to inside the United States of America."

"It's the kind of scenario that worries everybody," says Fred Burton, a former special agent for the U.S. State Department. Burton spent much of his federal career studying terrorists, predicting their next move. He now does the same thing at Stratfor, a private intelligence agency in Austin.

NEWSCHANNEL 5 asked Burton about the threat. "I think it has to be viewed credible, until proven otherwise," he says. The former special agent tells us the U.S. government is well aware Al Qaeda's been working hard to get a dirty bomb into the country, an explosive packed with nuclear materials small enough to carry in a suitcase.

Smugglers have been caught 300 times in the past four years trying to sneak in radioactive material, which could be used to make a dirty bomb. That's what the International Atomic Energy Agency told the London Times last month.

But Burton says, "I think if Al Qaeda has a dirty bomb, we would have seen it by now." He says a chemical attack is more likely and the Valley could be a launching ground. Burton says there are several specific locations in Houston, which if hit, could carry out a devastating terrorist attack on U.S. soil.
However Burton also says if Al Qaeda really does have a dirty bomb, border cities are much more vulnerable to attack, because he says terrorists don't want to get caught. "You'd want to bring that in right across the border, and you'd want to detonate that as soon as you can," he explains.

We asked who would be at risk. "You would look at cities such as El Paso or Brownsville," he replied.

For law enforcement, it's a very big worry, says Zapata County Sheriff Sigifredo Gonzalez Jr. He testified to lawmakers in Washington about the dangers of terrorists and terrorist weapons getting smuggled in through South Texas. The sheriff tells us his biggest fear is that something could go wrong with a bomb. "We're not prepared," he says.

The possible dangers are also a concern to U.S. Congressman Solomon Ortiz. He was among the first in Washington to sound the alarm about dangers at the border. Ortiz says, "The biggest threat is people coming in and we don't know who they are."

The government does know terror groups like Al Qaeda, Hamas, and Hezbollah are active in Latin America. In fact, members of Hezbolla are already inside the U.S., coming in through the Mexican border. We're also learning these Middle Easterners are changing their Islamic names to Hispanic names, buying fake documents, learning Spanish and posing as Hispanic immigrants.

Colorado Congressman Tom Tancredo says there's even a training camp in Brazil teaching Middle Easterners how to blend in to the Mexican culture. According to government intelligence, Middle Eastern aliens from countries known to harbor terrorists are smuggled to staging areas in places like Venezuela and the tri-border region between Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay. Then they're smuggled again through Mexico and our border right into the U.S.

There's a big payoff for those who sneak them in. Mexican illegals pay smugglers an average of $2,000. Middle Easterners pay as much as thirty times that amount, up to $60,000! "I don't think they really care who they're bringing across, as long as they get paid for it," says Texas Congressman Michael McCaul. He put out the report, which also says Islamic terrorist groups may be using Mexico as a refuge.

During our investigation, we found out a lot of people from suspicious countries are crossing right here in South Texas. Since 9/11, literally hundreds of illegal aliens have been caught here from places like Iraq, Iran, Syria, Egypt and Pakistan. Federal law enforcement estimates only ten to thirty percent of illegals who cross are actually caught. Governor Rick Perry says, "To think that international terrorists have not already exploited our border is naive."

http://www.newschannel5.tv/2006/11/2/30781/-Al-Qaeda-Leader--Materials-Smuggled-Across-Border-

Petronas

11-04-2006, 12:21 PM

Take with a grain of salt.

Al-Qaida able to build nuke weapon inside U.S.
Posted: November 2, 2006 1:00 a.m. Eastern

Terrorists could assemble a small group of fewer than 20 to construct a Hiroshima-size nuclear bomb, purchase the fissionable uranium needed and transport it to the U.S. city of their choice for less than $10 million, says a new report published in the November-December issue of Foreign Policy.

"The Bomb in the Backyard" was the result of the investigative work of Peter D. Zimmerman and Jeffrey G. Lewis. Zimmerman is professor of science and security in the Department of War Studies at King's College in London and previously served as chief scientist of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee and chief scientist of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. Lewis is executive director of the Managing the Atom Project at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.

"To put it in strictly commercial terms, terrorists would likely find a nuclear attack cost effective," they write in the article. "The simple appeal of nuclear terrorism can be illustrated with a hypothetical situation. A failed nuclear detonation, one that produced only a few tens of tons in yield, could kill 10,000 people in just a few hours if the device exploded in a crowded financial center. Not only would 10,000 persons represent the upward limit of a conventional terrorist attack, but that figure would exceed the combined casualties in all of al-Qaida's attacks over the entire history of the organization."

And that's the "worst-case" scenario for the terrorists, the authors point out. If "successful," the nuclear detonation would kill 10 times more people – 100,000.

Without giving away any information about the assembling of such a device that cannot already be found easily on the Internet, Zimmerman and Lewis construct a scenario for building a nuclear bomb within the U.S. for a budget of less than $10 million – finding it can done with a small team of about 19, the same number of people involved in the Sept. 11 attacks.

"It is certainly possible that a terrorist group might not want to risk detection within U.S. borders and would prefer to make the bomb overseas," they write. "But, for purposes of this hypothetical situation, we chose a scenario that would be far less uncertain for the terrorists by eliminating the risks of moving the bomb across a border."

In fact, the backyard bomb project came in under budget – at $5.433 million. The authors said the project – from start to finish – would take no more than a few months.

"Once complete, the nuclear device itself is likely to be less than 9 feet long," said the report. "Although it would not fit easily in a sedan, it could be transported in a van or small panel truck with, say, a couple drivers and a couple more people to keep an eye on the device. The plotters could target any number of metropolitan areas and would be free to choose based entirely on their desire to travel unobtrusively and undetected, presumably across a large fraction of the United States."

The authors warn that nuclear terrorism is still very much on the minds of al-Qaida, which began plans more than a decade ago for what it dubbed "American Hiroshima," a nuclear attack on the U.S. As recently as September, they say, al-Qaida put out a call urging nuclear scientists to join its war against the West.

Also in September, the new al-Qaida field commander in Afghanistan called for Muslims to leave the U.S. – particularly Washington and New York – in anticipation of a major terror attack to rival Sept. 11, according to an interview by another Pakistani journalist.

Abu Dawood told Hamid Mir, a reporter who has covered al-Qaida and met with Osama bin Laden, the attack is being coordinated by Adnan el-Shukrijumah and suggests it may involve some form of weapon of mass destruction smuggled across the Mexican border.

"Our brothers are ready to attack inside America. We will breach their security again," he is quoted as saying. "There is no timeframe for our attack inside America; we can do it any time."

As WND has previously reported, el-Shukrijumah is a trained nuclear technician and accomplished pilot who has been singled out by bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri to serve as the field commander for the next terrorist attack on U.S. soil.

The terrorist was last seen in Mexico, where, on Nov. 1, 2004, he allegedly hijacked a Piper PA Pawnee cropduster from Ejido Queretaro near Mexicali to transport a nuclear weapon and nuclear equipment into the U.S., according to Paul Williams, a former FBI consultant and author of "The Dunces of Doomsday."

"He is an American and a friend of Muhammad Atta, who led 9/11 attacks five years ago," said Dawood. "We call him 'Jaffer al Tayyar' (Jafer the Pilot); he is very brave and intelligent. (President) Bush is aware that brother Adnan has smuggled deadly materials inside America from the Mexican border. Bush is silent about him, because he doesn’t want to panic his people. Sheikh Osama bin Laden has completed his cycle of warnings. You know, he is man of his words, he is not a politician; he always does what he says. If he said it many times that Americans will see new attacks, they will definitely see new attacks. He is a real mujahid. Americans will not win this war, which they have started against Muslims. Americans are the biggest supporters of the biggest terrorist in the world, which is Israel."

Mir reportedly interviewed Dawood Sept. 12 at the tomb of Sultan Mehmud Ghaznawi on the outskirts of Kabul. Dawood and the al-Qaida leaders who accompanied him were clean-shaven and dressed as Western reporters. The al-Qaida commander had contacted Mir by cell phone to arrange the meeting.

El-Shukrijumah was born in Guyana Aug. 4, 1975 – the firstborn of Gulshair el-Shukrijumah, a 44-year-old radical Muslim cleric, and his 16-year-old wife. In 1985, Gulshair migrated to the United States, where he assumed duties as the imam of the Farouq Mosque in Brooklyn.

The mosque, located at 554 Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, has served as a hive for terrorist activities. It has raised millions for the jihad and has served as a recruiting station for al-Qaida. Many of the planners of the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, including blind Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, were prominent members of this notorious "house of worship."

In 1995, the Shukrijumah family relocated to Miramar, Fla., where Gulshair became the spiritual leader of the radical Masjid al-Hijah Mosque, and where Adnan became friends with Jose Padilla, who planned to detonate a radiological bomb in midtown Manhattan; Mandhai Jokhan, who was convicted of attempting to blow up nuclear power plants in southern Florida; and a group of other homegrown terrorists.

Adnan Shukrijumah attended flight schools in Florida and Norman, Oklahoma, along with Mohammad Atta and the other 9/11 operatives, and he became a highly skilled commercial jet pilot, although he, like Atta and the other terrorists, never applied for a license with the Federal Aviation Commission.

In April 2001, Shukrijumah spent 10 days in Panama, where he reportedly met with al-Qaida officials to assist in the planning of 9/11. He also traveled to Trinidad and Guyana, where virulent al-Qaida cells have been established. The following month, he obtained an associate's degree in computer engineering from Broward Community College.

During this time, he managed to get passports from Guyana, Trinidad, Saudi Arabia, Canada and the United States, according to Williams. He also began to adopt a number of aliases, including Abu Arifi, Jafar al-Tayyar, Jaafar At Yayyar, Ja'far al-Tayar, and Mohammed Sher Mohammed Khan (the name that appeared on his official FBI file). He traveled to Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, where he met with Ramzi Binalshibh, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and other members of the al-Qaida high command. He also spent considerable time within al-Qaida camps in Afghanistan, where he received training in explosives and special operations.

Following 9/11, el-Shukrijumah was reportedly singled out by bin Laden and al-Zawahiri to spearhead the next great attack on America. One plan was for a nuclear attack that would take place simultaneously in seven U.S. cities, leaving millions dead and the richest and most powerful nation on earth in ashes.

"Muslims should leave America," said Dawood. "We cannot stop our attack just because of the American Muslims; they must realize that American forces are killing innocent Muslims in Afghanistan and Iraq; we have the right to respond back, in the same manner, in the enemy's homeland. The American Muslims are like a human shield for our enemy; they must leave New York and Washington."

Mir, the journalist, has reported previously that al-Qaida has smuggled nuclear weapons and uranium into the U.S.

"I am saying that Muslims must leave America, but we can attack America anytime," he said. "Our cycle of warnings has been completed, now we have fresh edicts from some prominent Muslim scholars to destroy our enemy, this is our defending of Jihad; the enemy has entered in our homes and we have the right to enter in their homes, they are killing us, we will kill them."

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=52733

Petronas

11-20-2006, 07:34 PM

Al-Qaeda wants nuclear kit
13/11/2006 23:00

Al-Qaeda was trying to acquire the technology that would enable it to use a nuclear device to attack Western targets including Britain, a senior British official said on Monday. "We know the aspiration is there. We know attempts to gather materials are there; we know that attempts to gather technology are there," the unnamed foreign office official told reporters.

The comments at a briefing came days after the head of Britain's domestic spy agency said Muslim extremists were plotting at least 30 major terrorist attacks in Britain which could involve chemical and nuclear devices. The foreign office official, asked whether there was any doubt that al-Qaeda wanted to gather nuclear material for use against Western targets, said: "No doubt at all." ...

http://www.news24.com/News24/World/News/0,,2-10-1462_2029925,00.html

Petronas

11-20-2006, 09:10 PM

A little over a week ago I attended a conference on "Understanding the Threat of Radical Islamist Terrorism" in Las Vegas. Among the speakers were former FBI consultant Paul Williams and Pakistani journalist Hamid Mir, who believe that Al Qaeda already has nuclear weapons and that some are in place inside the U.S. I am still skeptical with respect to that theory, because of the need for sophisticated technical maintenance for the so-called "suitcase nukes", and the incentive for Al Qaeda to not let the opportunity to use such weapons slip through its hands by sitting on them until they are discovered by accident or betrayal. Nonetheless, the specific facts that were alleged tend to make me more concerned and not less. Here, for it may be worth, is what I heard:

Hamid Mir, on his way to meet OBL for an interview in 1998, met an individual in Afghanistan he was told was a Ukrainian nuclear technician or scientist working for Al Qaeda.
Hamid Mir was told that Al Qaeda acquired three miniaturized nuclear weapons (supposedly as light as 60 lbs each, with yields in the 3-10KT range) from Chechen guerillas. Two of them are supposed to have made it, via Georgia and and Italy, where one was lost, to Mexico and then into the U.S.
Al Qaeda in 2000 tested a radiological ("dirty") bomb in Kunar province in Afghanistan.
The biggest deterrent to Al Qaeda's use of these weapons in major U.S. cities is the thousands of Muslims that would be killed. That is supposed to explain the repeated calls for U.S. Muslims to leave the cities and the U.S.
The trigger for use of these weapons may be a U.S. attack on Iran (but why not the attack on Iraq, or the attack on the Tora Bora caves, which was a much greater threat to Al Qaeda's leadership?)

Finally, later last week I heard Vice President Cheney speak at a different occasion. One of the things he said stuck in my mind: "I am not worried so much about 19 men with boxcutters hijacking airplanes and flying them into buildings again. I am most worried about 19 men detonating a nuclear weapon in the middle of one of our cities".

Petronas

12-04-2006, 06:06 PM

Osama bin Laden knows how easy it is to build a nuke. Do you?
09:57 AM CST on Sunday, December 3, 2006

The Sept. 11 terrorist attack was undoubtedly a terrible tragedy. But it could have been much worse. Eight years earlier, aides to Osama bin Laden met with Salah Abdel al-Mobruk, a Sudanese military officer and former government minister who offered to sell weapons-grade uranium to the terrorists for $1.5 million. He proffered up a 3-foot-long cylinder. The al-Qaeda representatives agreed to the purchase because, after all, as one of them later said, "It's easy to kill more people with uranium."

The cylinder turned out to be a dud. But had it actually contained highly enriched uranium, and if Mr. bin Laden's deputies had managed to use it to assemble, transport and detonate a nuclear bomb, history would have looked very different. Sept. 11 would be remembered as the day when hundreds of thousands of people were killed.

Osama bin Laden's long-standing interest in developing nuclear weapons is deeply troubling, and the attempt to purchase uranium from the Sudanese was far from an isolated incident.

Al-Qaeda operatives have repeatedly tried to acquire nuclear materials over the years. In August 2001, a month before the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. bin Laden received two former Pakistani nuclear officials, asking them to help recruit other Pakistani scientists with expertise in building nuclear weapons. After the military effort to oust the Taliban from Afghanistan, U.S. forces found extensive documents, including crude bomb designs, at an al-Qaeda safe house in Kabul. In 2003, Mr. bin Laden sought a fatwa from an extremist Saudi cleric permitting the use of weapons of mass destruction, calling their acquisition a "religious duty." As recently as September, al-Qaeda put out a call urging nuclear scientists to join its war against the West.

Could a nuclear attack by Mr. bin Laden, or any other terrorist, actually happen? Some say it would be impossible, mistakenly believing that terrorists do not have the motivation, or the ability, to assemble the highly sophisticated, modern tools necessary for the task. Most observers, however, agree that a small group could construct a lethal nuclear weapon since they are conceptually simple devices. After all, the technology involved in creating a nuclear weapon is more than 60 years old. In fact, it is perhaps easier to make a gun-assembled nuclear bomb than it is to develop biological or chemical weapons.

Would terrorists build a nuclear device? Presumably, some terrorist organizations want to kill as many people as possible at the lowest cost. Like any organization, sophisticated terrorist outfits are concerned with "cost effectiveness." If terrorists could construct a successful device that killed 100,000 people for a cost of $10 million dollars –about $100 per murder – it would be a bargain, considering that most of al-Qaeda's attacks have been mounted in the $100- to $300-per-murder range.

So, just how difficult an enterprise would this be? What would a terrorist group have to do to build a bomb that would kill 100,000 people for less than $10 million?

Without providing a blueprint for how to make a nuclear bomb, let's break down the costs of what such a project might entail.

In our scenario, terrorists would construct the nuclear device within the U.S. Smuggling a fully constructed bomb across the border would cost more in time, personnel and planning. And U.S. Customs is on the alert for bomblike devices. Operatives would still have to enter the U.S. surreptitiously for the assembly, final check-out and delivery of the bomb. Obtaining the required special machinery for bomb-making might also be more difficult abroad. For purposes of this hypothetical situation, we chose a scenario that would be less uncertain for the terrorists by eliminating the risks of moving the bomb across a border.

What kind of nuclear device might a terrorist organization consider? In order not to publish anything that would make the terrorists' work easier, we have chosen a crude but well-known design concept, widely available on the Internet, that is similar to the device that the U.S. used when it bombed Hiroshima.

Our device consists of a gun that fires a highly enriched uranium "bullet" into a cylindrical target block, also made of highly enriched uranium. Terrorists could use a surplus light artillery gun barrel, something that's easily available today on the global arms market or the Internet for much less than $10,000. The target is hollow with a hole to receive the bullet and is simply bolted onto the muzzle of the gun. The explosion in Hiroshima produced a yield of approximately 12.5 kilotons, which killed about 100,000 people instantaneously.

How many people would it take to construct a crude nuclear device? In a 1977 government report on safeguards against nuclear proliferation, the U.S. Office of Technology Assessment estimated that a small group, including a "person capable of searching and understanding the technical literature in several fields and a jack-of-all-trades technician," could build a nuclear device for a sum that "need not exceed a fraction of a million dollars." Adjusted for inflation, that's less than $3 million today.

The constraint we have placed on our would-be bomb-makers is a total of 19 people – the same number of hijackers who orchestrated 9/11 – working over the course of a year in the U.S. We estimate that a three-person physics team, including a relatively senior physicist and two postdoctoral students, would be capable of rendering the design in three to six months. Their salaries during the course of a year would total approximately $200,000.

In addition to the physics team, the project could comprise a few small engineering teams to address the following: casting the uranium for the device, constructing the proper gun, assembling the supercritical mass of uranium, overseeing the electronics and, finally, the actual detonation.

In many respects, the most difficult task for nuclear terrorists would be casting the uranium metal, which melts at high temperatures, into appropriate shapes. The metallurgy team would include at least one person with experience in advanced casting techniques. A vacuum furnace is probably required to reduce oxygen contamination and prevent the uranium from igniting.

The team would probably need to practice using either natural uranium or some surrogate before casting the final core. The group could find the vacuum furnace to fit their specifications by searching on the Internet and could probably purchase it for less than $50,000.

The actual pit – or core of the weapon containing the highly enriched uranium – could be fabricated quickly. When China built its first nuclear bomb in 1964, a single technician named Yuan Gongfu used a lathe to shape the highly enriched uranium in just one night. New or used lathes large enough to properly finish the roughly cast pit can be bought on the Internet, even on eBay, for $10,000.

These instruments are probably as capable as the one Mr. Yuan used more than 40 years ago. Computer-controlled machine tools are not necessary. Our terrorist outfit could probably find all the standard machine shop equipment it would need in any university physics department. None of the tools require special licenses to purchase.

The machining group would also have the task of designing and building the required structure for the device and assembling the whole. This requires two or three people able to carry out such common laboratory tasks as welding, brazing and hard soldering. One member of the group should bring the skills of a draftsman and the ability to use computers to design complex shapes.

To detonate a nuclear bomb, terrorists do not need to fashion the right type of gun. "Team Gun" would likely consist of three or four people, at least one of whom is familiar with the interior ballistics of guns in the appropriate size range. Their principal task would be to find a surplus artillery piece of the correct size and to build a projectile. Such recoilless rifles are widely available in the United States and Canada as military surplus, though they require a license to purchase. A hobbyist could easily refurbish a recoilless rifle for just a few thousand dollars. It is unlikely to take more than six months for such a group to adapt and test a reliable gun.

Meanwhile, the electronics team would probably include one or two technicians, headed by an engineer with at least a baccalaureate degree in electrical engineering or experimental physics. Its principal job would be to design the circuitry that arms and fires the device at the desired point and prevents it from detonating accidentally. In addition, the group would need to assemble or purchase, install and calibrate neutron detectors to be used in testing.

The terrorists would also require a large, remote area for their "mini-Los Alamos." Their biggest concern would be the noise caused by firing the gun during tests. We would choose a 150-acre ranch in an isolated area. Such a ranch might be purchased for $150,000 in remote areas of the United States, such as Texas or Wyoming, and would require another $50,000 in temporary improvements to build the foundry, machine shop, electronics lab and other equipment.

Once complete, the nuclear device itself is likely to be less than 9 feet long. Although it would not fit easily in a sedan, it could be transported in a van or small panel truck with, say, a couple of drivers and a couple more people to keep an eye on the device. The trip would consume no more than 40 driving hours and could easily be completed in four to five days traveling from dawn to dusk. The cost to deliver the device using a typical rental truck from our hypothetical Wyoming ranch to, say, New York City or Washington, D.C., would be less than $3,000.

At this point, the project would have employed roughly 17 people full time for about one year. Purchasing the necessary items – from land to supplies, and surplus gun barrels to vacuum casting equipment – is a specialized business, particularly because the purchases could be traced by law enforcement. The plotters would want to avoid being personally involved in purchasing supplies, so there could be a need for one or two specialists who would be responsible for clandestine procurement. Even so, the entire active team would number no more than 19 people.

Altogether, a terrorist organization could plausibly build and deliver a nuclear weapon for less than $2 million. That leaves substantial room in our budget of $10 million for the cost of buying highly enriched uranium.

Estimating the cost of acquiring fissile material is quite difficult. A terrorist group would be most likely to either purchase uranium on the black market or attempt to steal the material from a poorly guarded facility. The "market" for fissile material is an unusual one. For the most part, it is a mix of criminals and con artists on one side and police and informants on the other.

Al-Qaeda's attempt to purchase highly enriched uranium from the Sudanese for $1.5 million is perhaps a realistic estimate of the cost, even though that particular cylinder turned out to be a fake. Without knowing the mass of the cylinder in Khartoum or whether Mr. bin Laden believed additional purchases would be necessary, a terrorist group might need to make two or three such purchases at a cost of $3 million to $5 million, with $4 million as an average.

With all other expenses running a little less than $2 million, it's clear that the biggest cost – and, by extension, the most difficult part of the operation – would be buying the uranium.

No one really knows how much highly enriched uranium there is in the world, or how close the wrong groups are to getting the right amount. The frightening truth is that fissile material, including nuclear explosive material, is an item of commerce and moves from place to place. One of the side effects of our globalized economy is that opportunities for direct theft and bribing of nuclear custodians abound.

And when rogue states like Iran and possibly North Korea continue to enrich uranium, ostensibly for energy purposes, it is even harder to control what happens to it. Although building a nuclear device remains an expensive, complex undertaking out of reach for most organizations, a well-financed group that seeks to kill large numbers of people may well find it an irresistible option. A wealthy organization seeking to kill several hundred thousand could hardly find a more economical method than the detonation of a small nuclear device.

That is reason enough to consider the nuclear threat a serious one. Just because a nuclear terrorist attack hasn't happened shouldn't give us the false comfort of thinking it won't.

Peter D. Zimmerman is professor of science and security in the Department of War Studies at King's College London. He was previously chief scientist of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. Jeffrey G. Lewis is executive director of the Managing the Atom Project at Harvard University. He publishes the leading arms control blog, www .armscontrolwonk.com. This essay is adapted from a longer one appearing in the current issue of Foreign Policy (www.foreignpolicy.com).

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/opinion/points/stories/DN-backyardbomb_03edi.ART.State.Edition1.3db770e.html

Vancouver

12-10-2006, 07:24 AM

The article by Zimmerman and Lewis:
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/users/login.php?story_id=3597&URL=http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3597

Petronas

12-11-2006, 11:55 PM

Police to get ‘dirty bomb hoods’ in terror alert
December 10, 2006

POLICE forces have been told to buy anti-radiation masks for their 100,000 frontline officers to protect them in the event of a “dirty bomb” terrorist attack. The Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) has told all forces they should look to purchase specially designed chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear (CBRN) hoods as soon as possible. Senior officers are concerned that, with only 1,000 thought to have been distributed, their ability to deal with any radiation threat will be severely hampered. The transparent “escape hoods” are able to protect the wearer from harm for about 20 minutes, allowing him or her to leave an affected area without breathing in any toxic particles.

The urgency that is being placed on the purchase of the hoods reflects the level of concern over the likelihood of a “dirty bomb” attack, where radioactive material, packed around a conventional explosive, is detonated and spreads radiation over a wide area. The threat has been highlighted by the use of radioactive polonium-210 to kill Alexander Litvinenko, the Russian defector.

A spokesman for the Home Office said: “These hoods are not intended for people who need to go and deal with an incident, they are for officers who are going about their normal duties and may find themselves caught up in a CBRN situation that they and others need to escape.” An ACPO spokesman said: “All UK police forces have been made aware of the availability of escape hoods. They have been advised by ACPO that individual forces should consider acquiring sufficient hoods to equip all patrolling officers at times of heightened threat.”

The hoods, which cost £95, can be folded into a holster the size of a hip flask. They were developed by Avon Protection in collaboration with the police’s national CBRN centre in Winterbourne Gunner, Wiltshire, and have been available since October. Avon confirmed it had sold about 1,000 hoods to the police but the company has not yet received any bulk purchases because of an apparent dispute over funding.

Chris Feltham, an Avon spokesman, said: “The Home Office, as far as I am aware, has told the constabularies that they will have to fund their own rather than through central procurement. Whether that happens is not something we have control over.” The issue of who will pay for the hoods could become a contentious one. The Police Federation is understood to be making representations to the Home Office to ask for government funding to pay for the hoods.

The current “threat level” of a terrorist strike in Britain is judged by MI5 and the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre to be “severe”, meaning that an attack is highly likely.

To cope with a “dirty bomb” attack other emergency measures include 360 mobile decontamination units for use around the country by ambulances and accident and emergency departments. More than 7,000 protection suits have been provided for key health workers and a total of 4,400 high performance gas-tight suits for firefighters have also been procured.

The CBRN centre has also trained 7,000 police officers in how to deal with “dirty bomb” attacks. In the event of an incident in London main roads would be turned into “escape expressways” taking outbound traffic only to evacuate the city.

Contaminated rubble would be shipped out along the Thames to landfill sites in Essex.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-2496487,00.html

Petronas

12-14-2006, 03:53 PM

Paul Williams is one of the proponents of the "American Hiroshima" hypothesis. Take this with as much salt as you like.

Spy Death By Nuclear Poisoning Tied To American Hiroshima?
December 6, 2006
By Paul L. Williams, Ph.D. and Lee Boyland

The death of Alexander Litvinenko by radiological poisoning points to the possibility that the former Soviet spy may have been involved with Islamic terrorists in the preparation of tactical nuclear weapons for use in the jihad against the United States and its NATO allies.

Litvenenko, a former KGB agent, died in London on November 23 after ingesting a microscopic amount of polonium-210. In a deathbed statement, Litvinenko blamed Russian President Vladimir Putin for the poisoning - - an accusation which the Kremlin has vehemently denied.

The denial is fortified by the fact that polonium-210 is a very rare radiological substance that is man-made by bombarding Bismuth-209 with neutrons within a nuclear reactor. It is expensive to produce and difficult to handle. When Russian officials resorted to nuclear poisoning in the past - - including the assassination of two Swiss intelligence officials who were engaged with Russia and South Africa in the nuclear black market - - they relied on such readily available radiological substances as cesium-137 in salt form. According to nuclear expert David Morgan, killing a spy or political dissident with a grain or two of polonium-210 is as ludicrous as shooting a rat with a howitzer.

Litvinenko, who was born an orthodox Christian, was a convert to Islam with close ties to the Chechen rebels. His last words consisted of his desire to be buried “according to Muslim tradition.”

In recent years, considerable attention has been paid to suitcase nukes that were developed by U.S. and Soviet forces during the Cold War. Reliable sources, including Hans Blix of the United Nation, have confirmed that bin Laden purchased several of these devises from the Chechen rebels in 1996. According to Sharif al-Masri and other al Qaeda operatives who have been taken into custody, several of these weapons have been forward deployed to the United States in preparation for al Qaeda’s next attack on American soil.

This brings us to the mysterious case of Litvinenko.

The neutron source or “triggers” of the suitcase nukes are composed of beryllium-9 and polonium-210. When these two elements are combined, the alpha particle is absorbed by the nucleus of the beryllium causing it to decay by emitting a neutron. Such “triggers” were a feature of early nuclear weapons in the U.S. and Soviet stockpiles.

Polonium-210 has a half-life of 138 days, necessitating the replacement of the triggers every six months. For this reason, the suitcase nukes are far from maintenance-free. In addition, the nuclear core of these devises emit a temperature in excess of one hundred degrees Fahrenheit - - further exposing the weapons to oxidation and rust. Small wonder that al Qaeda operatives including Adnan el-Shukrijumah, who are spearheading “the American Hiroshima” have received extensive training in nuclear technology.

Polonium-beryllium triggers are packaged in foil packs about the size of a package of sugar on a restaurant table. When the twin foil packages are crushed, the elements mix and the neutrons are emitted. A courier transporting nuclear triggers could have had a mishap causing the packages to rupture and a trail of contamination to occur.

Polonium-210 is a fine powder, easily aerosolized. Litvinenko could have inhaled the powder, or had a grain or two on his fingers when he ate the sushi.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/global.php?id=467267&PHPSESSID=7439137f3572344400e3c8f04e932ed1

HomesickTexan

12-14-2006, 05:34 PM

Man, that's creepy.

al-Canine

12-14-2006, 06:42 PM

Litvinenko, who was born an orthodox Christian, was a convert to Islam with close ties to the Chechen rebels. His last words consisted of his desire to be buried “according to Muslim tradition.”

Intriguing post, Petronas. The time frame and context of his so-called "conversion" might certainly lead to speculation.

From a CBS News (http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/12/07/world/main2238576.shtml) report...

... Walter Litvinenko [Aleksander's father] and [Chechen rebel envoy Akhmed] Zakayev both insisted the former spy had converted to Islam on his deathbed, although some friends disputed the claim — saying he had merely expressed empathy with Chechen Muslims. [Ghayasuddin] Siddiqui [head of Britain's Muslim parliament] said the mosque had been told Litvinenko converted to Islam 10 days before he was admitted to a hospital last month ...

Petronas

12-21-2006, 04:34 PM

The more of these nations have nuclear weapons, the more likely one will fall into the wrong hands.

The Arab Race for the Bomb
December 20, 2006

Iran’s Mullahs are no longer the only apparent contenders for a nuclear crown in the Islamic Middle East.

As of December 10th, six more Arab nations declared their intention to gain nuclear energy at the annual meeting of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) in Riyadh. Only the day before, Iran exacerbated tensions throughout the region by announcing that it had already begun “installing 3,000 centrifuges” in the “first step toward industrial production” of “nuclear fuel.” In this context, the GCC’s actions indicate a growing perception that the U.S. is on the verge of retreating from Iraq and may negotiate with Iran in order to achieve this end, as the recent Baker report proposed. Gulf players are now beginning to act to confront the aggression of Iran in the belief that the U.S. never will, signaling even greater division in a region that edges ever closer toward a full-blown nuclear arms race.

While Prince Saud al-Faisal, the Saudi foreign minister, later attempted to assuage anxiety by reasserting the council’s “peaceful purposes” in pursuing nuclear energy, Arab pundits praised the GCC’s nuke statement as a “clear, strong and courageous” response to Iran’s nuclear program and the first show of true strength among the Sunni nations toward Shiite Iran’s growing power. According to journalist Fouad al-Hashem, Sunni nations will no longer stand idly by while Shiite Iran achieves nuclear power; “with the help of [their] allies, [the Sunni nations intend to] balance the power and build [their] own reactors even if [they] don't need them.” ...

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=26097

Petronas

12-24-2006, 10:13 AM

Nuclear plant info available to public
Updated: 5:36 p.m. PT Nov 27, 2006

What if an airplane were to crash into a nuclear plant? How long would it take terrorists to penetrate security barriers outside nuclear facilities? What are the most vulnerable parts of a nuclear plant to attack in order to inflict maximum damage?

The answers to all those questions, and many more, are available to the public, as NBC News discovered in a recent hidden-camera investigation. Accessing that very information — along with thousands of other sensitive documents from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) — is as easy as walking into a public library, finding the right files, printing them out and walking out with the documents in hand, no questions asked.

Many of the documents we were able to access were among the thousands of files the NRC pulled from its Web site after 9/11, deemed too sensitive to be available to the public. But that same effort to clean out sensitive information, it seems, was never made with NRC’s document collections in public libraries across the country.

Former New Jersey Gov. Thomas Kean, who also served as co-chairman of the 9/11 commission, calls this inconsistency “appalling.” “What this means is that we've given the terrorists an easy map in order to find out about our nuclear facilities,” says Kean. “It's the worst possible thing we could be doing.”

E-mails and letters obtained by NBC News show that after 9/11, the NRC did, in fact, compile a list of sensitive documents to be pulled from public collections. But in early 2002, the agency made the decision not to pull the information, so the request, and that list, were never passed on to libraries. The documents were never removed.

In fact, we were able to obtain documents from that very list at all four libraries we visited, and federal investigators were able to find sensitive security documents at all 25 libraries they visited. For security reasons, NBC News is not revealing the location of the libraries or the exact content of the documents.

In a statement to NBC News, the NRC says it is aware of a “limited amount” of sensitive information that continues to exist in the public domain, but that “the usefulness of this information is minimal given its age and subsequent changes to and improvements in security programs and physical modifications that have been made to nuclear facilities” since 9/11. The agency wishes “to assure the public that information directly related to the security programs and protection of nuclear power plants is not in the public domain.”

But Dave Lochbaum, a nuclear safety engineer with the Union of Concerned Scientists, insists the information in the public collections is “very explicit, very detailed, and would be very useful to the terrorists planning out such an attack.” Lochbaum was recently able to buy an entire set of NRC’s document collection from a public library. “Many of those records were pulled by the NRC from the main collection because of their value to terrorists,” says Lochbaum. “Yet here they were in the collection we obtained.”

Among the files he found in his new collection: the same documents the NRC removed from its Web site, including a 1982 report that details the catastrophic impact a plane crash could have if it hit at just the right point at a nuclear plant. “That document, in pretty explicit detail, explains what the vulnerable parts of a plant are in terms of aircraft impact, so that would then become the targets for the pilot or the terrorist at the controls of an aircraft,” says Lochbaum. “That’s what he'd aim for.”

A prominent congressman agrees. Rep. Bart Gordon, D-Tenn., the ranking member of the House Committee on Science, recently wrote a letter to the NRC that describes the availability of all the sensitive nuclear data as "particularly troubling." Gordon writes, "It is baffling to me that the NRC would consider this information so sensitive that it should be pulled from its on-line database, yet apparently the information was considered safe enough to be left in more than 80 public libraries scattered throughout the nation." Gordon continues: "In my mind, the information can't be both a security threat and, simultaneously, of no consequence; a policy that treats the same materials in two different ways is simply muddled."

The NRC also claims that the limited accessibility of the documents was part of its decision to leave the information in the public realm. But Kean believes a difficult process is not necessarily sufficient deterrent to anyone determined to carry out a terror attack.

“What we learned in the 9/11 investigation was that these terrorists are smart, they're determined, they're willing to work as hard as necessary, they do their research, and they practice,” says Kean. “These are people who prepare very, very, very carefully. And so, if it's available and there's a way they can get it, they will.”

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15922717/

Petronas

01-30-2007, 08:46 PM

Russian man jailed after attempt to sell bomb-grade uranium
26-Jan-07 00:56 GMT

GEORGIAN special services have foiled an attempt by a Russian citizen to sell weapons-grade uranium for £506,000 to agents he believed were radical Islamists, a senior interior ministry official said yesterday. The official said Oleg Khintsagov, a resident of Russia's North Ossetia region, was arrested on 1 February, 2006, and a closed court soon after sentenced him to eight and a half years in prison.

Khintsagov was detained as he tried to sell uranium-235 to an undercover Georgian agent posing as a member of a radical Islamist group, said Shota Utiashvili, who heads the ministry's information and analytical department. The Georgian agents were working with assistance from the CIA. "He was demanding $1 million for 100g of enriched weapons-grade uranium," Mr Utiashvili said. "This sort of uranium could be used to make a nuclear bomb but 100g is not enough." Before being arrested, Khintsagov told agents he had another 2-3kg of highly enriched uranium in the North Ossetian capital, Vladikavkaz.

Khintsagov, who transported the uranium in plastic bags in his pockets, refused to co-operate with the investigation. Uranium is relatively harmless to carry around because it is an alpha-emitting radioactive material that does not penetrate the skin. The uranium's provenance was unclear. The safety of Russia's vast stocks of nuclear weapons from smugglers has concerned world leaders since the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991.

The Russian government said nothing on the investigation, except for an official at Russia's nuclear agency, Rosatom, who denied Georgian accusations that Russia was not co-operating with an investigation. There have been 16 previous confirmed cases of stolen or missing enriched uranium or plutonium recovered by authorities since 1993, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency. The IAEA said it expected Georgia to notify it of the new case shortly. "Given the serious consequences of the detonation of an improvised nuclear explosive device, even small numbers of incidents involving uranium or plutonium are of very high concern," said Melissa Fleming, an IAEA spokeswoman.

RUSSIA retains a sprawling nuclear weapons production industry and large stocks of weapons-grade fissile material left over from Soviet-era programmes. According to the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a Washington-based non-governmental organisation devoted to non-proliferation issues, Russia has between 735 and 1,365 tonnes of weapons grade-equivalent highly enriched uranium and between 106 and 156 tonnes of military-use plutonium. A US-financed drive has paid for cameras to increase security at many facilities.

http://news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=134362007

Petronas

02-02-2007, 09:52 PM

For what its worth...

New Evidence Ties Former Soviet Spy's Death to American Hiroshima
02/02/2007

New evidence has come to light that Alexander Litvinenko may have been involved with Islamic terrorists in the preparation of tactical nuclear weapons for use in the jihad against the United States and its NATO allies. Litvinenko, a former KGB agent, died in London on November 23 after ingesting a microscopic amount of polonium-210.

Investigators have now uncovered the following:

Litvinenko was a Muslim convert with reported ties to radical Islam.
The former Soviet spy masterminded the smuggling of radioactive material to Zurich in 2000. This finding was corroborated by Mario Scaramella, one of Litvinenko's business associates.
Litvinenko became closely allied with Boris Berezovsky, a Russian billionaire who established close ties with the Chechen leaders, and Chechen leader Ahmed Zakayev. Both men served as pallbearers at the funeral. Several years ago, Berezovsky boasted to the press that the Chechen separatists had acquired a portable nuclear weapon that lacked one "minor" component. That component, Scotland Yard officials now believe, was polonium-210.

In a deathbed statement, Litvinenko blamed Russian President Vladimir Putin for the poisoning -- an accusation which the Kremlin has vehemently denied. The denial was supported by the fact that polonium-210 is a rare radiological substance that is man-made by bombarding Bismuth-209 with neutrons within a nuclear reactor. It is expensive to produce and difficult to handle. Polonium-210 is also rare -- fewer than four ounces are produced annually. All of the reported production comes from Russian reactors. This amount is purchased annually by the United States, simply to keep the substance from leaking into the black market. Several rogue nations have been suspected of clandestinely producing polonium-210 for nefarious purposes. A quantity was detected in Iran by IAEA inspectors and in North Korea by U. S. airborne samplings.

When Russian officials resorted to nuclear poisoning in the past -- including the assassination of two Swiss intelligence officials who were engaged with Russia and South Africa in the nuclear black market -- they relied on such readily available radiological substances as cesium-137 in salt form.

According to nuclear expert David Morgan, killing a spy or political dissident with a grain or two of polonium-210 is as ludicrous as shooting a rat with a howitzer. Indeed, if Litvinenko was a victim of radiological assassination, his murder would represent the costliest hit in human history with a price tag of $30 million.

Litvinenko, who was born an orthodox Christian, was a convert to Islam with close ties to the Chechen rebels. His last words consisted of his desire to be buried "according to Muslim tradition." This wish was not fulfilled. The former spy was buried in a plain wooden coffin from a London mosque but was sealed in a Jacobean oak Garratt casket and laid to rest in Highgate Cemetery -- not the day after his death -- but on December 7, 17 days after his mysterious demise. The imam refused to allow the casket to enter the mosque because of fears of radiation contamination.

In recent years, considerable attention has been paid to suitcase nukes that were developed by U.S. and Soviet forces during the Cold War. Reliable sources, including Hans Blix of the United Nation, have confirmed that bin Laden purchased several of these devises from the Chechen rebels in 1996. According to Sharif al-Masri and other al Qaeda operatives who have been taken into custody, several of these weapons have been forward deployed to the United States in preparation for al Qaeda's next attack on American soil.

The neutron source or "triggers" of the reported suitcase nukes are composed of beryllium-9 and polonium-210. When these two elements are combined, the alpha particle is absorbed by the nucleus of the beryllium causing it to decay by emitting a neutron. Such "triggers" were a feature of early nuclear weapons in the U.S. and Soviet stockpiles.

Polonium-210 has a half-life of 138 days, necessitating the replacement of the triggers every six months. For this reason, the suitcase nukes are far from maintenance-free. In addition, the nuclear core of these devises emit a temperature in excess of one hundred degrees Fahrenheit -- further exposing the weapons to oxidation and rust. Small wonder that al Qaeda operatives including Adnan el-Shukrijumah, who are spearheading "the American Hiroshima" have received extensive training in nuclear technology.

Polonium-beryllium triggers are packaged in foil packs about the size of a package on sugar on a restaurant table. When the twin foil packages are crushed, the elements mix and the neutrons are emitted. A courier transporting nuclear triggers could have had a mishap causing the packages to rupture and a trail of contamination to occur. Polonium-210 is a fine powder, easily aerosolized. Litvinenko could have inhaled the powder, or had a grain or two on his fingers when he ate the sushi.

The most probable source of the polonium packets, according to investigators, remains North Korea. The nuclear bomb which was tested by North Korea on October 9, 2006, registered 4.2 on the Richter scale -- displaying an explosive yield of five to 15 kilotons. The Bush Administration dismissed the test as a "fizzle." But the explosion matched the yield of a Soviet Small Atomic Munitions Device (SADM), such as a suitcase nuke with a plutonium core.

A dozen associates of Litvinenko have displayed symptoms of polonium poisoning. The list includes Andrei Lugovoi, a former KGB colleague of Litvinenko, who met with the deceased at the Millenium Hotel in London on November 1, 2006, the day Litvinenko became ill; Dimitry Kovtun, Lugovoi's business associate, who attended that meeting; Mario Scaramella, an Italian security consultant, who had dinner with Litvinenko the evening of November 1 at the Itsu Sushi Restaurant; and Litvinenko's Russian wife, Marina. Traces of the lethal substance have been found in Litvinenko's home in Muswell Hill, two London hotels, and two British Airways 757s.

In an interview with The Independent shortly before the poisoning became public, Scaramella said that Litvinenko had been involved in the smuggling of radioactive material to Zurich. He also said that black market dealings in radioactive isotopes provided Litvinenko with badly need revenue to meet his living expenses.

Litvinenko's father said that the former Soviet spy had converted to Islam before his death. He told the press: "He [Alexander] said I want to be buried according to Islamic tradition. I said okay son. It will be as you wish. We already have one Muslim in our family. The important thing is to believe in the Almighty. God is one."

Mr. Williams is author of "The Al Qaeda Connection" and the forthcoming "The Day of Islam." The Paul L. Williams Defense Fund has been established by friends of Dr. Williams, who has been sued by McMaster University for investigating terrorist activity at McMaster.

http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=19242

Ono

02-02-2007, 09:57 PM

Whoa!

Klaus

02-03-2007, 01:18 AM

Woe!

candypreet

02-03-2007, 02:26 AM

good posts

uchiuke123

02-03-2007, 08:05 AM

Interesting....

uchiuke123

mahyuta

02-04-2007, 11:37 PM

i called it the day the news was breaking he was sick from radiation

so one needs to do the math and see when 138 days is from his inital poisoning

november 1st is the inital poisoning

therefore, a possible suitcase to go off prior to march 21st ?

is this why iran stated that jesus and the iman is set for return on the spring equinox ?

Vancouver

02-05-2007, 07:17 AM

Mr. Williams is author of "The Al Qaeda Connection" and the forthcoming "The Day of Islam." The Paul L. Williams Defense Fund has been established by friends of Dr. Williams, who has been sued by McMaster University for investigating terrorist activity at McMaster.Williams is not being sued for investigating terrorist activity at McMaster. He is being sued falslely claiming that there is terrorist activity at McMaster. The libel is in a book called The Dunces of Doomsday, published by the doomsday-minded Christian organization World Net Daily:
http://shop.wnd.com/store/item.asp?ITEM_ID=1838

Petronas

02-05-2007, 03:26 PM

I should say that I have not read Mr Williams's book, and that the statement about the lawsuit was part of the article, not my commentary. I have a question, however: how can you be so sure that he is FALSELY claiming that there is terrorist activity at Mc Master? After all, there certainly has been, and probably is ongoing, terrorist related activity at many US universities. Not knowing about McMaster specifically, I would not be surprised if more than one Canadian university had the same issue.

Petronas

02-16-2007, 01:25 PM

New York Prepares for Nuclear Terror
Friday, Feb. 9, 2007 10:33 a.m. EST

The federal government is installing new radiation detection machines at a New York City port facility in a test of defenses against a terror attack by a nuclear weapon or radioactive "dirty bomb.” The devices are designed to automatically screen cargo for ingredients in a terrorist’s bomb.

And later this year, the government intends to set up a network of radiation detection devices at some bridges, tunnels, roadway and waterways leading into New York, creating a 50-mile ring around the city, the New York Times reports in a front-page story on Friday. The anti-terror effort could be expanded to other cities at a later date.

The detection devices are to be installed at the New York Container Terminal in Staten Island. The machines can, for the first time, not only sound an alarm when radioactivity is detected, but also identify the radioactive isotope, allowing officials to distinguish between innocuous items emitting low levels of radiation and potentially dangerous cargo.

The network that will ring the city would most likely include truck inspection stations and tollbooths along highways approaching New York, and at locations where boat, rail and subway traffic could be monitored, according to the Times. New York City’s police commissioner, Raymond Kelly, expressed concerns that the Department of Homeland Security will install the radiation detection equipment and then leave the local and state governments to pay the cost of operating the system.

He also stated: "Whether or not it works, whether or not it causes too many false alarms, which causes a whole other set of problems, all of these things are still to be determined.” But Benn H. Tannenbaum, a physicist and nuclear terrorism expert at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, said that while he doubted the system would be foolproof, it still might be worthwhile. He told the Times: "If nothing else, it makes the terrorist think twice before they do something like this.”

http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2007/2/9/105458.shtml?s=ic

Petronas

02-23-2007, 12:52 AM

Radioactive, unprotected: A `dirty bomb' nightmare
Published February 15, 2007

Jobless for two years, Gagik Tovmasyan believed escape from poverty lay in a cardboard box on his kitchen floor. Inside the box, a blue, lead-lined vessel held the right type and amount of radioactive cesium to make a "dirty bomb." The material was given to him by an unemployed Armenian Catholic priest who promised a cut if Tovmasyan could find a buyer.

He found one in 2004, but the man turned out to be an undercover agent. Tovmasyan spent a year behind bars on a charge of illegally storing and trying to sell 4 grams of cesium-137.

Today the chain-smoking Armenian cabdriver says his actions amounted to simple survival. "That's just the way it was back then," said Tovmasyan, 48, who insisted he had no idea of the danger the material presented. "I was selling all my belongings just to get by."

At a time when the U.S. is grappling with the specter of nuclear weapons in North Korea and Iran, security experts warn that a vast supply of radioactive materials--enough to make hundreds of so-called dirty bombs--lies virtually unprotected in former Soviet military bases and ruined factories.

Desperately poor scavengers looking for scrap metal already have raided many of those sites, fueling an ever-growing concern in the war on terrorism.

There were 662 confirmed cases of radioactive materials smuggling around the world from 1993 to 2004, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency. More than 400 involved substances that could be used to make a dirty bomb, a weapon that would spew radioactivity across a broad area. Experts say even these alarming numbers do not reflect the magnitude of the smuggling.

The risk has grown despite tens of millions of dollars spent by the United States to provide radiation detection equipment and security training in former Soviet republics. Tracking how the money is spent by opaque, often-corrupt governments has proved especially difficult.

The problem is wider in scope than often acknowledged, and the stakes are enormous: It takes only a few grams of a deadly radioactive substance such as cesium-137 or strontium-90 to make a dirty bomb.

Along Russia's barren, jagged coastline on the Barents Sea, enough strontium-90 to make hundreds of dirty bombs can be found in dozens of unguarded lighthouses and navigational beacons. In Semipalatinsk in eastern Kazakhstan, once the site of Soviet nuclear weapons testing, scavengers routinely slip through breaches in tunnels where poorly secured strontium-90, cesium-137, plutonium and uranium waste is stored alongside scrap metal, the site's director says.

In the small mountainous republic of Georgia, the director of a former Soviet laboratory in the breakaway province of Abkhazia says separatist leaders have prevented IAEA inspectors from adequately surveying the institute, where stockpiles of uranium, cesium-137, strontium-90 and other radioactive materials cannot be accounted for.

Many former Soviet republics do a poor job of maintaining reliable inventories of radioactive material, according to Lyudmila Zaitseva, a radioactive materials trafficking researcher at the University of Salzburg in Austria. Former Soviet borders are porous, and corruption is rife at border guard posts.

When it comes to protecting radioactive materials, the countries that once made up the Soviet Union are "the weakest and most dangerous link in the whole chain," said Igor Khripunov, a U.S.-based expert in nuclear and radioactive materials security at the University of Georgia.

Zaitseva and her research colleague Friedrich Steinhausler, who log radioactive materials trafficking cases into a database at the University of Salzburg, estimate that roughly 3 of every 5 cases of radioactive materials smuggling go undetected. "I am far more concerned with what we don't see than with what we see," Steinhausler said.

The U.S. government has been slow to gird its ports and border checkpoints with enough detection capability to prevent smuggled radioactive materials from entering the country. In December 2005, congressional investigators smuggled enough cesium-137 across U.S. checkpoints on the Canadian and Mexican borders to produce two dirty bombs, according to a 2006 Government Accountability Office report.

Testifying before a Senate homeland security subcommittee in March, GAO officials said they doubted that the Department of Homeland Security could hit its deadline of placing more than 3,000 radiation detectors at border crossings, seaports and mail facilities by 2009. It was likelier, said the GAO's Eugene Aloise, that the department would not finish until 2014.

"Four and a half years after Sept. 11, and less than 40 percent of our seaports have basic radiation equipment," said Sen. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.), the subcommittee chairman at the time during a congressional hearing last March. "This is a massive blind spot."

No one has ever detonated a dirty bomb, but terrorists have made it clear they have the means and desire to do so.

In November 1995, Chechen separatists buried a canister of cesium-137 under the snow in Moscow's Izmailovo Park and told a Russian television network where to find it. Last year, a British court sentenced Dhiren Barot, a London resident linked to Al Qaeda, to 40 years in prison for planning a series of terrorist attacks in London and the U.S. that would have included a dirty bomb.

In the dense stands of birch and pine in Russia's far north, special generators used to power lighthouses represent one of the most vulnerable sources of material. Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators create electricity through the decay of strontium-90. A single RTG can house enough strontium-90 for 40 dirty bombs.

Russia has more than 600 RTGs scattered across its 11 time zones. Lighthouses and navigational beacons equipped with them are largely unguarded, at times lacking even a chain-link fence for protection.

In the Murmansk and Arkhangelsk regions along the Barents coastline, scrap metal hunters have broken into six RTGs in recent years, said Vladimir Kozlovsky, a local official involved in a Russian-Norwegian project to replace the aging RTGs with safer technology.

In March, scrap metal hunters broke into a deserted military base above the Arctic Circle and ripped apart four RTGs, according to Bellona, a Norwegian environmental watchdog organization.

While there are no reports of strontium being taken from an RTG, the scavenging highlights the risks.

Radioactive materials transported in Russia by rail are also alarmingly vulnerable.

Last year Greenpeace activists staked out a train depot in a village near St. Petersburg, Russia, to monitor trainloads of uranium from Western Europe that had been stopping on their way to Siberia for disposal.

"There were no police, no guards, no armed personnel around," said Greenpeace activist Georgy Timofeyev. "The first time we noticed this in May, we called authorities. They said, `If there aren't any guards, then there's no danger.'

"But anyone can walk up and open them because there are no serious locks on the containers," Timofeyev said.

Greenpeace activists say Russian authorities confirmed that the shipments were being handled by Izotop, a state-owned nuclear materials transport company. The firm handles roughly 50,000 tons of nuclear material shipped through St. Petersburg each year, according to Bellona. Izotop officials declined to comment.

In Kazakhstan, once a hub for Soviet nuclear production and research because of its remoteness in the steppes of Central Asia, vast networks of tunnels and boreholes used for nuclear weapons testing pose a unique problem.

For four decades, the treeless stretches of scrub outside Semipalatinsk in eastern Kazakhstan served as the Soviet Union's ground zero. The Soviet military machine conducted 458 nuclear weapons tests at the 7,200-square mile site. Most of the blasts occurred in 181 iron-lined tunnels a half-mile below the ground, or in the site's 60 boreholes.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Kazakhstan relinquished its entire nuclear arsenal and sealed Semipalatinsk's tunnels and boreholes with concrete.

Those seals have failed to deter impoverished Kazakhs, who fashion propane tanks into makeshift bombs to blast their way into the tunnels. Their quarry is scrap metal, but local authorities worry that the vast amounts of strontium, cesium, plutonium and uranium waste still inside the tunnels could attract those intent on building a dirty bomb.

"Anyone who wants to make a dirty bomb can target by-products of the blasts," said Kayrat Kadyrzhanov, director general of the Kazakhstan National Nuclear Center, which oversees the site. "When test blasts were done, not all of the particles burned out. Even taking soil samples would be of value to a terrorist or rogue state.

"When people get into the tunnels, we assume it's for iron. But that's our assumption," Kadyrzhanov said.

The U.S. government has given Kazakhstan more than $20 million to seal up tunnel and borehole entrances, Kadyrzhanov said, "but the problem is still there." Kazakh authorities deploy only four patrol teams--made up of a local police officer, a radiation detector specialist and a driver--to cover 181 tunnels and a tract of steppe the size of New Jersey.

The scrap hunters are well-equipped," Kadyrzhanov said. "They've got cell phones and warn each other about approaching patrols."

Radioactive flotsam left behind by the Soviets in Georgia is just as worrisome. Canisters of cesium-137 and other radioactive materials have been routinely found at abandoned military bases, research laboratories--even in farmhouses, according to nuclear safety specialists with the Georgian government.

Last summer, inspectors found cesium-137 amid a pile of nuts and bolts in a soap container at a farmer's house in the village of Likhauri.

"We came across many cases where radioactive material was found in the street, in a forest, or in fields," said Grigol Basilia, a scientist with Georgia's Nuclear Radiation Safety Service.

Georgia's biggest worry is the rebellious province of Abkhazia on the Black Sea coast, where a separatist government defies Tbilisi with the political and military backing of Russia.

Abkhazia is home to the Sukhumi Institute of Physics and Technology, or SIPT, founded in 1945 as a cog in the effort to build the Soviet Union's first atomic bomb. In 1992, civil war broke out in Abkhazia. Abkhaz separatists drove out Georgian troops in a year of fighting that claimed 17,000 lives. Georgian scientists at the institute fled, leaving the laboratory and its storehouse of uranium, plutonium and other radioactive materials in the hands of Abkhaz separatists.

Today, those Georgian scientists have no control over the fate of SIPT's deadly array of radioactive substances. Guram Bokuchava, the institute's director, operates out of a small office in downtown Tbilisi, not knowing how those materials are guarded or even how much are left.

In 2002, when IAEA inspectors flew to Sukhumi to check on uranium stored at the institute, Abkhaz authorities would not let them inspect the storage site, Bokuchava said.

"It's not known how much uranium is there," Bokuchava said. "And it's not known how much cesium-137 and strontium-90 is there. Of course, we're concerned about what happened to these materials ... but the Abkhaz side is not giving any information about this."

Georgia also continues to be a major transit nation for radioactive materials smugglers. In the most recent case, Oleg Khinsagov, a 50-year-old Russian trader, was caught trying to smuggle 100 grams of highly enriched uranium through Georgia last year. He was convicted of nuclear materials trafficking and sentenced to 8 1/2 years in prison. Georgian authorities believe the uranium originated in Russia.

Khinsagov fits the profile of the opportunistic radioactive materials smuggler working the Caucasus region: He was a simple trader, with no criminal background and no known connections to organized crime or terrorists.

Tovmasyan, the Armenian cabdriver, and the other men arrested with him fit the same profile.

The man who gave Tovmasyan the cesium, Asokhik Aristakesyan, was a priest and also unemployed, said Vahe Papoyan, an investigator with the Armenian National Security Service. So was another man who tried to sell the cesium, Sarkis Mikaelyan, a jobless economist. They each were convicted and also sentenced to a year in jail

"Especially in countries with low standards of living," Khripunov said, "people can be very enterprising."

The U.S. has aggressively tried to shore up border checkpoints in Georgia and other former Soviet republics to stem the flow of radioactive materials smuggling. From 1994 to 2005, Washington spent $178 million to provide radiation detection equipment for border posts in 36 countries, many of them former Soviet nations.

A March 2006 GAO report acknowledged that the new equipment helps, but the bigger challenge is corruption.

"Border guards often don't know what they're dealing with," Zaitseva said. "They're bribed to switch off their detection equipment. They don't know what's being smuggled, and they really don't care."

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0702150125feb15,1,6578821.story?coll=chi-news-hed&ctrack=1&cset=true

Petronas

03-11-2007, 12:35 PM

U.S. Unprepared for Nuclear Terror Attack, Experts Say
Mar 05, 2007

Although the Bush administration has warned repeatedly about the threat of a terrorist nuclear attack and spent more than $300 billion to protect the homeland, the government remains ill-prepared to respond to a nuclear catastrophe.

Experts and government documents suggest that, absent a major preparedness push, the U.S. response to a mushroom cloud could be worse than the debacle after Hurricane Katrina, possibly contributing to civil disorder and costing thousands of lives. "The United States is unprepared to mitigate the consequences of a nuclear attack," Pentagon analyst John Brinkerhoff concluded in a July 31, 2005, draft of a confidential memo to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "We were unable to find any group or office with a coherent approach to this very important aspect of homeland security. .. This is a bad situation. The threat of a nuclear attack is real, and action is needed now to learn how to deal with one."

Col. Jill Morgenthaler, Illinois' director of homeland security, said there's a "disconnect" between President Bush's and Vice President Dick Cheney's nuclear threat talk and the administration's actions. "I don't see money being focused on actual response and mitigation to a nuclear threat," she said.

Interviews with more than 15 radiation and emergency preparedness experts and a review of internal documents revealed:

- The government has yet to launch an educational program, akin to the Cold War-era civil defense campaign promoting fallout shelters, to teach Americans how to shield themselves from radiation, especially from the fallout plume, which could deposit deadly particles up to 100 miles from ground zero.

- Analysts estimate that as many as 300,000 emergency workers would be needed after a nuclear attack, but predict that the radiation would scare many of them away from the disaster site.

- Hospital emergency rooms wouldn't be able to handle the surge of people who were irradiated or the many more who feared they were.

- Medical teams would have to improvise to treat what could be tens of thousands of burn victims because most cities have only one or two available burn-unit beds. Cham Dallas, director of the University of Georgia's Center for Mass Destruction Defense, called the predicament "the worst link in our health care wall."

- Several drugs are in development and one is especially promising, but the government hasn't acquired any significant new medicine to counteract radiation's devastating effects on victims' blood-forming bone marrow.

Over the last three years, several federal agencies have taken some steps in nuclear disaster planning. The Department of Health and Human Services has drawn up "playbooks" for a range of attack scenarios and created a Web site to instruct emergency responders in treating radiation victims.

The Energy Department's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is geared to use real-time weather data, within minutes of a bombing, to create a computer model that charts the likely path of a radioactive fallout plume so that the government can warn affected people to take shelter or evacuate. The government also has modeled likely effects in blast zones.

Capt. Ann Knebel, the U.S. Public Health Service's deputy preparedness chief, said her agency is using the models to understand how many people in different zones would suffer from blast injuries, burns or radiation sickness "and to begin to match our resources to the types of injuries."

No matter how great the government's response, a nuclear bomb's toll would be staggering. The government's National Planning Scenario, which isn't public, projects that a relatively small, improvised 10-kiloton bomb could kill hundreds of thousands of people in a medium-sized city and cause hundreds of billions of dollars in economic losses.

The document, last updated in April 2005, projects that a bomb detonated at ground level in Washington, D.C., would kill as many as 204,600 people, including many government officials, and would injure or sicken 90,800. Another 24,580 victims would die of radiation-related cancer in ensuing years. Radioactive debris would contaminate a 3,000-square-mile area, requiring years-long cleanup, it said.

Brinkerhoff, author of the confidential memo for the Joint Chiefs, estimated that nearly 300,000 National Guardsmen, military reservists and civil emergency personnel would be needed to rescue, decontaminate, process and manage the 1.5 million evacuees.

The job would include cordoning off the blast zone and manning a 200-mile perimeter around the fallout area to process and decontaminate victims, to turn others away from the danger and to maintain order. Brinkerhoff estimated that the military would need to provide 140,000 of the 300,000 responders, but doubted that the Pentagon would have that many. And the Public Health Service's Knebel cited studies suggesting that the "fear factor" would reduce civil emergency responders by more than 30 percent.

Planning for an attack seems to evoke a sense of resignation among some officials. "We are concerned about the catastrophic threats and are trying to improve our abilities for disasters," said Gerald Parker, a deputy assistant secretary in Health and Human Services' new Office of Preparedness and Response. "But you have to look at what's pragmatic as well."

Dr. Andrew Garrett of Columbia University's National Center for Disaster Preparedness, put it this way: "People are just very intimidated to take on the problem" because "there may not be apparent solutions right now."

The U.S. intelligence community considers it a "fairly remote" possibility that terrorists will obtain weapons-grade plutonium or highly enriched uranium, which is more accessible, to build a nuclear weapon, said a senior intelligence official who requested anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the information. The official said intelligence agencies worry mainly about a makeshift, radioactive "dirty bomb" that would kill at most a few hundred people, contaminate part of a city and spread panic.

But concerns about a larger nuclear attack are increasing at a time when North Korea is testing atomic weapons and Iran is believed to be pursuing them. Al-Qaida's worldwide network of terrorists also reportedly has been reconstituted.

The 9/11 Commission's 2004 report rated a nuclear bombing as the most consequential threat facing the nation. "We called for a maximum effort against the threat," Lee Hamilton, the panel's vice chairman, said. "My impression is that we've got a long ways to go. ... I just think it would overwhelm us."

Dr. Ira Helfand, a Massachusetts emergency care doctor who co-authored a report on nuclear preparedness last year by the Physicians for Social Responsibility, chided the administration for trying "to create a climate of fear rather than to identify a problem and address it." The doctors' group found the government "dangerously unprepared" for a nuclear attack.

Government officials say they have drafted playbooks for every sort of radioactive attack, from a "dirty bomb" to a large, sophisticated device. But radiation experts and government memos emphasize the chaos that a bigger bomb could create. Emergency responders could face power outages, leaking gas lines, buckled bridges and tunnels, disrupted communications from the blast's electromagnetic pulse and streets clogged by vehicle crashes because motorists could be blinded by the bright flash accompanying detonation.

No equipment exists to shield rescue teams from radiation, and survivors would face similar risks if they tried to walk to safety.

Defense analyst Brinkerhoff proposed having troops gradually tighten the ring around the blast zone as the radiation diminished, but warned that the government lacks the hundreds of radiation meters needed to ensure that they wouldn't endanger themselves. He said those making rescue forays would need dosimeters to monitor their exposure.

Emergency teams would have no quick test to determine the extent of survivors' radiation exposure. They would have to rely on tests for white blood cell declines or quiz people about their whereabouts during the blast and whether they had vomited.

For those with potentially lethal acute radiation sickness, only limited medication is available, said Richard Hatchett, who's overseeing nearly $100 million in research on radiation countermeasures for the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases. The Department of Health and Human Services might commit to a limited purchase of one promising drug as early as this month. But currently federal health officials plan to fly victims of acute radiation sickness to hospitals across the country for bone marrow transplants.

The National Planning Scenario expressed concern that uninformed survivors of an attack could be lethally exposed to radiation because they failed to seek shelter, preferably in a sealed basement, for three to four days while radioactive debris decayed. Another big problem: Only a small percentage of Americans store bottled water, canned food and other essentials for an ordeal in a shelter.

Helfand said it would be too late to help most people near the blast, but that advance education could save many people in the path of the fallout. Education is critical, he said, because attempting to evacuate could "put you on a crowded freeway where you'll be stuck in traffic and get the maximum radiation exposure."

California's emergency services chief, Henry Renteria, said it might be time "to re-establish an urban area radiation shelter program."

Brinkerhoff wrote that people could build their own radiation-proof shelters if the government engaged in "large-scale civil defense planning" and gave them meters and dosimeters to monitor the radiation. Since there hasn't been "any enthusiasm to address this kind of preparedness," Brinkerhoff concluded, the only choice for most people would be to flee.

http://www.govtech.net/digitalcommunities/story.php?id=104230&story_pg=1

Petronas

03-17-2007, 09:12 PM

Neutralizing a Nuclear Nightmare -- Online
March 12, 2007

An explosion rocks a local high school. Minutes later, casualties flood into a hospital emergency room. Only after the first wave of wounded arrive is the hospital informed that the explosion was a result of a dirty bomb -- a weapon designed to scatter radioactive material throughout its blast radius.

And one by one, weaknesses in the system take their toll on emergency efforts. Hospital administrators call their local radiation safety officer, but he is on vacation and can't be reached. Health workers search for but cannot locate radiation meters that could help them determine which patients suffered the highest degree of contamination.

Confusion builds as medical professionals wonder about the appropriate way to deal with so many patients as radioactive patients lay waiting for appropriate treatment, possibly contaminating other patients and health professionals. At the climax of the disaster, the emergency bays of the hospital close down. The system of medical treatment grinds to a halt. All that remains now is a slim hope that casualties and contamination can somehow be kept to a minimum.

Fortunately, the above was just a drill -- one of many conducted in communities across the country since the 9/11 attacks. But the scenario was frighteningly realistic. And the ways in which the situation was mishandled exposed the weak spots in the medical system of one county when it came to a possible radiological disaster. "They flubbed it terribly," says Dr. John Moulder, professor of radiation oncology at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee. Moulder, who did not reveal the location of the scenario described above, says the missteps in the response could have happened anywhere else in the country. It is a nightmarish scenario. But federal officials hope a new online tool could help health professionals cope with such an episode more effectively.

The words "dirty bomb" have been on the lips of health and law enforcement officials since the terrorist attacks of 2001. But even now, a surefire solution for dealing with such a catastrophe has been elusive.

Moulder was part of the team that developed a new resource -- a Web site conceived by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services -- that provides a readily accessible plan of action. "The need for this resource was first discussed within a couple of months of 9/11," Moulder says. "It has taken this long to develop because it is a federal document." The need for such a resource is clear, he says. "Most medical professionals do not know how to deal with radiation injuries," Moulder says. "And since they will probably never see one, they have little incentive to spend days learning the material."

Other health experts in the field of radiation treatment say the Web site, which includes detailed guidelines for triage and treatment of patients, is a welcome resource. "I must admit I am very impressed by this Web site," says Dr. Jack Little, professor of radiobiology at the Harvard School of Public Health. "In the best of all possible worlds, one would never need to consult it. However, having it there and widely available on the Internet is, to my mind, a great service."

But before the algorithms and guidelines of the site can be applied, health professionals must first be familiar with the site. If they are not, the Web site may not be the first stop for useful information.

But while the Web site may represent a boon for health workers, for the public, it may give a terrifying peek into the difficult decisions that would have to be made in the event of a radioactive disaster. The site is laced with euphemisms. "Expectant" patients are those "who are seriously injured and in whom survivability is poor &" Recommended treatment: "Provide comfort care."

Numerous flowcharts branch downward into frightening conclusions. Treatment of survivors. Management of the deceased. Follow the link of the latter possibility, and receive this guidance: "If an autopsy is necessary, refrigerate the decedent and defer the procedure until a health physicist can assist in planning."

For this reason, Moulder says, the site may be best left to health professionals. "Scattered within the site is stuff at the lay consumer level, but most of the resources in there assume some knowledge of medicine," he says. Other health experts agree. "I am not sure it is meant for lay people. It is pretty specialized and detailed," says Dr. Ziad Kazzi, medical toxicologist at the University of Alabama department of emergency medicine in Birmingham. "Radiation is not user-friendly, in general," he adds.

Bobby Scott, senior scientist at the Lovelace Respiratory Research Institute in Albuquerque, N.M., says public worries at the idea of measures that would have to be taken after such an event are to be expected. "The very thought of having to prepare for the possibility of a nuclear- or radiological-weapon-associated mass casualty event in the U.S. is likely to frighten many members of the public," he says. But he adds that certain features of the site are not likely to leave lay readers with a feeling of warm reassurance.

"The public may also find somewhat disconcerting the disclaimer statement 'Neither the U.S. government nor any agency thereof, nor any of their employees, make any warranty, express or implied, or assumes any legal responsibility for the accuracy, completeness, or usefulness of any information disclosed,'" Scott says.

Moulder says the Web site is a step in the right direction, but he believes there is still a long way to go before health workers and the government are fully prepared for the unthinkable. "It's better than anything else we've had before, but I don't think it's good enough yet," he says. "We are not currently equipped to deal with radiation mass casualties. "Let's hope it's always scenarios and never the real thing."

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/story?id=2939106&page=1

Petronas

03-30-2007, 09:51 PM

Experts Warn Terrorists Could Launch Nuclear Attack on US
21 March 2007

A group of nuclear weapons specialists has issued ominous warnings before members of the U.S. Congress that terrorist groups like al-Qaida could launch a massive attack on the United States and currently there is little to deter or defend against such a strike. VOA correspondent Meredith Buel has details from Capitol Hill.

Sidney Drell, an arms control specialist and physicist at Stanford University, told members of the Senate Armed Services Committee the United States has entered, what he calls, a "dangerous time." "I view us on the precipice of entering a new and more dangerous nuclear era with the spread of technology, which means, in particular, the enrichment of uranium, which makes it possible for more societies to enter the nuclear club," he said. "That raises the danger of nuclear weapons getting in the hands of terrorist groups and others unrestrained by the norms of civilized behavior as we know it and therefore these weapons become more likely to be used."

The dean of Georgetown University's school of Foreign Service, Robert Gallucci, agrees. Gallucci, a former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Political-Military Affairs, says the most dangerous threat is that a terrorist group will smuggle a nuclear weapon into the United States. "The most likely is that a terrorist group, al-Qaida or an al-Qaida cousin would acquire a nuclear weapon and introduce it into the United States," he explained. "It seems to me that that is a threat against which we have neither a defense nor a deterrent."

Gallucci says a maximum effort needs to be made to prevent terrorists from acquiring or manufacturing a nuclear weapon. He says this should be done by convincing countries with nuclear materials to secure them. "If we discover that a country has purposely transferred fissile material or a nuclear weapon to a terrorist group, we ought to be telling them in advance that we will treat them as though they were the one who launched the attack and they should expect devastating retaliation," he added. Gallucci says he is especially concerned about unauthorized transfer of nuclear materials from Russia and Pakistan and the intentional transfer from North Korea and eventually Iran.

http://www.voanews.com/english/2007-03-21-voa69.cfm

al-Canine

05-17-2007, 10:21 PM

Nuclear terror: How real?

By Brian Michael Jenkins
THE WASHINGTON TIMES

Former CIA Director George Tenet writes in his new book his biggest fear is "the nuclear one." He writes that Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda "desperately want" to mount a nuclear terrorist attack because "they understand that... if they manage to set off a mushroom cloud, they will make history."

The history of nuclear terrorism can be summarized: There hasn't been any -- yet. But it remains a fantasy of terrorists seeking super-destructive power, and a nightmare for everyone else, with periodic reminders some day it may come true.

Al Qaeda certainly has nuclear ambitions, but is not believed to have nuclear capabilities at this time. But the absence of nuclear terrorism has not prevented nuclear terror. Such is the power of language, that the mere placement of the words "nuclear" and "terrorism" in close proximity produces a fission of fear.

The possibility someone outside government might build a nuclear weapon was contemplated at the very beginning of the atomic age in the 1940s. Nuclear terrorism plots drove suspense novels written in the 1950s and '60s, like James Bond creator Ian Fleming's "Thunderball." Today, it is "24" character Jack Bauer who chases terrorists with nuclear bombs.

But what about reality? I presented my first paper on nuclear terrorism at a conference in Los Alamos, N.M., in 1975. The title: "Will Terrorists Go Nuclear?" We still ask that question 32 years later.

The debate in the 1970s focused on whether terrorists could build a bomb even if they had the material. Bomb designers tended to argue the principles of nuclear weapons design were by then well known, and therefore terrorists probably would be able to fabricate a crude nuclear weapon. But bomb builders remained skeptical: Building a nuclear bomb involved more than equations on paper.

Having no expertise in design of nuclear weapons, I took a different tack, looking at terrorist motives and intentions. While nuclear terrorism seemed theoretically attractive, even those we labeled terrorists did not do everything they could have done just a few decades ago.

Technological limitations and operational difficulties aside, terrorists seemed to operate within self-imposed constraints in the 1970s. They worried that large-scale indiscriminate violence might tarnish their image, threaten the cohesion of their groups, alienate their perceived constituents, and provoke a backlash that would threaten their survival. But these constraints were not universal or immutable and changed over time.

Beginning in the 1980s, the constraints began to erode and large-scale terrorist violence increased. By the 1990s, my colleagues at the Rand Corp. were writing about the "new terrorism," referring to terrorists increasingly motivated by religious fanaticism and determined to kill in quantity and likely to seek weapons of mass destruction (WMD) to expand their capacity for mayhem.

Perceptions of the likely terrorist scenario also changed. Prompted by the prevalence of terrorist hostage-taking in the 1970s, analysts scaled up contemporary scenarios and wondered whether terrorists with nuclear weapons might some day hold cities hostage to extort political concessions. At least some terrorists apparently thought along the same lines. This later changed to fears that if terrorists acquired WMD they would attack without warning.

The fall of the Soviet Union and growing concerns about the security of its huge nuclear arsenal deepened fears of nuclear terrorism. Exploratory discussions about how the United States and the Soviet Union might generally cooperate against terrorism, which began in the 1980s, developed into concrete programs aimed at securing Russian weapons and finding employment for Russian weapons designers.

The end of the Cold War also required a thorough rethinking of American national security policy. Two threats dominated attention: escalating terrorism and the proliferation of WMD. The two were easily conflated. Analysts feared that hostile states with nuclear weapons might be tempted to arm terrorists with one. Even without state approval, rogue elements involved in these programs might, for financial gain or ideological reasons, facilitate terrorist acquisition.

The September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks redefined plausibility. Terrorist scenarios previously considered far-fetched suddenly became operative presumptions. Facing the reality of large-scale death and destruction, could America afford to take the chance terrorists might attack again, causing even greater devastation?

The subsequent "global war on terror" (the terms "terror" and "terrorism" initially were used interchangeably) would include not only a campaign against those responsible for September 11, but also a campaign against hostile states suspected of pursuing nuclear weapons. Pre-emption became national policy. Suspicion sufficed and the U.S. invaded Iraq to destroy WMD that turned out not to exist.

There is less uncertainty about North Korea's nuclear arsenal, since the North has already tested a nuclear weapon. There is enough suspicion about Iran's nuclear intentions to fear Iran and North Korea, even if they don't launch suicidal nuclear attacks, will clandestinely provide terrorists with nuclear weapons. If dismantling these programs proves impossible, the world is confronted with the unattractive alternatives of another pre-emptive military attack or accepting the risk.

Some analysts have suggested instead that deterrence strategies, which worked during the Cold War, might be modified and applied to new nuclear weapons states -- even to terrorists themselves. But this idea tends to be rejected in official circles from fear deterrence implies acceptance of nuclear weapons and therefore undercuts current efforts aimed at their elimination.

Whether nuclear terrorism will be avoided or is only a matter of time remains in the realm of speculation. Nonetheless, it will continue to be a source of public apprehension and a factor confronting governments around the world.

Brian Michael Jenkins is a terrorism expert at the Rand Corp., a nonprofit research organization.

http://washingtontimes.com/commentary/20070512-102004-1533r.htm

al-Canine

05-17-2007, 10:30 PM

... and here's another opinion...

The Likelihood of Nuclear Terror

The threat of nuclear terrorism is having a May upsurge. A simulated attack upon Indianapolis was just conducted. The San Francisco Chronicle revealed an unpublicized, closed conference for government officials, organized by Harvard and Stanford, on how to prepare for such an attack. A high-level group in the White House meets weekly on the subject.

Terrorist expert Brian Jenkins, in an op-ed piece in the conservative Washington Times was cautious but saw the possibility of a nuclear terrorist attack as real. Another essay in that paper speculated that the A.Q. Khan nuclear network in Pakistan could easily be activated. All these sources emphasized foreign terrorists and rogue states, presumably because domestic terrorists are not inclined to radiological suicide.

The threat is, of course, real, and the recommendation of sensible and well-informed people such as Michael May in the paper he circulated at the closed conference should be published and taken seriously. For one thing, May argues that, in contrast to what many of us believe, most residents will survive a nuclear attack upon a major city. Nuclear attacks aside, the steps recommended to prepare for a nuclear bomb in San Francisco will help us prepare for the much more likely earthquake, tsunami, 90-ton chlorine tank car release due to an accident or terrorist attack, and other serious industrial disasters our cities may experience. But how likely it is a nuclear terrorist attack on the U.S.?

The most sophisticated terrorist attack here or elsewhere was 9/11. But their preparation for that was easy: a few months in flight schools and the ability to read airline schedules and acquire box cutters. A nuclear attack envisioned by the warnings we have had this month would require immensely more preparation, more difficult targeting, and expensive, complicated, and large weapons.

Terrorist attacks to date, other than 9/11, have been primitive. More sophisticated car bombs are being developed for use in Iraq, but they remain car bombs. Even the use of chemical weapons has been limited to small amounts of chlorine gas with only a dozen or so victims. The explosives used in the Madrid train depot bombing were more sophisticated than those used in the London subway bombings, but neither were devastating.

In 2005, the FBI reported that it could find no sign of terrorist cells in the US, and even if there were a strong one it is hard to believe that it could get and deliver a nuclear bomb. It might fashion a "dirty bomb" but judging from the terrorist cell recently discovered that targeted an army base, it would have a hard time fashioning one. This cell had yet to acquire any firearms, was poorly organized, easily penetrated, and quite unsophisticated.

Of course, a nuclear attack might be organized from abroad, but there is no evidence of sophisticated cells abroad The plot to blow up airliners in the Atlantic last year involved a few who had looked at flight schedules, but did not have passports to fly, or any bomb-making equipment nor the skills to fashion credible liquid explosives while in flight. There was no evidence the flight was "ready to go in a day or so" as the British initially said. A March report by RAND concluded a terror strike from abroad was unlikely. It found al Queda to be more preoccupied with foreign targets, especially Iraq, and lacked a specific strategic plan for attacking targets within the U.S.

A rogue state such as North Korea, or Pakistan after Islamic fundamentalists take over, might be able to launch a nuclear missile from a freighter off our shore and we might not even be able to establish the source immediately. But it would be hard for them to avoid eventual detection, and it is hard to see their motivation for such an attack, especially since eventual detection means they would be destroyed in return.

Should we fear attacks by a biochemical or biological weapon? The possibility is only somewhat greater than a nuclear weapon or dirty bomb attack. These weapons, if they are to kill thousands rather than 100, also require more sophistication than we have any reason to believe that any terrorist group has. Yet a substantial proportion of our counter-terrorist funds are devoted to preventing these unlikely attacks. If we experience a terrorist attack in the U.S. in the future it is likely to resemble those being conducted abroad, killing less than 100 people, and limited to conventional explosives. These are very hard to prevent.

The real danger is that terrorists may realize the potential for massive kills by releasing the Weapons of Mass Destruction we have in or adjacent to our large cities, such as the concentration of hazardous materials in our chemical plants, nuclear power plants, on our rail tracks, or the concentrations in our food industry. We have almost no defense against these.

We should dedicate the month of June to conferences, scholarly papers, editorials and op-eds dealing with this very real threat, rather than the very unlikely nuclear, chemical and biological ones. Our only defense against these attacks is to reduce the size of the targets, and thus the dangers, making the targets less attractive to terrorists. We would get a big bonus from this: these hazardous concentrations are also targets for nature's wrath and the industrial accident, both of which are more likely than a terrorist attack.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/charles-perrow/the-likelihood-of-nuclear_b_48700.html?

al-Canine

06-13-2007, 06:04 PM

Expert warns of terrorists' nuke strategy

BY LISA ORKIN EMMANUEL

Authorities need to expand their focus on the ways terrorists could deliver nuclear or radiological weapons into the country, a New York City counterterrrorism official said Tuesday in Miami.

U.S officials and agencies are focused on international shipping containers delivering potential weapons, Richard Falkenrath, the New York Police Department's deputy commissioner for counterterrorism, told delegates from 28 countries at a nuclear terrorism conference.

''This is the big focus. I don't know why they've gotten so much attention,'' Falkenrath said at the Global Initiative to Combat Nuclear Terrorism Law Enforcement Conference.

''They are important and I am not suggesting to ignore them, but they should not be the focus of attention above and beyond all others as a potential delivery vehicle,'' he warned.

Falkenrath said another delivery method could be a truck or van driving into Manhattan because it blends into the background and is easy to acquire.

''I think we also on a national level need to concern ourselves with light aircraft and small vessels,'' he said.

Falkenrath also said the single best defense against such attacks is securing the materials for making these weapons. He said radiological source materials are too readily available both domestically and internationally. He added that both nationally and in New York City, the regulations for governing these materials could be tightened.

Vayl Oxford, director of the Domestic Nuclear Detection Office, said the government did initially focus on container traffic, but now has expanded its scans to other delivery methods.

''It has been a principal focus to look at containerized traffic. It was one of the ideas of a needle in a haystack. That was one of the haystacks that we dealt with first,'' Oxford said.

The Coast Guard will be equipped with radiation detection equipment during patrols, he said.

''We feel like the U.S. is a terrorist target. We are also not just looking at the import of devices, we are looking at the type of material that could be used to make a device domestically,'' Oxford said.

http://www.miamiherald.com/509/story/137782.html

al-Canine

06-13-2007, 07:46 PM

FBI director predicts terrorists will acquire nukes

By Jerry Seper
THE WASHINGTON TIMES

FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III yesterday said that it was only a matter of time and economics before terrorists will be able to purchase nuclear weapons and that the world's law-enforcement community must unite to prevent it.

"Our greatest weapon is unity," Mr. Mueller said at the Global Initiative to Combat Nuclear Terrorism law-enforcement conference in Miami. "That unity is built on intelligence and interagency cooperation. It is built on the idea that, together, we are smarter and stronger than we are standing alone."

Mr. Mueller said federal authorities, working with their counterparts overseas, must secure loose nuclear material, share intelligence about those who wish to buy and sell such material, and stop those who do -- adding that by some estimates, there is enough highly enriched uranium in global stockpiles to construct thousands of nuclear weapons.

Mr. Mueller said the economics of supply and demand dictate that someone, somewhere will provide nuclear material to the highest bidder, and that material will end up in the hands of terrorists. He said the al Qaeda terrorist network has demonstrated a clear intent to acquire weapons of mass destruction, noting that Osama bin Laden sought to buy uranium in Sudan in 1993.

But, he said, al Qaeda is not the only concern, adding that the United States faces threats from other terrorist cells around the world and from homegrown terrorists not affiliated with al Qaeda but who have been inspired by its message of hatred and violence.

"Several rogue nations -- and even individuals -- seek to develop nuclear capabilities," he said. "Abdul Khan, for example, was not only the father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb; he peddled that technology to North Korea, Libya and Iran. Khan was one of many to prove that it is indeed a seller's market in the so-called atomic bazaar."

Mr. Mueller said the next terrorist attack is not a question of if, but when.

While the FBI investigates all acts of terrorism in the United States, he said that the prevention of a nuclear attack is a responsibility shared by many and that the necessary coordination to meet the threat begins with training.

"Together, we are training our foreign partners in WMD detection, border security, undercover investigations, nuclear forensics and crisis management. To date, we have trained more than 5,000 participants from more than 23 countries," he said.

Strong intelligence, he said, is the FBI's primary asset, but standing alone is not enough. He said that if the FBI uncovers information about potential nuclear trafficking or a pending plot, it must be able to move at a moment's notice.

"We cannot sit back and wait for others to act. To do so is to continue to feed the crocodile, hoping he will eat you last, as Winston Churchill once said," he said. "Our safety lies in protecting not just our own interests, but our collective interests."

http://washingtontimes.com/national/20070611-104521-9295r.htm

al-Canine

06-20-2007, 12:12 PM

Pakistan ads raise worry over its nuclear security

WASHINGTON -- Rep. Mark Kirk asked the Bush administration last month to investigate whether Pakistan has lost control of nuclear material, based on government advertisements in Pakistani newspapers that Kirk said raise "serious questions" about that nation's nuclear stockpile and whether terrorists could obtain any of it.

The administration has not responded to the letter or to requests for comment from the Tribune. Pakistani officials say Kirk (R-Ill.) is misreading the ads and that their stockpile is secure.

"There is no possibility of any nuclear or other sensitive material falling into the wrong hands," said Khawar Hanif, the defense attache at the Pakistani Embassy in Washington.

Kirk is a member of the House appropriations subcommittee on foreign operations and works one weekend a month as a naval intelligence officer. He has visited Pakistan four times as a congressman.

On May 3, Kirk wrote President Bush to express concerns over ads in Pakistan's Urdu-, Sindhi- and Pashtu-language newspapers -- but none of its English papers -- that display the international yellow-warning sign for nuclear material. The ads, placed by the Pakistan Nuclear Regulatory Authority, warn anyone who sees such a sign to step away from the material and call a reporting hot line.

Kirk noted that in 2004, Pakistan's top nuclear scientist admitted funneling nuclear material to Iran, North Korea and Libya. He said the recent ads suggest "that our concerns over the safety and security of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal could be greater than we first suspected."

Hanif said the ads were part of a broad government awareness program, which he likened to announcements at airports warning passengers to be on the lookout for unattended luggage. He said he was surprised the ads caused any controversy and that Kirk did not call the embassy directly to discuss them. No one from the Bush administration questioned them, he added.

Kirk said Tuesday that his concerns persist, in large part because Pakistan has never run ads like this before, and because the ads did not appear in English-language newspapers.

"This is a big deal," he said. "They seem to be trying desperately to make it boring."

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-kirk_wedjun20,1,7031101.story?

Petronas

06-21-2007, 01:26 AM

Dirty bomb threat high and rising
17/06/2007

The threat of terrorists attacking Britain with a radioactive "dirty bomb" has grown rapidly in recent months, a leading defence expert has warned. Prof Sandra Bell spoke out following the sentencing last week of seven al-Qaeda "foot soldiers" who had plotted dirty bomb attacks in Britain and the United States. The men were jailed for a total of 136 years at Woolwich Crown Court. Their leader, Dhiren Barot, is serving life for conspiracy to murder.

Prof Bell, the director of homeland security at the Royal United Services Institute, said: "The threat from dirty bombs is now higher than it was two years ago, and has increased significantly over the last six months. I used to think you had more chance of winning the lottery than of being attacked with radiation weapons, but times are changing." She said that turmoil in parts of Africa and the former Soviet Union had created a black market in radioactive materials which could be used to lace a conventional bomb. "Rather than maximise civilian casualties, the terrorists are now trying to cause as much disruption to public services as possible," she said. "Widespread radiation emitted by dirty bombs would be ideal for this."

The Sunday Telegraph has learned that in an effort to combat the growing threat, the Government has begun secretly installing radiation detectors and X-ray machines at ports, which are perceived to be less secure than airports. The first of the devices, which scan cargo and containers for hazardous material, is already in operation at Southampton. It has been donated by US authorities under Washington's Secure Freight Initiative.

Detectors have also been installed at Port Busan in South Korea, whose neighbour North Korea exploded an atom bomb in a test last year, and at Port Qasim in Karachi, Pakistan.

Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, the former head of MI5, warned three years ago that it was "only a matter of time" until terrorists launched a dirty bomb attack on the West.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/06/17/nterr117.xml

al-Canine

07-02-2007, 08:50 AM

Fast action needed to avert nuclear terror strike on U.S.

By Graham Allison
Originally published July 2, 2007

Before 9/11, most Americans found the idea that international terrorists could mount an attack on their homeland and kill thousands of innocent citizens not merely unlikely but inconceivable.

After nearly six years without a second attack on U.S. soil, some skeptics suggest that 9/11 was a 100-year flood. The view that terrorists are preparing even more deadly assaults seems as far-fetched to them as the possibility of terrorists crashing passenger jets into the World Trade Center did before that fateful Tuesday morning in 2001.

And yet the danger of a nuclear attack by terrorists is not only very real but disturbingly likely.

To assess the threat of nuclear terrorism, it is necessary to answer five questions:

1. Who could be planning a nuclear terrorist attack?

Al-Qaida remains a formidable enemy with clear nuclear ambitions. Former CIA Director George J. Tenet wrote in his memoirs that al-Qaida's leadership has remained "singularly focused on acquiring WMD" - weapons of mass destruction - and willing to "pay whatever it would cost to get their hands on fissile material."

2. What nuclear weapons could terrorists use?

They could acquire an existing bomb from one of the nuclear weapons states or construct an elementary nuclear device from highly enriched uranium made by a state. Theft of a warhead or material would not be easy, but attempted thefts in Russia and elsewhere are not uncommon.

Once a terrorist group acquires about 100 pounds of highly enriched uranium, it could conceivably use publicly available documents and items commercially obtainable in any technologically advanced country to construct a bomb such as the one dropped on Hiroshima.

3. Where could terrorists acquire a nuclear bomb?

If a nuclear attack occurs, Russia would be the most likely source of the weapon or material. Russia has more nuclear weapons and materials than any other country, much of them vulnerable to theft. A close second would be North Korea. Pyongyang has boasted that it not only possesses nuclear weapons but might export them, saying, "It's up to you whether we ... transfer them." Finally, research reactors in 40 developing and transitional countries still hold the essential ingredient for nuclear bombs.

4. When could terrorists launch the first nuclear attack?

If terrorists bought or stole a nuclear weapon in good working condition, they could explode it today. If the weapon had a lock, detonation would be delayed for several days. If terrorists acquired 100 pounds of highly enriched uranium, they could have a working elementary nuclear bomb in less than a year.

5. How could terrorists deliver a nuclear weapon to its target?

The illicit economy for narcotics and illegal immigrants has built up a vast infrastructure that terrorists could exploit.

Based on current trends, a nuclear terrorist attack on the United States is more likely than not in the decade ahead. As horrific as that vision is, the most important but largely unrecognized truth is that this ultimate catastrophe is preventable.

There is a feasible, affordable checklist of actions that, if taken, would shrink the risk of nuclear terrorism to nearly zero. I have proposed a strategy for a no-loose-nukes agenda under a "Doctrine of Three Nos":

1. No unsecured nuclear weapons or weapons-usable material. All such material should be locked down as quickly as possible.

2. No new domestic capabilities to enrich uranium or reprocess plutonium. Highly enriched uranium and plutonium are bombs about to hatch. The crucial challenge to this principle today is Iran.

Preventing Iranian completion of its nuclear infrastructure will require a combination of incentives and credible threats to persuade Tehran to accept a grand bargain for denuclearization. President Bush must be prepared to give Tehran assurance of security if and when it gives up its nuclear weapons program.

3. No expansion of the nuclear club beyond its current 8.5 members, the half being North Korea.

Faced with the possibility of an American Hiroshima, many Americans are paralyzed by a combination of denial and fatalism. Either it hasn't happened, so maybe it's not going to happen, or if it is going to happen, there's nothing we can do to stop it. Both propositions are wrong. Citizens must press their elected officials to adopt a clear agenda for action and then hold them accountable for following through.

Graham Allison is director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. He is a former assistant secretary of defense and author of "Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe." His e-mail is graham_allison@harvard.edu.

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bal-op.nukes02jul02,0,41630.story?

al-Canine

10-22-2007, 12:38 PM

Portents of A Nuclear Al-Qaeda

Rolf Mowatt-Larssen is paid to think about the unthinkable. As the Energy Department's director of intelligence, he's responsible for gathering information about the threat that a terrorist group will attack America with a nuclear weapon.

With his shock of white hair and piercing eyes, Mowatt-Larssen looks like a man who has seen a ghost. And when you listen to a version of the briefing he has been giving recently to President Bush and other top officials, you begin to understand why. He is convinced that al-Qaeda is trying to acquire a nuclear bomb that will leave the ultimate terrorist signature -- a mushroom cloud.

We've all had enough fear-mongering to last a lifetime. Indeed, we have become so frightened of terrorism since Sept. 11, 2001, that we have begun doing the terrorists' job for them by undermining the legal framework of our democracy. And truly, I wish I could dismiss Mowatt-Larssen's analysis as the work of an overwrought former CIA officer with too many years in the trenches.

But it's worth listening to his warnings -- not because they induce more numbing paralysis but because they might stir sensible people to take actions that could detect and stop an attack. That's why his boss, Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman, is encouraging him to speak out. Mowatt-Larssen doesn't want to anguish later that he didn't sound the alarm in time.

Mowatt-Larssen has been gathering this evidence since a few weeks after Sept. 11, when then-CIA Director George Tenet asked him to create a new branch on weapons of mass destruction in the agency's counterterrorism center. He helped Tenet prepare the chapter on al-Qaeda's nuclear efforts that appears in Tenet's memoir, " At the Center of the Storm." Now that the uproar over Tenet's mistaken "slam dunk" assessment of the Iraqi threat has died down, it's worth rereading this account. It provides a chilling, public record of al-Qaeda's nuclear ambitions.

Mowatt-Larssen argues that for nearly a decade before Sept. 11, al-Qaeda was seeking to acquire weapons of mass destruction. As early as 1993, Osama bin Laden offered $1.5 million to buy uranium for a nuclear device, according to testimony presented in federal court in February 2001. When the al-Qaeda leader was asked in 1998 if he had nuclear or chemical weapons, he responded: "Acquiring weapons for the defense of Muslims is a religious duty. If I have indeed acquired these weapons, then I thank God for enabling me to do so."

Even as al-Qaeda was preparing to fly its airplane bombs into buildings, the group was also trying to acquire nuclear and biological capabilities. In August 2001, bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, met around a campfire with Pakistani scientists from a group called Umma Tameer-E-Nau to discuss how al-Qaeda could build a nuclear device. Al-Qaeda also had an aggressive anthrax program that was discovered in December 2001 after bin Laden was driven from his haven in Afghanistan.

Al-Qaeda proclaimed a religious rationale to justify the WMD attacks it was planning. In June 2002, a Kuwaiti-born cleric named Suleiman Abu Ghaith posted a statement on the Internet saying that "al-Qaeda has the right to kill 4 million Americans" in retaliation for U.S. attacks against Muslims. And in May 2003, at the same time Saudi operatives of al-Qaeda were trying to buy three Russian nuclear bombs, a cleric named Nasir al-Fahd issued a fatwa titled "A Treatise on the Legal Status of Using Weapons of Mass Destruction Against Infidels." Interrogations of al-Qaeda operatives confirmed that the planning was serious. Al-Qaeda didn't yet have the materials for a WMD attack, but it wanted them.

Most chilling of all was Zawahiri's decision in March 2003 to cancel a cyanide attack in the New York subway system. He told the plotters to stand down because "we have something better in mind." What did that mean? More than four years later, we still don't know.

After 2004, the WMD trail went cold, according to Mowatt-Larssen. Many intelligence analysts have concluded that al-Qaeda doesn't have nuclear capability today. Mowatt-Larssen argues that a more honest answer is: We don't know.

So what to do about this spectral danger? The first requirement, says Mowatt-Larssen, is to try to visualize it. What would it take for al-Qaeda to build a bomb? How would it assemble the pieces? How would the United States and its allies deploy their intelligence assets so that they could detect a plot before it was carried out? How would we reinvent intelligence itself to avert this ultimate catastrophe?

A terrorist nuclear attack, as Tenet wrote in his book, would change history. If we can see how this story might end, perhaps we can deflect the arrow before it hits its target.

The writer is co-host ofPostGlobal, an online discussion of international issues. His e-mail address isdavidignatius@washpost.com.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/17/AR2007101702114.html?

candypreet

10-22-2007, 12:45 PM

very good post

al-Canine

10-25-2007, 11:08 PM

Study: U.S. unprepared for 'dirty bomb'

Congressional report: Nation lacks labs to test for contamination after blast

The Associated Press
Updated: 5:56 p.m. ET Oct 25, 2007

WASHINGTON - The U.S. has a shortage of laboratories to test the thousands of people who might be exposed to radiation if a “dirty bomb” detonated in a major city, according to a congressional report released Thursday.

If a dirty bomb goes off in a major downtown area and potentially exposes 100,000 people to radioactive materials, it could take four years to complete the necessary testing, according to the report prepared for the House Committee on Science and Technology.

A dirty bomb is a device that contains some radioactive material that could contaminate a limited area but would not create actual nuclear explosions.

Should this happen in real life in a big city, the nation would not be able to quickly conduct the necessary tests, because there are few labs capable of doing so in the country. Also, the tests available only address six of the 13 radiological isotopes that would likely be used in a dirty bomb, according to the report.

'A radiological Katrina'

The Environmental Protection Agency estimates this scenario would produce 350,000 samples to be tested. With the EPA’s current lab capacity, it would take two years to complete the testing, said Dana Tulis of the EPA’s office of emergency management.

“We are likely headed for a radiological Katrina if terrorists do succeed in detonating a dirty bomb in an American city,” said Rep. Brad Miller, D-N.C., chairman of the subcommittee holding a hearing on the issue.

The report acknowledges that this type of dirty-bomb scenario would probably not cause massive casualties, but Miller said four years is too long to wait for results of whether people need medical treatment.

“I can’t imagine a parent, who is told that their child can be tested for cesium in two-and-a-half more years, is going to be reassured to hear that their child probably won’t die,” Miller said in an interview Wednesday.

Miller said there have been some efforts to address this gap, but the bureaucratic response has been frustrating. The Homeland Security Department in 2005 created a consortium of laboratory networks to address this issue.

“We have some significant shortfalls when it comes to the radiological area,” said John Vitko Jr., director of the chemical and biological division at the Homeland Security Department’s science and technology directorate. “Clearly we need to improve in that area.”

Study gives example of deficiency

The report on radioactive testing offered this example of the deficient lab capabilities in the U.S.:

When a former Russian KGB agent was poisoned with polonium-210 last year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention identified 160 U.S. citizens who were staying at the same hotel where the Russian was poisoned or eating at the same restaurant and were potentially exposed. But the CDC found only one laboratory in the U.S. that was qualified and able to conduct analysis for exposure to the radioactive material.

Ultimately, 31 samples were tested, and it took seven days to test each one. The Energy Department has labs capable of doing a polonium analysis, but those labs do not meet legal standards for testing set by CDC.

The environmental tests are key, because they direct decision-makers in the recovery effort — when it is safe to move back into a building, for instance, said John Griggs who heads the EPA’s monitoring and analytical services branch. “The lack of data I think is going to result in heightened public concern and panic and the demand for answers,” Griggs said.

Similarly, officials recently said the nation is ill-equipped to quickly track down the make and origin of nuclear materials.

If terrorists use such a radioactive device to attack the U.S., people would immediately want to know who is responsible, and it could take months to analyze and identify nuclear material, counterproliferation officials said earlier this month.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21477933/

al-Canine

11-28-2007, 06:06 PM

Petronas

11-30-2007, 12:35 AM

98.6% U-235 - that's pretty hot stuff!

'Dirty bomb' uranium seized
11:41 a.m. EST, Thu November 29, 2007

Two Hungarians and a Ukrainian arrested in an attempted sale of uranium were peddling material believed to be from the former Soviet Union, and it was enriched enough to be used in a radiological "dirty bomb," police said Thursday.

The three, who were arrested Wednesday in eastern Slovakia and Hungary, were trying to sell about a pound of uranium in powder form, said First Police Vice President Michal Kopcik. "It was possible to use it in various ways for terrorist attacks," Kopcik said. Investigators were still working to determine who ultimately was trying to buy the uranium, which the three allegedly was selling for $1 million.

He said police had intelligence suggesting that the suspects -- whose names were not released -- originally had planned to close the deal sometime between Monday and Wednesday. Police moved in when the sale did not occur as expected, he said. One of the Hungarians had been living in Ukraine.

Kopcik said three other suspects -- including a Slovak national identified only as Eugen K. -- were detained in the neighboring Czech Republic in mid-October for allegedly trying to sell fake radioactive materials. It was unclear to what degree, if any, they played a role in the thwarted uranium sale. "According to initial findings, the material originated in the former Soviet republics," Kopcik said.

He said the uranium had been stashed in unspecified containers, and that investigators determined it contained 98.6 percent uranium-235. Uranium is considered weapons-grade if it contains at least 85 percent uranium-235. The arrests heightened long-standing concerns that Eastern Europe is serving as a source of radioactive material for a "dirty bomb," which would use conventional explosives to scatter radioactive debris.

Experts say roughly 55 pounds of highly enriched uranium or plutonium is needed in most instances to fashion a crude nuclear device. But they say a tiny fraction of that is enough for a dirty bomb -- a weapon whose main purpose would be to create fear and chaos, not human casualties. ...

http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/europe/11/29/nuclear.arrests.ap/index.html

Petronas

11-30-2007, 09:25 PM

Al-Qaeda woos recruits with nuclear bomb website
November 6, 2005

AN Al-Qaeda website containing detailed instructions in Arabic on how to make nuclear, “dirty” and biological bombs has attracted more than 57,000 hits and hundreds of readers’ inquiries. Terrorism experts are warning that the site could be boosting the organisation’s appeal to would-be assassins in Britain and abroad. The manual, posted on October 6 on a forum titled Al-Firdaws, or Paradise, contains 80 pages of instructions and pictures of kitchen bomb-making techniques. It is divided into nine lessons under the overall heading The Nuclear Bomb of Jihad and the Way to Enrich Uranium, and is dedicated as a “gift to the commander of the jihad fighters, Sheikh Osama Bin Laden, for the purpose of jihad for the sake of Allah”.

As well as describing how to make a nuclear bomb from enriched uranium — impossible for the layman — the manual explains how to make simple bombs that can blow up anything from electrical generators to petrol stations.

The site encourages its readers to look for materials such as radium, which it says is an “effective alternative to uranium and available on the market”. It is unclear who the author is or where he is based: he describes himself simply as “Layth al-Islam”, or the “Lion of Islam”, belonging to a group called “the Black Flags”.

“Fight them so that Allah will punish them at your hands and will put them to shame and will give you victory over them,” he writes, quoting the Koran. “Perhaps nuclear weapons represent a technology of the 1940s. However, the Crusaders, the allies of the Satan, Allah’s curse be upon them, insist on depriving the jihad fighters of the right to have these weapons.”

The site’s appeal is evident from the enthusiasm of its correspondents. One of the most recent, Mariyam al-Jihadiyya, writes: “God bless you for this precious topic . . . fight them, through your hands God tortures them . . . and heal the hearts of the faithful people.” Beneath she includes a couple of pictures for her hero. “I love you, Osama,” she writes.

Other users complain that not all the site’s links are activated, and several urge caution. “Don’t talk about things you don’t understand,” writes one. For enthusiasts there are links to a mailing service that provides regular updates on bomb-making techniques.

Nuclear physicists were alarmed by the site. “Normally you just get generic principles, but this appears to be more like a proper instruction manual,” said John Hassard, reader in physics at Imperial College, London. “The thing about this website that is striking is that it is very particular. A lot of effort has been put into it.”

He said that while it was highly unlikely that amateur bomb-builders could get hold of fissile material, smuggling networks with access to nuclear materials from the break-up of the Soviet Union could use the information. “It is a very real threat and one which we can’t afford to ignore,” he said. “I would say this is public enemy No 1.”

Experts on Al-Qaeda said the organisation appeared to be moving from a phase where it preached a fatwa permitting the use of weapons of mass destruction — issued two years ago — to one where it encourages its followers to produce both “dirty” bombs and smaller devices similar to those used in the London Tube attacks.

“Al-Qaeda strives to move directly from the stage of obtaining the WMD to the stage of using it,” said Matti Steinberg, an Israeli expert on the organisation. He said efforts by Al-Qaeda, whose members are Sunni Muslims, to produce a nuclear weapon also reflected its fear that Shi’ite Iran was on the brink of producing a bomb. Bin Laden wanted to “balance the efforts by Iran to obtain the first Shi’ite bomb by building the first Sunni one”.

While assessing the website’s influence on young British Muslims is difficult, terror experts believe it is an important potential recruiting tool. Jeevan Deol, a terrorism analyst at the London School of Oriental and African Studies, said that while Al-Qaeda could not match western military capabilities and intelligence, its use of “cyberwarfare” helped redress the balance. “They are using the web in a focused way for propaganda and recruiting,” said Deol. “Some jihadi kid in Leeds clicks on it and thinks, ‘Wow, 50,000 hits — we don’t see Osama on telly any longer but we’re big, we’re bad and extremely engaged in all these things’.”

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/article587022.ece

Casey

11-30-2007, 10:03 PM

Yes, I went by the al-firdaws forum today, they have a "paradise will be closed for several days", message up.

Around November 24th one poster started populating one forum with bomb making and weapons downloads. The fact that the forum is down is neither here nor there because I am pretty sure the files linked to a different website.

I did download one full book, in 4 separate zip files. Unless you have the full set of zip files for any one book you cannot unzip them and a password is required to start unzipping the first file.

The nuclear bomb book is also available in a light weight electronic book. I'm sure we have not seen the last of it.

Al-Qaeda woos recruits with nuclear bomb website
November 6, 2005

AN Al-Qaeda website containing detailed instructions in Arabic on how to make nuclear, “dirty” and biological bombs has attracted more than 57,000 hits and hundreds of readers’ inquiries. Terrorism experts are warning that the site could be boosting the organisation’s appeal to would-be assassins in Britain and abroad. The manual, posted on October 6 on a forum titled Al-Firdaws, or Paradise, contains 80 pages of instructions and pictures of kitchen bomb-making techniques. It is divided into nine lessons under the overall heading The Nuclear Bomb of Jihad and the Way to Enrich Uranium, and is dedicated as a “gift to the commander of the jihad fighters, Sheikh Osama Bin Laden, for the purpose of jihad for the sake of Allah”.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/article587022.ece

Petronas

12-22-2007, 11:34 PM

Al Qaeda said to be pursuing nuclear weapon
Wednesday, December 19, 2007

A former senior US official said that Pakistan was the “real front line in the war against Al Qaeda”, but it is the “most frightening concern” that Al Qaeda was in pursuit of a nuclear weapon. Bruce Riedel of the Brookings Institution said that Pakistan was the world’s only Muslim state with nuclear weapons, and that in the last decade a former CIA chief George Tenet had said that Al Qaeda was making efforts to get its hands on a Pakistani nuclear device. “Today, it has a secure operating base in the country, its leadership is issuing constant guidance to its global supporters, it is threatening NATO’s position in Afghanistan through its Taliban allies and it is now a growing force in Pakistan itself. The current political crisis in Pakistan is endangering the secular democratic forces in the country, polarising the debate about the country’s future and strengthening Al Qaeda’s Islamist partners.

Writing in the Combating Terrorism Centre Sentinel — a new publication of the US Military Academy, West Point — Riedel is of the view that Osama bin Laden and Ayman Al Zawahiri could well be in any of Pakistan’s areas that are now increasingly getting out of the control of the central government and essentially lawless. “From Balochistan to Kashmir, much of western Pakistan is sympathetic to Al Qaeda’s message and remains an open field where they can operate. Even in the urban areas, Al Qaeda operatives have been able to attack key targets, including military posts, with increasingly deadly results,” he said. “Most concerning is that the resurgence of the Al Qaeda-Taliban alliance in Pakistan has created a safe operating base for the global jihadist movement to train and recruit operatives from Western Europe and other major European cities.

“It seeks to destroy the secular political leadership and civil society that offers an alternative to its extremist Salafist Islamic preaching. Al Qaeda’s goal in Pakistan is to polarise the country into warring factions, break the back of civil and secular society and ultimately see its allies in the Pakistani Islamist movement seize power.

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2007\12\19\story_19-12-2007_pg7_43

Bman

12-26-2007, 01:02 PM

Arrests in Slovak 'nuclear plot'

BRATISLAVA, Slovakia (AP) — Three people have been arrested for trying to sell more than two pounds of an unspecified radioactive material, which officials then seized, police said Wednesday.

Specialists were examining the radioactive material, which the three were trying to sell for $1 million, said police spokesman Martin Korch.

Two of the suspects were arrested in eastern Slovakia, the other in Hungary, he said. They were not identified.

Slovak and Hungarian police have been working together on the case for several months, Korch said.

Hungary's National Bureau of Investigation had no comment Wednesday.
The Czech news agency CTK, citing unconfirmed reports, said the material was enriched uranium.

Erich Tomas, a spokesman for the Slovak Interior Ministry, said he had no information about the case, and the U.S. Embassy in Bratislava had no immediate comment.

There have been concerns that Eastern Europe could be a source for radioactive material for a so-called "dirty bomb."

In 2003, police in the neighboring Czech Republic arrested two Slovaks in a sting operation in the city of Brno, after they allegedly sold undercover officers bars of low-enriched uranium for $715,000.

Melissa Fleming, a spokeswoman for the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency, said the U.N. nuclear watchdog would be following up on the case.

"It will be important to determine whether the material is question is nuclear," Fleming said, adding that such incidents are tracked in an IAEA database.

Concerns about nuclear smuggling have focused on Russia and the former Soviet Union, where security at nuclear-related industries fell into disrepair after the 1991 Soviet collapse.

The U.S.-based organization Nuclear Threat Initiative said in a report last year that Russia remains the prime country of concern for contraband nuclear material.

In 2006, Georgian agents, working with CIA officials, set up a sting operation that led to the arrest of a Russian who tried to sell a small amount of weapons-grade uranium in a plastic bag in his jacket pocket.

In 1997, two men were arrested in Novosibirsk, and officials said they aimed to smuggle some 11 pounds of enriched uranium to Pakistan or China. That uranium reportedly was stolen from a plant in the former Soviet republic of Kazakhstan.

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5ipT935CMr_ThHo38V3KPPguIE8wwD8T6T0C80

BBC Monitoring Europe - Political
Supplied by BBC Worldwide Monitoring

December 12, 2007 Wednesday

Slovak police expert says seized uranium may be used for "dirty bomb"

Text of report by Slovak privately-owned independent newspaper Sme, on 10 December

[Report by Tom Nicholson: "Thwarted Uranium Deal Sparked Rumors; Experts Doubt Foreign Media Claims That Seized Uranium Was 98.6-percent Pure, Agree It Could Have Been Used To Make 'Dirty Bomb'"]

Bratislava -- On the face of it, the story had everything that a headline story needs to have: three members of an international smuggling gang caught by the Slovak police, half a kilo of enriched uranium, averted terrorist threats.

The world media paid really close attention to the story. Major press agencies, television channels, and US, French, Spanish, and British dailies carried extensive reports focusing on the amount of radioactive material remaining on the black market in Eastern Europe and on the risks that this trade meant for world security.

The Slovak media ignored the case. So who was right? Did the foreign media exaggerate the significance of the uranium discovery, or did the Slovaks underestimate it? How serious a threat was actually averted?

Doubts

Michal Kopcik, police first vice president, who called a news conference and reported that the police had found uranium, had no doubts that the case was significant. Those 481 grams of enriched radioactive material could be used to make a "dirty bomb" and carry out terrorist attacks, he said.

Since the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 in the United States, Western security experts have repeatedly warned of the risk of "dirty bombs" -- weapons that combine explosives and radioactive material -- falling into terrorists' hands.

"As regards reactions from abroad, when we take England, Spain, France, or the United States, all of these countries have experienced terrorist attacks in some form, and this is why people and journalists are able to make a more realistic assessment of a possible threat and the degree of danger when this material is used," Kopcik said.

Commenting on the Slovak media's feeble reaction, he said: "Just like in everyday life, when you have no knowledge and experience of something, you cannot gauge a real threat and a real risk."

The world media carried a frightening report saying that the uranium seized in Slovakia contained 98.6 percent of the isotope uranium-235, which would make it a highly radioactive sample, probably from a military source.

However, what Kopcik actually said was that preliminary tests had showed with 98.6-percent certainty that the sample also contained uranium-235 and that it was an enriched and radioactive substance. By international standards, any uranium containing more than 20 percent of the isotope uranium-235 is defined as "highly enriched."

Doubts also arose about Kopcik's claim that the uranium could have been used to make a dirty bomb.

The Reuters news agency, for example, quoted Peter Novotny, head of the chemical laboratory that had tested the uranium, as saying that the uranium was not enriched enough to be used as a "dirty" bomb. "Preliminary tests have shown that it was low-enriched uranium.... That was too little for a dirty bomb," he said.

A week later, Novotny declined to make any comment on his earlier statement. The Nuclear Regulatory Authority [UJD] also refused to comment until it had the final results of tests on the seized sample.

"Really specific tests take a long time to conduct, so we have to give them some time before we begin to speculate about the possible uses of the uranium," Maria Powell from the Terrorism Research Center in Washington said.

Certainties

The facts about the case may not confirm the world media's alarmist reports, but they do not explain the phlegmatic attitude of the Slovak media, either.

"To make a dirty bomb, you do not need highly enriched uranium," Powell says. "The intention is to scare people, so any bomb containing any amount of radioactive material will overfill hospitals with people who will have to undergo tests. The decontamination of the affected area is financially demanding, the price of the affected plots of land will be zero, and tourism will also collapse."

The discovery of the uranium will, according to Powell, naturally increase the West European countries' fears that, by admitting new members into the Schengen area, they will jeopardize their own security. "It makes one feel that, if it can get from Ukraine to Slovakia and Hungary, it can also get to Europe," Powell says.

Kopcik disagrees. "This case is clear proof that we are able to secure our borders, we are prepared and able to do our job well, and we will be a full-fledged member of the Schengen area."

Smugglers' Routes

Kalman Kocsis, who headed the Hungarian Secret Service between 1990 and 1996 and now works as a security consultant, said that Slovakia and Hungary did not lie on the main route by which radioactive material was smuggled from the former Soviet Union countries.

"The smugglers' route used to lead through the Balkans and northward to Austria or in other directions," he said. "Criminals in the Balkans are much better organized, and smuggling is a much more traditional activity there."

Powell says that the Slovak case should be seen positively rather than as a threatening one. "What is a very good sign is that the Slovak and the Hungarian police had been monitoring the case from August and had it under control, and so it was not just an incidental discovery after a detector on the border started beeping," she said. "More and more countries are coming to realize that this trade is everyone's problem, and so this case should be seen as part of the increasing caution."

Slovakia and Uranium Smuggling

10 December 1994: Two Hungarian customs officers detained four Slovak citizens that the Hegyeshalom border crossing. The latter had been trying to smuggle 1.7 kilograms of uranium-239 into Austria. The customs officers had later to be hospitalized on suspicion of contamination.

14 December 1994: The Czech police seized 3 kilograms of uranium-235, 90-percent enriched, and detained one Czech and two Russians.

25 April 1995: The Slovak, Hungarian, and Czech police detained nine smugglers (four Slovaks, three Hungarians, and two Ukrainians) in Svit with 18.39 kilograms of uranium-238 originating from Ukraine. They had been trying to smuggle the uranium to Hungary via Poprad airport.

5 June 1996: The German police seized 2.77 kilograms of highly enriched uranium-235 in Ulm and detained a 49-year-old engineer from Bratislava.

21 February 1997: The police in Zvolen seized 2.36 kilograms of uranium-238 and detained four Slovaks. SIS [Slovak Information Service] official Stefan H. later testified that more than 20 secret service agents had worked on the case.

13 December 1997: Three Czechs and four Slovaks were detained at the Zelenec gas station between Bratislava and Trnava. The police seized 5 kilograms of uranium-238.

17 November 2003: Two Slovaks, former soldiers, were detained in Brno as they tried to sell 3 kilograms of nearly worthless uranium.

28 November 2007: Two Hungarians and one Ukrainian were detained by the Slovak and the Hungarian police, 481 grams of uranium were seized.

Source: Sme, Bratislava, in Slovak 10 Dec 07

Vancouver

12-26-2007, 07:21 PM

Al Qaeda said to be pursuing nuclear weapon
...
Writing in the Combating Terrorism Centre Sentinel — a new publication of the US Military Academy, West Point ...

The article begins on page 8 of the journal:
http://ctc.usma.edu/sentinel/CTCSentinel-Vol1Iss1.pdf

Another excerpt, not mentioned at that Pakistani paper:

In addition to helping the Taliban recover, al-Qa'ida in Pakistan also began reaching out to Pakistani diaspora communities around the world to provide an effective means to recruit, indoctrinate and train operatives to strike in Europe and ultimately in the United States. The 800,000-strong Pakistani communities in the United Kingdom (1.3% of the UK’s population, 500,000 of whom are Kashmiris) are the favorite targets, but communities in Germany, Denmark, Austria, Italy and elsewhere have also been infiltrated. Every major terrorist operation in the United Kingdom since 9/11, including the July 7, 2005 underground attacks and the foiled 2006 plot to blow up 10 jumbo jets en route to the United States, have had a Pakistani connection back to al-Qa'ida. The head of Britain's domestic security service, the MI5, recently noted that "the command, control and inspiration for attack planning in the UK (for the last five years) have derived from the al-Qa`ida leadership in Pakistan." [see "Intelligence, Counter Terrorism and Trust" at www.mi5.gov.uk. ]

NYer

12-27-2007, 10:01 AM

I'd wager that after today's events in Rawalpindi, PK, the nuclear scenario has jumped way up the priority list.

al-Canine

01-06-2008, 05:13 PM

How the U.S. seeks to avert nuclear terror

Scientists scan cities. Response teams are ready. And if there were a lethal device, experts would work on tracing the source.

By Ralph Vartabedian
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

January 6, 2008

About every three days, unknown to most Americans, an elite team of federal scientists hits the streets in the fight against nuclear terrorism.

The deployments are part of an effort since 2001 to ratchet up the nation's defenses. More than two dozen specialized teams have been positioned across the nation to respond to threats of nuclear terrorism, and as many 2,000 scientists and bomb experts participate in the effort. Spending on the program has more than doubled since it was launched.

And an evolving national policy aims to create a system of nuclear forensics, in which scientific analysis could quickly identify the source of a nuclear attack or attempted attack. A key report on nuclear forensics is due next month.

The counter-terrorism efforts are becoming routine. Scientists in specially equipped helicopters and airplanes use radiation detectors to scan cities for signs of weapons. They blend into crowds at major sporting events, wearing backpacks containing instruments that can identify plutonium or highly enriched uranium.

So far, they have not encountered a terrorist. Near the Las Vegas Strip, they investigated a homeless person who somehow had picked up a piece of radioactive material. On the streets of Manhattan, a hot-dog vendor fresh from a medical test triggered a policeman's radioactivity sensor.

But the teams have not become complacent. If the many layers of federal defense against nuclear smuggling break down, these unarmed weapons designers and physicists, along with experts from the FBI, could be the last hope of staving off a catastrophic attack.

They are supposed to rush up to a ticking nuclear explosive (or a "dirty" bomb, which would disperse radioactive material) and defuse it before it's too late -- a situation often depicted by Hollywood that seems less fictional every year.

"After everything else fails, we come in," said Deborah A. Wilber, the scientist who directs the Office of Emergency Response at the Energy Department's National Nuclear Security Administration. "I don't believe it is a question of if it will happen. It is a question of when."

Since the attacks of 2001, the office has created 26 rapid-response units around the nation.

If a device were located, two other specialized teams would rush to the scene, one from a base in Albuquerque, where a fueled jetliner is on 24-hour alert. Another FBI team would depart from rural Virginia.

The teams would first attempt to disable a bomb's electrical firing system and then quickly transfer the weapon to the Nevada desert. There, the bomb would be lowered into the G Tunnel, a 5,000-foot-deep shaft, where a crew of scientists and FBI agents would attempt to disassemble the device behind steel blast doors, logging any evidence.

About 1,000 nuclear weapons scientists and 500 to 1,000 more FBI professionals participate in the nation's emergency response effort, though not full time. Increased investment in the project reflects an acknowledgment that the nation remains vulnerable to nuclear terrorism.

But the effort is also reaching for something greater than defense: a Cold War style of deterrence.

The scientists are also experts in the rapidly evolving field of nuclear forensics, which aims to track nuclear materials to their country of origin. Even if a bomb detonates, fallout can be analyzed to identify the terrorists and their state sponsors. A retaliatory strike could be the response.

The idea is to force other nations to take better care of their own nuclear fuels or else find themselves in the cross hairs of the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

A major technical and policy analysis of this approach -- the report that is due next month -- is being conducted by some of the nation's top nuclear weapons experts, sponsored by the American Assn. for the Advancement of Science and led by Stanford University physicist Michael M. May.

In the meantime, the United States is retrieving and locking down nuclear fuels abroad, has created a line of radiation detectors at foreign and domestic ports, and has increased intelligence efforts.

If those and other measures fail, the emergency response teams are a last hope, but one nobody should rely on, said Charles B. Curtis, president of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, which pushes for stronger efforts to prevent nuclear terrorism.

Intercepting a device "is a very, very, very difficult problem, but not impossible," said Curtis, a former Energy Department deputy secretary.

Vahid Majidi, a nuclear weapons chemist and head of the FBI Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate, seemed more confident. Asked how good his chances would be to find a nuclear bomb in Manhattan with 24 hours' warning, he said, "Quite reasonable."

He continued: "When you think of issues only as a technical problem, you only think of technical capability. I am not sitting on my hands waiting for some detector to go off. We will use every asset at our disposal. Technology is a very small portion of what we do."

The full capability of the teams is classified. Bruce Goodwin, nuclear weapons chief at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, said the teams now had "some really remarkable tools that can prevent nuclear function," suggesting a device that can foil the arming system or perhaps even neutralize its basic operation.

It is assumed that any terrorist bomb would have booby traps and anti-tampering devices, perhaps designed by scientists who studied at the same universities that trained U.S. weapons scientists. Emergency response scientists run exercises in which one team designs a booby-trapped bomb and another team tries to disarm it.

A weapon stolen from a national stockpile might pose fewer problems than a makeshift terrorist device.

"We know a lot about other people's weapons," said Curtis. "They will tolerate a greater intrusive disarming strategy than an improvised nuclear device."

History has some unfortunate lessons. In 1980, Energy Department experts were sent to help disarm a 1,000-pound conventional bomb placed by an extortionist at Harvey's Resort Hotel in Stateline, Nev. The bomb had extraordinary anti-tampering devices that prevented the teams from disassembling, disarming or even moving it.

So the bomb experts decided to fire a shaped charge into the arming mechanism, hoping to sever it from the rest of the bomb before it could detonate. After the hotel was evacuated, the team triggered the charge from a safe distance. The strategy failed and the bomb badly damaged the hotel.

But today's level of expertise would easily have solved the problem, said Joseph J. Krol Jr., a retired Navy rear admiral who heads the National Nuclear Security Administration's Office of Emergency Operations, to which Wilber's emergency response office belongs.

"We are very much better prepared," Krol said. "How we operated then and how we operate now is like night and day."

Indeed, Philip E. Coyle, a former deputy director at Lawrence Livermore, recalled that when he served on the emergency teams in the 1970s and 1980s, he carried a card in his wallet to present at an airport in an emergency so he could order airlines to take him where he needed to go.

"It sounded good, but I always wondered whether it would work," he said. Now the teams travel by government aircraft and other federal vehicles.

A successful terrorist nuclear attack would trigger the so-called national response plan.

Many federal agencies would swing into action, including the Environmental Protection Agency, the Defense Department, the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice, as would myriad obscure offices unknown to the vast majority of Americans. For example, the National Atmospheric Release Advisory Center, based at the Livermore lab, would run advanced computation models of fallout patterns to provide evacuation plans for potentially millions of people.

Whether so many federal agencies could work together in the chaos of a nuclear attack, all while coordinating with state and local officials, is a matter of grave concern in Congress. But Majidi and Krol say extensive planning and exercises have clarified the lines of authority.

Communications would be a major undertaking.

"If you tell 100 million people to go east, 25 million will go west because they don't trust the government," said Jay C. Davis, a retired weapons scientist who is working on the forensics study.

The forensics study is trying to assess how authoritative the U.S. could be in attributing a nuclear device to a particular source and in making its case to the American public and the rest of the world.

Davis said it was hoped that nuclear forensics could determine the size of a detonation within one hour; the sophistication of the bomb design within six hours; how the fuel was enriched within 72 hours; and the peculiar details of national design -- "Does this look like a Russian, a Chinese or a Pakistani device, or something we have never seen before?" -- within a week.

What next? That part of the strategy is still evolving. Retaliation is one option that counter-terrorism officials have suggested in congressional testimony. Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Pasadena), who has sponsored legislation to increase funding for nuclear forensics, suggested that any policy had to be flexible.

"It would be left to the administration in office to determine what the repercussions would be," he said.

Deterrence might depend simply on the perception that the U.S. could respond with a counterstrike. But if nuclear fuel were traced back to Russia, would the U.S. start a nuclear exchange? And what if the nuclear materials came from the U.S.?

Of course, those on the front lines hope such a quandary never has to be confronted.

The scientists and engineers -- who say anonymity is their only defense -- talk about their jobs with marked calm.

"I told my wife that I have a job that might require me to leave home in the middle of the night and I won't be able to say where I'm going," said Jerry, one team member. "Well, that didn't set too well with her. But she works in the Pentagon, and was right next to the corridor that took the hit in the 9/11 attack. So we share what this service means."

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-na-nuke6jan06,1,6779317.story

Petronas

02-13-2008, 10:02 AM

Threat to Campus Reactors Cited
Published: February 11, 2008

The risk of a terrorist attack on a nuclear research reactor on a college campus, and the potential consequences, have been underestimated by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, according to Congressional auditors. Their report complained that the commission had overruled expert contractors who thought differently and misrepresented what the contractors said.

Security requirements at the research reactors has changed very little since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, according to the auditors, even though many of the reactors still run on enriched uranium, which terrorists could convert into fuel for an atomic bomb. In contrast, the rules for civilian power plants have become much stricter, according to the report by the Government Accountability Office.

An unclassified version of the audit found uncertainty “about whether N.R.C.’s assessment reflects the full range of security risks and potential consequences of an attack on a research reactor.” The rules, the audit said, “may need immediate strengthening,” and said that more parts of research reactors are probably vulnerable to damage than the commission assumes.

Research reactors typically are less than 1 percent as powerful as civilian electric plants, and they usually do not operate under pressure, so there is less energy available to spread radioactive material in case of attack or accident. They are used for scientific research, training and manufacture of medical isotopes.

But while power reactors are surrounded by fences, guard towers and open space, the research reactors are often located in buildings on densely populated campuses. Some have added concrete barriers to protect against truck bombs, and better doors. But the “first responders” who would arrive if intruders set off an alarm are likely to be unarmed campus police officers, the audit said.

Government nuclear experts brought in by the commission paint a grimmer picture, according to the audit. The nuclear commission’s estimates of vulnerability are “not supported” by experts from Sandia National Laboratories, Idaho National Laboratory and the Department of Homeland Security, the auditors said. The Idaho experts said a terrorist attack could have “significant consequences” and a “high socio-economic impact,” the auditors said.

The nature of the outside experts’ concern is not made clear in the unclassified version of the report, but truck bombs or other bombings have been issues in the past. An article in the journal Science and Global Security in 2003 noted that several research reactors have been destroyed by accidental runaway reactions, and that controls are in place to prevent those, although they could be disabled. And the nuclear cores of research reactors are usually much more accessible than the cores of power reactors, the article pointed out, often sitting at the bottom of an open tank. Debris thrown into the tanks could clog cooling channels, the engineers said.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission asserts that it was the Government Accountability Office, and not the commission, that had misrepresented the position of the outside experts and made “unsupported assumptions.”

Representative Christopher Shays, a Connecticut Republican who requested the audit, said of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission: “They’re making assumptions and wishing the threats go away. It’s very disconcerting to me.”

“They don’t want to burden the licensees,” he said.

But Luis A. Reyes, the commission’s executive director, said in a letter of rebuttal to the G.A.O. that the auditors did not cite any intelligence information to show that potential terrorists had the “highly sophisticated methods and skills” that the report said were within their capabilities. The audit “lacks a sound technical basis,” he said. The G.A.O. “failed to acknowledge key scientific facts,” he wrote.

According to David Lochbaum, a reactor expert at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a private group that often raises safety concerns, steps to reduce the risk of theft may have raised the potential for radioactive releases. To prevent theft, he said, research reactor operators have started putting highly irradiated fuel, which is much more radioactive, into their cores, making it impractical for a terrorist to carry fuel away. But that raises the amount of radioactive material available for release.

For 30 years, the Energy Department has been working toward designing new cores for the reactors that would do the same work with low-enriched fuel. In some cases it has completed the designs, but no money is available to convert the reactors; in others, it is still working on the designs.

Research reactors are a threatened species; with a long drought in the construction of power reactors, many universities have shrunken or closed their nuclear engineering departments and shut the reactors.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/11/washington/11cnd-nuke.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

Petronas

02-13-2008, 10:09 AM

Dirty Bomb Vulnerability
February 9, 2008

While admitting that the likelihood of a nuclear attack on a U.S. remains low, officials admit that they are not zero. But, we are finding out that defending cities against dirty bombs is difficult. That's the conclusion reached by the Department of Homeland Security after an NYPD helicopter fashioned with sensitive radiation detection equipment flew over Lower Manhattan in December. The fly over was actually a block-by-block hunt to find a black SUV in the Wall Street area carrying the components of a homemade radiological dirty bomb. As written by The Washington Post's Spencer Hsu, the half hour training exercise failed to identify the SUV despite the fact that the vehicle had a purposely planted 'sample' of cesium-137.

However, earlier in the day, a ground unit operating three kinds of vehicle sensors successfully detected the test sport-utility vehicle carrying cesium-137 on 42nd Street near Eighth Avenue, close to Times Square. The ability to detect even a radiological weapon is impacted by the sensitivity of the detector and the concentration of the material when a sample is taken. Being close to the 'subject' and being able to detect the material is not really surprising.

The implication of this material in the context of a 'dirty bomb' is that an explosion with cesium-137 would paralyze the Wall St. financial district, not so much with a high casualty rate, but on the infrastructure (the materials could fuse with asphalt and concrete and prevent access to critical urban areas such as buildings, train stations, or tunnels).

With time running short, police operators blamed technical glitches, and the pilot turned back to a West Side landing pad. The test sweep, which followed a secret, concerted search for radioactive materials in Manhattan by hundreds of local, state and federal officers before the city's New Year's Eve celebration, underscores the government's determination to prove this year that it can detect and disrupt nuclear threats to major cities.

Once again it seems to be a question of evaluating the cost benefit relationships of defending against a low threat that might have enormous and catastrophic consequences if the 'unlikely event' actually occurred.

This is related to a program begun back in 2006 under the leadership of Vayl Oxford, director of DHS's Domestic Nuclear Detection Office. Called 'Securing the Cities,' the program is intended to enhance the protection and response capabilities in and around the Nation's highest risk urban areas by helping state and local officials to develop urban and regional deployment and operations strategies, identify appropriate detection equipment, establish the necessary support infrastructure, and develop incident management protocols to respond to a small scale 'dirty bomb' attack.

However, it should be noted that in some of the references on this program that some officials recognize that it isn't a perfect program, and that it needs to evolve. While that is true of almost any research program looking into uncharted areas, there has been a considerable amount of money spent on radiation detectors for our ports and transportation depots. But the question of addressing the threat of urban nuclear terrorism

To date, the Securing the Cities program has cost approximately $90 million, with critics raising questions about its value in light of its expansion without any clear and specific threat of urban nuclear terrorism. Additionally, while the 'plan' is to use the New York City detection system as a model for other cities, as shown by the fly over episode, the program faces significant technical challenges. Frankly, developing sensors to detect things, even radiological materials, is not a simple task, especially given variable and unpredictable dispersal patterns of weapons components.

Michael Levi, a Council on Foreign Relations scholar and the author of the recently published book 'On Nuclear Terrorism,' said the Securing the Cities program may be useful but that its backers should be more open about its goals and limits. He also worries that too much is being spent on technology and not enough on coordination.

Thus, while acknowledging that the program is not perfect, supporters like Jonah Czerwinski, an IBM homeland security consultant believe that it will evolve over time (that seems to be a reasonable assumption). Oxford's position, also reasonable, is that you don't want to wait for an attack on 'a city with a nuclear weapon or dirty bomb and wait to figure that out. Together with the high risk New York always faces, we feel this is a prudent step to help secure that city, as well as to determine, 'Does this model work?' '

In preparation for this unimaginable event, the DHS, NYPD, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and officials from three states and 91 localities have created a partnership in which local officers have been trained in radiation detection operations, and basic, hand-held radiation detectors have been distributed to thousands of police officers and others whose daily work has them crisscrossing the region. Additional funds have been allocated to purchase six half-million dollar trucks equipped with detectors distinguish different radioactive materials

The problems are many. Some experts comment that current detection equipment would have a difficult time finding a lead-shielded improvised nuclear bomb with weapons-grade uranium. This type of a device would emit a much smaller radioactive signal. Additionally, continuing difficulties in communications and data transfer to manage monitoring efforts and in developing new investigative procedures remain challenges.

This is just another chink in our defensive armor. Its not a criticism so much as it is a realization of the difficulties involved in detecting things like a radiological weapon in a densely populated area. None of this even touches on the very real question of air dispersion following an attack using a radiological, chemical or biological weapon. Attempts at modeling the air flow over the canyons in Manhattan have been performed. The actual results of course are classified. But imagine the difficulties in determining the direction in which a plume of just about any airborne toxin or agent, given the always variable wind directions up and down the avenues and the cross streets, and then stirred by the passing traffic or the subterranean rush of air up the Avenue of the Americas as a subways passes beneath.

[Sorry, I could not find any publicly available source to cite, but thought the piece interesting enough to post nonetheless]

Casey

02-23-2008, 12:54 AM

IAEA Nuclear Security Series No. 6

Technical Guidance
Reference Manual

Combating Illicit Trafficking
in Nuclear and other
Radioactive Material

http://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/publications/PDF/pub1309_web.pdf

==========================================

IAEA Publishes Advisory Guide to Address Nuclear Terror Threat
Joint International Effort Produces First-of-its-Kind Document
Staff Report
22 January 2008

Story Resources

Combating Illicit Trafficking in Nuclear and Other Radioactive Material [pdf]
IAEA Illicit Trafficking Database Releases Latest Aggregate Statistics, 11 September 2007
Office of Nuclear Security
INTERPOL
EUROPOL
World Customs Organization

The IAEA today released a reference manual that details how to prevent, detect, and respond to an incidence of nuclear terrorism. Combating Illicit Trafficking in Nuclear and Other Radioactive Material serves as a how-to booklet on several topics related to combating criminal acts involving nuclear and radioactive material. The 150+ page text is intended for a broad audience, including law enforcement agencies, legislators, customs and border patrol personnel, intelligence officials, emergency response teams and users of nuclear technology.

"In addition to providing recommendations on how to prevent, detect, and respond to a possible nuclear or radiological attack, this document is also a call for greater harmonization between agencies and governments who may be called upon to deal with such a threat," said Reza Abedin-Zadeh, IAEA Department of Nuclear Security Officer.

The manual is composed of four sections, containing:

Discussion of the nature of the threat posed by illicit acts utilizing nuclear and radioactive material, along with an outline of policy and legal frameworks currently in place to hinder such an act;

Review of international steps being taken to counter the threat;

Primer on radioactive material, the public health risks associated with exposure to radiation, and information on current applications and transport issues involving radioactive material; and

Advisory text on how countries can prevent, detect and confront a possible threat.

Tackling the unauthorized movement of nuclear and radioactive material poses a multifaceted challenge to countries and officials responsible for public security. In response to the threat of a possible radioactive terrorist attack, states and organizations have begun to synchronize their information-sharing capabilities on a wider scale. The release of this Illicit Trafficking handbook aims to further these efforts by providing a resource foundation to guide cooperative measures around policy, training and awareness.

Developed in cooperation with INTERPOL (International Police Organization), EUROPOL (European Police Organization), and the World Customs Organization, the handbook is the first to provide a comprehensive guide that addresses the multifaceted threat of a possible nuclear terror attack. Though the Agency has previously issued a series of technical publications to assist police, customs and law enforcement officers in anticipating or addressing criminal acts involving nuclear or radioactive material, this publication is intended for a wider, non-technical audience.

Background

The IAEA also maintains an information system on incidents of illicit trafficking and other criminal or unauthorized activities involving nuclear and radioactive materials. To date, the Illicit Trafficking Database (ITDB) has received reports from participating States on approximately 1250 incidents ranging from illegal possession, attempted sale and smuggling, to unauthorized disposal of these materials and recoveries of radioactive sources. Currently, 96 States participate in the ITDB Programme, which was established in 1995. In some cases, non-participating Member States have provided information to the ITDB.

See Story Resources for more information.

http://www.iaea.org/NewsCenter/News/2008/guideterrorthreat.html

al-Canine

02-26-2008, 12:57 PM

On one hand...

Nuclear terrorism attack a real possibility within next decade

By Graham Allison

Before 9-11, most Americans found the idea that international terrorists could mount an attack on their homeland and kill thousands of innocent citizens not just unlikely but inconceivable.

After more than six years without a second attack on U.S. soil, some skeptics suggest that 9-11 was a 100-year flood. The view that terrorists are preparing even more deadly assaults seems as far-fetched to them as the possibility of terrorists crashing passenger jets into the World Trade Center did before that fateful Tuesday morning.

To assess the threat of nuclear terrorism, it is necessary to answer five questions:

1. Who could be planning a nuclear terrorist attack?

Al-Qaida remains a formidable enemy with clear nuclear ambitions. Former CIA Director George Tenet wrote in his memoirs that al-Qaida's leadership has remained "singularly focused on acquiring WMD" and willing to "pay whatever it would cost to get their hands on fissile material."

2. What nuclear weapons could terrorists use?

They could acquire an existing bomb from one of the nuclear weapons states or construct an elementary nuclear device from highly enriched uranium made by a state. Theft of a warhead or material would not be easy, but attempted thefts in Russia and elsewhere are not uncommon. Once a terrorist group acquires about 100 pounds of HEU, terrorists could conceivably construct a bomb such as the one dropped on Hiroshima.

3. Where could terrorists acquire a nuclear bomb?

If a nuclear attack occurs, Russia will be the most likely source of the weapon or material. A close second would be North Korea. Pyongyang has boasted that it not only possesses nuclear weapons but might export them, saying, "It's up to you whether we … transfer them." Finally, research reactors in 40 developing and transitional countries still hold the essential ingredient for nuclear bombs.

4. When could terrorists launch the first nuclear attack?

If terrorists bought or stole a nuclear weapon in good working condition, they could explode it today. If the weapon had a lock, detonation would be delayed for several days. If terrorists acquired 100 pounds of HEU, they could have a working elementary nuclear bomb in less than a year.

5. How could terrorists deliver a nuclear weapon to its target?

The illicit economy for narcotics and illegal immigrants has built up a vast infrastructure that terrorists could exploit.

Based on current trends, a nuclear terrorist attack on the United States is more likely than not in the decade ahead. To see what such an event would mean in your neighborhood, enter your ZIP code at www.nuclearterror.org.

As horrific as that vision is, the most important but largely unrecognized truth is that this ultimate catastrophe is preventable.

I have proposed a strategy for a no-loose-nukes agenda under a "Doctrine of Three Nos":

1. No unsecured nuclear weapons and weapons usable material; they should be locked down as quickly as possible.

2. No new domestic capabilities to enrich uranium or reprocess plutonium.

3. No expansion of the nuclear club beyond its current 8.5 members, the half being North Korea.

Faced with the possibility of an American Hiroshima, many Americans are paralyzed by a combination of denial and fatalism. Either it hasn't happened, so maybe it's not going to happen, or, if it is going to happen, there's nothing we can do to stop it.

Both propositions are wrong. Citizens must press their elected officials to adopt a clear agenda for action and then hold them accountable for following through.

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/opinion/sfl-terror26forumsbfeb26,0,4548843.story

al-Canine

02-26-2008, 12:58 PM

...And then another...

The implausibility of nuclear terror

Steve Chapman

"Death tugs at my ear and says, 'Live, I am coming.'" Were Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. alive today, he might ascribe that line not to death but to nuclear terrorism.

Ever since Sept. 11, 2001, Americans have had to live with the knowledge that the next time the terrorists strike, it could be not with airplanes capable of killing thousands but atomic bombs capable of killing hundreds of thousands.

The prospect has created a sense of profound vulnerability. It has shaped our view of government policies aimed at combating terrorism (filtered through Jack Bauer). It helped mobilize support for the Iraq war.

Why are we worried? Bomb designs can be found on the Internet. Fissile material may be smuggled out of Russia. Iran, a longtime sponsor of terrorist groups, is trying to acquire nuclear weapons. A layperson may figure it's only a matter of time before the unimaginable comes to pass. Harvard's Graham Allison, in his book Nuclear Terrorism, concludes, "On the current course, nuclear terrorism is inevitable."

But remember: After 9/11, we all thought more attacks were a certainty. Yet al-Qaida and its ideological kin have proved unable to mount a second strike.

Given their inability to do something simple - say, shoot up a shopping mall or set off a truck bomb - it's reasonable to ask whether they have a chance at something much more ambitious. Far from being plausible, argued Ohio State University professor John Mueller in a recent presentation at the University of Chicago, "the likelihood that a terrorist group will come up with an atomic bomb seems to be vanishingly small."

The events required to make that happen consist of a multitude of Herculean tasks. First, a terrorist group has to get a bomb or fissile material, perhaps from Russia's inventory of decommissioned warheads. If that were easy, one would have already gone missing.

Besides, those devices are probably no longer a danger, because weapons that are not scrupulously maintained (as those have not been) quickly become what one expert calls "radioactive scrap metal." If terrorists were able to steal a Pakistani bomb, they would still have to defeat the arming codes and other safeguards designed to prevent unauthorized use. As for Iran, no nuclear state has ever given a bomb to an ally - for reasons even the Iranians can grasp.

Stealing some 100 pounds of bomb fuel would require help from rogue individuals inside some government who are prepared to jeopardize their lives. The terrorists, notes Mr. Mueller, would then have to spirit it "hundreds of miles out of the country over unfamiliar terrain, and probably while being pursued by security forces."

Then comes the task of building a bomb. It's not something you can gin up with spare parts and power tools in your garage. It requires millions of dollars, a haven and advanced equipment - plus people with specialized skills, lots of time and a willingness to die for the cause. And if al-Qaida could make a prototype, another obstacle would emerge: There is no guarantee it would work, and there is no way to test it.

Assuming the jihadists vault over those Himalayas, they would have to deliver the weapon onto American soil. Sure, drug smugglers bring in contraband all the time - but seeking their help would confront the plotters with possible exposure or extortion. This, like every other step in the entire process, means expanding the circle of people who know what's going on, multiplying the chance someone will blab, back out or screw up.

Mr. Mueller recalls that after the Irish Republican Army failed in an attempt to blow up British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, it said, "We only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always." Al-Qaida, he says, faces a very different challenge: For it to carry out a nuclear attack, everything has to go right. For us to escape, only one thing has to go wrong.

That has heartening implications. If Osama bin Laden embarks on the project, he has only a minuscule chance of seeing it bear fruit. Given the formidable odds, he probably won't bother.

None of this means we should stop trying to minimize the risk by securing nuclear stockpiles, monitoring terrorist communications and improving port screening. But it offers good reason to think that in this war, it appears, the worst eventuality is one that will never happen.

www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bal-op.chapman11feb11,0,4499235.story

Petronas

03-23-2008, 03:18 AM

Wikileaks Releases Previously Classified Nuclear Bomb Schematics
March 17, 2008 11:14 AM

Official schematics for a “workable” atomic bomb appeared on Wikileaks last week, purportedly depicting the “Fat Man” weapon detonated over the Japanese city of Nagasaki. The schematic, a “crude” British description of the famous “Fat Man” device developed at Los Alamos laboratories, was part of the declassified-then-retracted Penney Report, released under the UK Public Records Act. However, the UK retracted the document from public access in 2002.

Wikileaks claims the medium-quality scan of a 1947 drawing is still a public record. The site notes that despite having its access conditions changed to the custody of the Ministry of Supply, nobody from the government has tried to contact anyone already in possession of the file, known as UK Public Record Office File AVIA 65/1163 “Implosion.”

“It should be observed that Penney's description and discussion of development are no more revealing than descriptions of the United States' first implosion bomb that have been publicly available for many years, and in fact are less precise than other descriptions that are now available,” reads the analysis, which appears to have been originally posted at nucelarweaponsarchive.org. The schematic, part of the 1947 Penney Report compiled by elite British scientist William G. Penney, who served on the Manhattan Project, is described as “the oldest material in the file” and was written “before any actual bomb development work had been undertaken in the UK.”

An original text transcription of the Penney Report depicts a Britain deep in the development of its own nuclear program: a chart in Appendix M classifies bomb development into 11 categories, and it lists only two that Britain could “go straight ahead and make.” Other categories, including the bomb’s Plutonium core and detonation fuse, cite everything from inexperience to difficulty in acquiring materials as bars to progress – all of which seemed to be defeated by 1952, when the UK successfully carried out its “Operation Hurricane” at midnight, October 3.

“This diagram is not really a secret to foreign intelligence services,” reads the WikiLeaks analysis, “nobody is going to be surprised by this design, just by the fact that it’s appeared in public.” “Open sources have speculated on these matters for a long time (see Nuclear Weapons Design article in Wikipedia), and this just confirms that they were right,” it adds.

It appears that Wikileaks is comfortable posting the plans: “The real problem about building one of these designs is the rarity … of plutonium and polonium, as well as the ability to fabricate sophisticated high explosives to exacting specifications,” it says. “We’re not talking about IEDs here: to build a nuclear weapon requires a state.” ...

http://www.dailytech.com/Wikileaks+Releases+Previously+Classified+Nuclear+B omb+Schematics/article11115.htm

al-Canine

04-05-2008, 09:04 AM

Intelligence officers call al Qaeda nuclear threat real

By Michael Posner | Congress Daily April 2, 2008

Two high-level government intelligence experts testified Wednesday that al Qaeda is intent on attacking the United States with a nuclear weapon but has not developed a nuclear device.

In a hearing, Charles Allen, chief intelligence officer for the Homeland Security Department, said there is no doubt that al Qaeda wants a nuclear weapon. But, he told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, "I do not believe that any terrorist organization currently has developed a nuclear device." He said, however, that this capability "could change drastically" with the recruitment of people with knowledge of nuclear materials and design.

His testimony was buttressed by Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, director of the office of intelligence and counterintelligence of the Energy Department. Before Sept. 11, 2001, he said, many in the intelligence community believed it was too hard for terrorists to develop a nuclear bomb.

"We should not, however, assume that the technology of a nuclear weapon is beyond the capability of a terrorist group," Mowatt-Larssen said. "A terrorist group needs only to produce a nuclear yield once to change history."

Both experts plan to testify before the committee later Wednesday to discuss classified material. "We do not yet know when and where they intend to strike us next," Mowatt-Larssen testified, "but past experience strongly suggests that they are seeking an attack more spectacular than 9/11."

Mowatt-Larssen said a global effort must be undertaken to get nuclear materials off the black market and stop global trafficking in them. Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Chairman Joseph Lieberman, I-Conn., summed up the testimony of both men as sobering.

Matthew Bunn, a nuclear exert at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University, said that nuclear stockpile security in Russia "has improved dramatically in the past 15 years" but called for more global nuclear security. He too warned of the threat from a terrorist group.

"This is a real danger," he said. Homeland Security Department's Allen said any terrorist nuclear bomb would lack the sophistication of one developed by a country and be of unknown yield. But, he warned, "A nuclear device of any yield could produce thousands of casualties, significant damage to the infrastructure and render large areas uninhabitable."

Similarly, Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs ranking member Susan Collins of Maine supported that assessment, saying that a 10-kiloton nuclear device in Manhattan's Times Square at noon would result immediately in the loss of half a million lives.

http://www.govexec.com/story_page.cfm?articleid=39686&dcn=todaysnews

al-Canine

04-05-2008, 01:34 PM

BOOK REVIEW: Using Murphy’s Law Against Nuclear Terrorists

On Nuclear Terrorism
Michael Levi, Harvard University Press

Reviewed by William C. Potter

Michael Levi’s slender volume On Nuclear Terrorism is a valuable addition to the burgeoning literature on catastrophic terrorism. Unlike many recent studies, it neither hypes the nuclear threat nor discounts it. Instead, Levi sketches the obstacles a terrorist would need to overcome to successfully implement a nuclear attack and then discusses the panoply of means available to preclude that outcome. Although many of the challenges and preventive measures have been discussed in much greater depth elsewhere, Levi’s study adopts a systems analysis perspective to demonstrate the power of an integrated, multilayered defense.

Underlying Levi’s concept of defense as a system is the premise that, in order for a defense against nuclear terrorism to be effective, it only needs to succeed at one stage in the terrorist chain of events. In contrast, the terrorist must successfully complete each step in the plot to acquire fissile material or an intact nuclear explosive, fabricate a nuclear weapon, deliver the weapon to the target, and detonate the explosive.[1] Although any element or layer of defense may be relatively ineffectual, Levi argues that a carefully conceived and integrated, multilayered defense stands a much better chance of obstructing a nuclear attack than may at first appear to be the case.

This approach leads Levi to exploit what he calls “Murphy’s Law of Nuclear Terrorism,” what can go wrong (from a terrorist’s perspective) might well go wrong. In other words, understanding the various ways in which terrorists might fail provides insights and potential tools for increasing the odds of terrorist failure. This perspective, in turn, suggests the importance of understanding both terrorist capabilities and their attitudes toward risk and failure.

Levi’s work, like most analyses of nuclear terrorism, does not delve very deeply into terrorist motivations. Yet, it does highlight the intriguing finding by several analysts that many terrorist organizations, including al Qaeda, appear to be tactically conservative and risk averse from an operational standpoint; they may be very willing to risk their lives, but not in futile operations. This tendency may not dissuade a terrorist organization from embarking on the very challenging tasks of devising and implementing a nuclear strike, but it suggests a number of opportunities for exerting countervailing pressures that may reinforce their cautionary inclinations and steer them away for the pursuit of high-consequence but low-probability acts.

In reviewing the various barriers in the path of a would-be nuclear terrorist, Levi correctly identifies state stockpiles of fissile material as the “gateways to nuclear terrorism” and emphasizes the importance of security at the source. As Graham Allison famously observed, “[N]o nuclear material, no nuclear bomb.”[2] Unfortunately, the world currently is awash in fissile material, including about 500 metric tons of separated plutonium and more than 1,700 tons of highly enriched uranium (HEU), enough for tens of thousands of nuclear weapons.[3] Although the overwhelming majority of this amount resides in the United States and Russia, more than a dozen states are estimated to possess at least 25 kilograms of HEU, the minimum quantity needed for a nuclear weapon, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency.[4]

In Search of a Nuclear Fort Knox

A number of approaches have been employed with varying degrees of success in order to secure nuclear weapons-usable material at the source. They include materials protection, control, and accounting (MPC&A). Although Levi does not dispute the desirability of providing the same degree of MPC&A for nuclear material as gold is afforded at Fort Knox, he observes a number of difficulties in achieving a gold security standard for nuclear material. One problem pertains to the fact that although the precise amount of gold in storage is known, there is no reliable figure for the amount of global stocks of HEU and plutonium. Indeed, physical inventories have never been conducted in some countries. In addition, although the movement of gold from Fort Knox is very limited (only very small quantities are reportedly ever removed, for purposes of testing its purity), significant quantities of HEU and plutonium are on the move frequently, especially between facilities within a country, but also on occasion internationally. As a consequence, although the Fort Knox analogy may be useful from an aspirational standpoint, one must look more closely at the existing deficiencies in MPC&A to appreciate both the promise and potential for preventing leakage of fissile material into the hands of terrorists.

One of Levi’s important observations in this respect is his recognition of the human dimension to physical protection. In other words, although the three G’s (guns, guards, and gates) are important, the major limits to physical materials protection and material control pertain to human factors such as the presence or absence of a highly developed nonproliferation and security culture and the commitment by political leaders to expend the resources necessary to make MPC&A a national priority.

Although Levi calls attention to the problems posed by deficient political will and underdeveloped culture, he does not offer much guidance about how to correct the deficit, which arguably requires a long-term investment in nonproliferation education and training in order to change mindsets on the part of nuclear custodians as well as nuclear industry officials. He also ignores a number of other promising approaches for reducing the risk of fissile material leakage, including the minimization or elimination of HEU use in the civilian nuclear sector.

Buyers and Sellers

One of the more interesting and original sections of Levi’s book pertains to the economics of illicit nuclear trade. Price, he notes, will present a major barrier to all but the wealthiest terrorist organizations and, in principle, could be manipulated to impede terrorist acquisition of fissile material. For example, he suggests that intelligence and law enforcement entities “might attempt to purchase nuclear materials themselves, driving terrorists out of the market.” Such action, however, also might have the unintended effect of attracting more nuclear suppliers and thieves to the illicit market place. As a consequence, Levi believes sting operations directed at buyers rather than sellers are a more promising approach and could increase uncertainty for terrorists in the market for nuclear goods and services. As such, the authorities “could raise [the terrorists’] perceived chances of failing and hence the odds that a risk-averse terrorist group would be deterred.”

Analogies are often drawn between the trade in narcotics and illicit nuclear trafficking. Although these comparisons typically are put forth to illustrate the amount of nuclear material trade that may have gone undetected (i.e., approximately 20 confirmed cases of smuggling fissile material are just the tip of a much bigger iceberg), Levi cites other drug trade statistics to indicate the potential for even very imperfect border security to disrupt a nuclear terrorist’s plans. For example, he notes estimates by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency that 10-15 percent of the cocaine leaving South America for the United States in 2004 was lost or seized in the transit zone and that the “combined probability that cocaine departing South America destined for the United States will actually make it to the United States” was between 35-70 percent. Although these figures and profit margin may still be attractive for drug smugglers, it is less obvious that nuclear traffickers possessing a relatively small supply of material would judge similar odds to be favorable. As such, even less-than-airtight border controls could significantly affect the calculus of would-be nuclear terrorists and might be particularly effective against failure-averse organizations.

INDs vs. Intact Nuclear Weapons

In principle, would-be nuclear terrorists could choose to build their own nuclear explosive or an improvised nuclear device (IND) or seek to purchase or steal an intact nuclear weapon. The chain of necessary conditions for these two types of nuclear terrorism is different, as are the opportunities for frustrating their occurrence.

The potential for nonstate actors to build an IND has been acknowledged by experts for many years, and most concur with the view of the U.S. National Research Council that “crude HEU weapons could be fabricated without state assistance.”[5] There is much less agreement among specialists, however, about how technically competent terrorists would have to be to make a gun-type device or how large a team they would need.

At one end of the spectrum is the view that a suicidal terrorist could literally drop one piece of HEU metal on top of another piece to initiate an explosive chain reaction. At the other end are some senior Russian nuclear officials who continue to deny that nonstate actors could fabricate a nuclear explosive even if they were able to obtain enough fissile material. Levi stakes out a middle position, which recognizes the possibility of terrorist-manufactured INDs but emphasizes the multiple barriers that would have to be overcome, including acquiring a sufficient quantity and quality of fissile material, reshaping the material to meet nuclear explosive specifications, avoiding accidents such as spontaneous ignition, and initiating the explosion. In this respect, he tends to portray the task as far more demanding than several other recent accounts. For example, although he does not directly challenge the assumptions of the widely publicized article by Peter Zimmerman and Jeffrey Lewis on the prospects for terrorists to build a bomb on a “terror farm,” he correctly notes that it will not be a simple task to find experienced farmers and appropriate utensils, not to mention the necessary seed stock of fissile material.[6]

Levi’s discussion of the prospects for terrorist acquisition of an intact nuclear weapon is less satisfying and focuses primarily on scenarios in which states transfer nuclear weapons to nonstate actors either intentionally or as a consequence of their collapse. He largely ignores the risks posed by thousands of nonstrategic or tactical nuclear weapons that remain in Russian and U.S. nuclear arsenals. These weapons represent a particular concern from the standpoint of nuclear terrorism because of a combination of their physical properties and basing modes. Their relatively small size; portability; and, in the case of some older systems, the lack of electronic locks, as well as their forward deployment, make tactical nuclear weapons the likely weapon of choice for a nuclear terrorist organization. These are also the weapons for which there are no legally binding and verifiable arms control restraints in place.

A Way Forward?

Levi’s brief survey of nuclear terrorism pathways is designed less to probe in depth the various points where vulnerabilities exist than to counter worst-case thinking and to direct attention to the potential for reforming defense against “realistic threats.” Although the parameters of these real but less-than-worst-case expectations are not defined, Levi provides a number of very reasonable guidelines for policymakers to follow: (1) improve security for nuclear weapons and materials; (2) emphasize defensive measures that simultaneously address both nuclear terrorism and other terrorist threats; (3) mandate a strategic intelligence assessment that covers the entire spectrum of nuclear terrorist threats, not only the worst possible case; (4) foster an integrated defensive system that promotes domestic and international intelligence sharing and cooperation on nuclear terrorism; and (5) audit defensive efforts to increase confidence that they work in practice as well as theory.

Levi’s first recommendation essentially embraces the dictum that the first priority should be to secure material at the source. As he properly observes, the effective application of this approach has the virtue of not only preventing nuclear terrorism directly, but also increasing the effectiveness of broader (secondary) defensive measures should terrorists find the means to overcome the initial defenses.

The main insight of Levi’s second tenet is the value added of conceiving defenses that serve to protect against nuclear and non-nuclear terrorist threats. Here, Levi has in mind not only measures that enhance intelligence collection and analysis, but efforts to counter terrorist financing and enhance export controls.

One of the fundamental deficiencies in most governmental and nongovernmental analyses of nuclear terrorism is the failure to tap expertise that crosses the terrorism and nuclear weapons divide. Few analyses display familiarity with both domains, and much of what passes for analysis is particularly shallow in treating the diversity of terrorist types, their motivations, and the means available for affecting the tactical and strategic calculations of terrorists. In addition to recognizing this serious shortcoming, Levi suggests a number of means to improve strategic intelligence assessments, including the development of a wider range of scenarios and more public vetting of assessments in order to build public support for strategies that address less-than-worst-case threats.

It is difficult to exaggerate the challenge of effectively managing the existing counterterrorism system involving diverse and often competing organizational interests at the local, state, federal, and international levels. Unlike some analysts, Levi is skeptical that a top-down approach to coordination, such as a czar for nuclear terrorism, would effectively overcome bureaucratic obstacles to coordination. Instead, he argues that the best alternative is to “provide departments and agencies with a framework within which to plan their activities and with a tool to use in justifying and seeking funding for those programs.” The key to coordination, he believes, is the development of a system or framework that enables those responsible for implementing policy to view how the different pieces in the system fit together as an integrated defense.

Finally, Levi maintains that an effective defensive system must include the means to evaluate its efforts wisely. One must continually test the system as a whole to identify weaknesses and assess, as best as possible, its applicability against realistic threats. Exercises that involve red teaming against multiple variations on possible threats, he suggests, are important components of this testing process.

Levi’s argument about the need to conceive of defense against nuclear terrorism as a broad and integrated system makes a great deal of sense. His specific recommendations for achieving that system also generally are sound as far as they go and offer useful insights for thinking about the nature of nuclear terrorism and what can be done to reduce the probability of its occurrence. Yet, the recommendations, as well as the analysis on which they are based, are presented more in the form of snapshots than fully developed arguments. As a consequence, one is left to ponder a number of questions. What are the less-than-worst-case nuclear threats on which we should be focused? Do they primarily involve the theft of HEU or plutonium or tactical nuclear weapons? Should we concentrate principally on those geographical regions and states where most of the material and weapons are located or on those nuclear facilities that are least secure? What would a broad defensive framework actually look like, and how should a new U.S. administration move to implement it? What can be done to more effectively implement the proliferation of new international initiatives to counter nuclear terrorism?

Levi astutely calls attention to the likely operation of Murphy’s Law of Nuclear Terrorism as it applies to terrorists. Unfortunately, one also must be attentive to the probable operation of a similar law as it pertains to the U.S. government’s efforts to combat nuclear terrorism. In other words, as we adjust our sights to deal with less-than-10-foot terrorists, we should not discount the possibility that poorly conceived and implemented U.S. foreign policy can serve as a terrorist growth hormone. That is not an argument for focusing most of our resources on the worst-case scenario, but it cautions against completely ignoring that threat.

William C. Potter is the Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar Professor of Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. He also directs the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies. He is co-author of The Four Faces of Nuclear Terrorism (2005).

ENDNOTES

1. The focus of Levi’s book is on high-consequence nuclear terrorism. It does not specifically address the higher-probability but lower-consequence threats posed by radiological dispersal devices and attacks on or sabotage of nuclear energy facilities.

2. There are a variety of variations of Allison’s quote, a long version of which is, “It is a basic matter of physics: without fissile material, you can’t have a nuclear bomb. No nuclear bomb, no nuclear terrorism.” See Graham Allison, “How to Stop Nuclear Terror,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 83, No. 1 (January/February 2004), p. 64.

3. See International Panel on Fissile Materials, “Global Fissile Material Report 2007,” October 2007.

4. Some nongovernmental experts believe the International Atomic Energy Agency figure is much too high. See, for example, Thomas B. Cochran and Christopher E. Paine, “The Amount of Plutonium and Highly-Enriched Uranium Needed for Pure Fisson Nuclear Weapons,” Natural Resources Defense Council, April 13, 1995.

5. National Research Council, Making the Nations Safer: The Role of Science and Technology in Countering Terrorism (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 2002), p. 45.

6. See Peter G. Zimmerman and Jeffrey G. Lewis, “The Bomb in the Backyard,” Foreign Policy, November/December 2006, pp. 32-39.

http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2008_04/BookReview.asp

Casey

04-06-2008, 05:02 AM

Islamist Hoped to Strike Nuclear Plants
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

April 4th, 2008 @ 1:44pm
By DAVID STRINGER
Associated Press Writer

LONDON (AP) - A man accused of plotting to down trans-Atlantic airliners was also developing plans to cripple nuclear power stations, a European gas pipeline and Britain's electricity grid, a prosecutor told a court Friday.

Assad Sarwar, 27, a British Muslim with ties to Islamic radicals in Pakistan, also wanted to destroy the main exchange for Britain's Internet service providers and target an airport control tower, prosecutor Peter Wright said.

Wright said Sarwar decided not to join the seven other defendants in carrying out their planned suicide mission to blow up at least seven flights to the United States and Canada.

"On the evidence you may conclude he had other terrestrial targets in mind as well," he said.

All eight defendants have denied the charges.

Sarwar compiled detailed information on London's Canary Wharf finance district, a Belgium-Britain gas pipeline, Britain's electricity grid and oil refineries for possible attacks, Wright said.

He also stored information about an air traffic control tower at London's Heathrow airport on a computer memory stick.

"The horizon of Sarwar's terrorist ambition, we say, was limitless," Wright said.

In a diary, Sarwar made references to the Fawley oil refinery, in Hampshire in southern England, the Coryton oil refinery in Essex in southeast England, and Kingsbury oil terminal in central England.

Sarwar visited Pakistan between June 13 and July 8, 2006 _ likely to confer with Islamist leaders over the planned jetliner attacks, Wright said.

(Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.)
http://www.620ktar.com/?nid=46&sid=796832&r=1

Petronas

04-23-2008, 01:20 PM

Nuclear attack on D.C. a hypothetical disaster
April 16, 2008

A nuclear device detonated near the White House would kill roughly 100,000 people and flatten downtown federal buildings, while the radioactive plume from the explosion would likely spread toward the Capitol and into Southeast D.C., contaminating thousands more.

The blast from the 10-kiloton bomb — similar to the bomb dropped over Hiroshima during World War II — would kill up to one in 10 tourists visiting the Washington Monument and send shards of glass flying the length of the National Mall, in a scenario that has become increasingly likely to occur in a major U.S. city in recent years, panel members told a Senate committee yesterday.

"It's inevitable," said Cham E. Dallas, director of the Institute for Health Management and Mass Destruction Defense at the University of Georgia, who has charted the potential explosion's effect in the District and testified before a hearing of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. "I think it's wistful to think that it won't happen by 20 years."

The Senate committee has convened a series of hearings to examine the threat and effects of a terrorist nuclear attack on a U.S. city, as well as the needed response.

Yesterday's panel stressed the importance of state and local cooperation with federal authorities in the wake of an attack, assistance from the private business sector to aid recovery and the dire need to boost the capabilities of area hospitals.

They recommended expanding emergency personnel by training physicians like pharmacists and dentists to aid in all-hazards care, monitoring the exposure of first responders to radiation and clearly disseminating information to the public.

"The scenarios we discuss today are very hard for us to contemplate, and so emotionally traumatic and unsettling that it is tempting to push them aside," said Sen. Joe Lieberman, Connecticut independent and committee chairman. "However, now is the time to have this difficult conversation, to ask the tough questions, and then to get answers as best we can and take preparatory and preventive action."

Ashton B. Carter, co-director of the Preventive Defense Project at Harvard University, said the likelihood of a nuclear attack on U.S. soil is undetermined, but it has increased with the proliferation of weapons by Iran and North Korea and the failure to secure Russia's nuclear arsenal following the Cold War.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080416/METRO/556828862/1001

al-Canine

04-23-2008, 05:09 PM

BRIEFING: Nuclear attack a worst-case reality?

April 23, 2008

By Graham Allison - During the 2004 campaign, in the first nationally televised debate between President Bush and his challenger, Sen. John Kerry, the moderator asked each candidate, "What is the single most-serious threat to American national security?"

Mr. Kerry answered: "nuclear terrorism."

Mr. Bush said, "I agree with my opponent that the biggest threat facing the country is weapons of mass destruction in the hands of a terrorist network."

In recent years, contrarians have emerged to challenge what they call an "atomic obsession." They argue that no terrorist group is seriously motivated to conduct a nuclear terrorist attack; that none is capable of overcoming "Herculean challenges" to acquire the fissile material for a bomb or constructing a nuclear device; and that even if they were able to do so, they would not be able to deliver the device to the United States.

In short, they argue that nuclear terrorism is a "worst-case fantasy."

If only this were the case.

In "Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe," published in 2004, I present the evidence for the proposition that on the current trajectory, a successful terrorist nuclear attack devastating one of the great cities of the world is inevitable. I offer my own considered judgment that if all the governments stay on autopilot, doing no more and no less than they are doing today, a nuclear 9/11 is more likely than not within a decade — that is, by 2014.

Richard Garwin, a designer of the hydrogen bomb, was called by Nobel laureate Enrico Fermi "the only true genius I had ever met." Testifying to Congress in March 2007, Mr. Garwin estimated a "20 percent per year probability of a nuclear explosion with American cities and European cities included."

My Harvard colleague, Matthew Bunn, created a model that estimates the probability of a terrorist nuclear attack over a 10-year period to be 29 percent — identical to the average estimate from a poll of security experts commissioned by Sen. Richard G. Lugar, Indiana Republican, in 2005.

Former Defense Secretary William J. Perry has expressed that my work underestimates the risk. Warren Buffet, the world's most successful investor and legendary odds-maker in pricing insurance policies for unlikely but catastrophic events, concluded that nuclear terrorism is "inevitable." As he has stated: "I don't see any way that it won't happen." Are there real and serious adversaries of the United States intent on conducting a terrorist nuclear attack on the homeland? Yes.

Al Qaeda remains a formidable enemy with clear nuclear ambitions. In 1998, Osama bin Laden declared that obtaining weapons of mass destruction was "a religious duty" for al Qaeda. According to the final report of the 9/11 commission, "Al Qaeda has tried to acquire or make nuclear weapons for at least 10 years ... and continues to pursue its strategic goal of obtaining a nuclear capability." Al Qaeda spokesman Sulaiman Abu Ghaith announced the group's objective — "to kill 4 million Americans — 2 million of them children," in retaliation for the deaths the group thinks the United States and Israel have inflicted on Muslims.

As former CIA Director George J. Tenet reveals in his memoir, "the most senior leaders of al Qaeda are still singularly focused on acquiring [weapons of mass destruction]... . The main threat is the nuclear one. I am convinced that this is where Osama bin Laden and his operatives desperately want to go."

Homeland Security Undersecretary Charles Allen confirmed Mr. Tenet's view in his Senate testimony earlier this month. He told lawmakers: "Our post-9/11 successes against the Taliban in Afghanistan yielded volumes of information that completely changed our view of al Qaeda's nuclear program. We learned that al Qaeda wants a weapon to use, not a weapon to sustain and build a stockpile. ... A terrorist group needs only to produce a nuclear yield once to change history." Would a nuclear 9/11 be a game-changer? You bet.

Consider the consequences of even a single nuclear bomb exploding in just one U.S. city. Researchers at the Rand Corp., a U.S. government-funded think tank, estimated that a nuclear explosion at the Port of Long Beach, Calif., would cause immediate indirect costs worldwide of more than $3 trillion and that shutting down U.S. ports would cut world trade by 10 percent.

The negative economic repercussions would reverberate well beyond the developed world. As former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan warned, "Were a nuclear terrorist attack to occur, it would cause not only widespread death and destruction, but would stagger the world economy and thrust tens of millions of people into dire poverty," creating "a second death toll throughout the developing world."

What's been done to address the threat? More than one would recognize.

In the 16 years since the collapse of the Soviet Union, visionary leadership and far-sighted government programs — see the Nunn-Lugar scorecard at http://lugar.senate. gov/nunnlugar/scorecard.html — have made significant headway in securing nuclear weapons and materials.

U.N. Security Council Resolution 1540, in 2004, focused attention on the nuclear-terrorism threat globally by legally obligating all member states to provide "appropriate effective export controls, border controls, and transshipment controls."

What is left undone? A great deal.

Over the last two decades, a series of missed opportunities and missteps have eroded the nonproliferation regime. As the 2004 U.N. High-Level Panel on Threat, Challenges and Change concluded: "We are approaching a point at which the erosion of the nonproliferation regime could become irreversible and result in a cascade of proliferation."

The incoming U.S. administration's top priority should be to reverse this trend. The alternative — a world of nuclear anarchy — is not one in which Americans protect and advance our values or our interests.

Graham Allison, director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, is a former U.S. assistant secretary of defense and author of "Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe."

http://washingtontimes.com/article/20080423/FOREIGN/682211960/1003/foreign

al-Canine

05-22-2008, 08:53 AM

CQ HOMELAND SECURITY
May 21, 2008 – 9:13 p.m.

Nuclear Threat Going Unheeded, Initiative Official Warns

By Matt Korade, CQ Staff

When it comes to protecting the United States against the most serious threat it faces — a nuclear terrorist attack — the actions from the Bush administration and Congress have not matched the rhetoric, a Clinton administration official told an audience at a National Defense University Foundation-sponsored national security seminar Wednesday.

“Nuclear terrorism is the greatest threat to our national security,” said Charles Curtis, the president and chief operating officer of the Nuclear Threat Initiative and former deputy secretary of the Department of Energy. “We are not treating this threat with the urgency it requires.”

If any doubts rippled through the audience, Curtis did his best to dispel them.

First, on the threat: several government officials have given estimates in recent years on the probability of a nuclear attack on the United States within the next decade. Of these, Matthew Bunn, a nuclear threat and terrorism expert at Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, gave the lowest estimate, at 29 percent. The others were former Secretary of Defense William Perry; and Sen. Richard G. Lugar , R-Ind., both of whom placed the probability at 50 percent or greater.

While predicting nuclear threats isn’t a science, Curtis said, “the danger is high enough to have a significant effect on the life expectancy of everyone who works in downtown Washington.”

Experts also agree that a nuclear bomb or fissile materials could come from several places: Russia, suffering from its own radical Islamic problem; Pakistan, where the military is infiltrated by al Qaeda sympathizers; North Korea, which might trade in nuclear weapons for money; or one of the 100-plus nuclear research labs proliferating in about 40 countries around the globe. Iran may soon join this list, Curtis said.

But while politicians of both stripes have identified nuclear terrorism as the most serious threat facing the United States today, the Department of Defense and broader U.S. government have lost ground in efforts at prevention, protection, and response — the three main pillars in the national security strategy, he said.

The Bush administration’s layered approach of monitoring border access points and seaports with radiation-detection equipment can only be so effective, Curtis said, adding that the best place to secure nuclear materials is at their source, yet there is no comprehensive, prioritized list of nuclear sites nearly seven years after the 9/11 attacks.

The Energy Department’s Global Threat Reduction Initiative, which is responsible for securing nuclear materials around the world, is undermanned for the task. The DoD’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency has more personnel, but suffers from poorly defined activities, a lack of standing within the DoD, and less money than it needs.

Curtis knows whereof he speaks, drawing on his experience at the Energy Department, where he had direct responsibility for all of its energy, science and technology, and national security programs.

He outlined a several-part plan to prevent the next administration from backsliding further on nuclear nonproliferation issues:

• Securing all plutonium and highly enriched uranium by assisting nations with technical controls over their nuclear facilities.

• Undermining discontent expressed in radical Islam through a multistate effort.

• Appointing a nuclear czar to oversee cooperation among the nonproliferation programs of the various departments, as recommended by the 9/11 commission.

Congress created this “nuke czar” position with the passage of the 9/11 commission bill in August 2007 (PL 110-53), but the president has yet to make an appointment, Curtis said. The White House has said the position is unnecessary, but Curtis said he believes the current situation, in which the Defense, State, Commerce and even Health and Human Services departments could all play a role in the national nuclear terrorism and nonproliferation strategy, is a recipe for inaction.

Congress also has shown poor leadership, becoming ensnared in the kind of turf battles and jurisdictional issues among committees that the executive branch faces among departments. Last week, Congress appointed a nine-member advisory commission on nuclear terrorism and nonproliferation, which was authorized under the same 9/11 commission law, but the appointments came well after Congress’s 90-day deadline in November.

The new commission will provide a report offering recommendations to the government on how to go about securing fissile materials around the world and will be chaired by former Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., and vice-chaired by former Sen. Jim Talent, R-Mo.

Graham Allison, a former assistant secretary of State and director of Harvard’s Belfer Center, is one of the appointees. He agreed with Curtis’ analysis, pointing out similar ideas from his book, “Nuclear Terrorism: the Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe,” on the nuclear threat posed by terrorist groups such as al Qaeda.

Allison said the group’s objective is to kill 4 million Americans, including 2 million children, which they justified in a fatwa, to balance the deaths of Muslims at the hands of “Jewish-Christian crusaders,” Allison said. “You’re not going to kill 4 million people by hijacking airplanes and crashing them into buildings.”

While nobody knows for sure what the chances are of an attack, the consequences make the different estimates an issue of secondary importance, he said. The commission would present a nonpartisan opportunity to take stock on the progress made since 9/11.

“I think the inspiration of the people who created the commission is that a bunch of independent people looking at the evidence will, I think, agree on both the urgency of this agenda, but also on specific things to be done,” Allison said.

To be successful, the commission will have to be specific about what the president and new Congress can do to overcome past obstacles; the goal, he said, must be to gain the international community’s assistance in choking off the threat of proliferation at the source, allowing no loose nuclear weapons, no new fissile materials, and no new nuclear states.

“There’s no more important issue in my view,” Allison said.

CQ © 2007 All Rights Reserved | Congressional Quarterly Inc. 1255 22nd Street N.W. Washington, D.C. 20037 | 202-419-8500

http://www.cqpolitics.com/wmspage.cfm?docid=hsnews-000002881258

al-Canine

05-23-2008, 05:42 PM

America in Ashes?

By Christopher S. Carson
FrontPageMagazine.com | 5/23/2008

The latest audio message from al-Qaeda, reportedly from Osama bin Laden himself, is only the most recent confirmation that the jihadist threat to the West remains real and deadly serious. But the fact that it could take the form of nuclear terrorism should be most worrying to citizens and policy makers alike.

Where a nuclear attack once may have been beyond the capacities of stateless terrorists, that is no longer the case. One need only consider Khalid Sheik Mohammed (KSM), mastermind of 9/11 and chief operating officer of al-Qaeda, who revealed under intensive interrogation -- including the much-maligned tactic of waterboarding -- that a nuclear attack against the United States was a top priority for al-Qaeda.

According to the New York Daily News and its sources, the captive KSM told his interrogators that Osama bin Laden was planning a “nuclear hell storm” in America. Normally such a lurid claim would be disbelieved by our “inside-the-box” intelligence officers, but KSM’s recovered laptop had corroborating details.

The agents learned that the chain of command for this new operation went simply: bin Laden, his terrorist doctor Ayman al-Zawahiri, a mysterious scientist named “Dr. X,” and an operational coordinator. The scientist turned out to be Dr. A.Q. Khan, the founder of Pakistan’s atomic bomb, national hero, and nuke material proliferator extraordinaire. The operations ringleader was known as “Jafer the Pilot” (Jaffer al-Tayyar). This ID was corroborated by former al-Qaeda No. 3 Abu Zubaydah when he himself was waterboarded.

Dr. Khan’s input was important: One month before 9/11, according to The Washington Post, bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, met around a blazing campfire with Pakistani scientists from an A.Q. Khan-affiliated group called Umma Tameer-E-Nau, to discuss how al-Qaeda could build a nuclear device themselves and ship it to a target.

The night meeting went well. 'Jafer the Pilot" is the nom de guerre of U.S. citizen Adnan el-Shukrijumah. Young, intelligent, fluent in multiple languages and a trained jet pilot who had apparently been in flight schools with Mohammed Atta, Shukrijumah had studied and worked with other jihadis at the 5-megawatt nuclear reactor at McMaster University in Canada. But one day all the terrorists disappeared from campus forever.

John Loftus of WABC news reported on November 7, 2003, that in the immediate wake of Shukrijumah and his fellow travelers’ disappearance, 180 pounds of uranium ended up “missing” from the reactor. Pakistani journalist Hamid Mir, who interviewed Osama bin Laden in the wake of 9/11, reported bin Laden saying that one of the founders of al-Qaeda, Anas el-Liby, had helped the Pilot haul out the stash of uranium.

McMaster U. has always insisted that no material was ever missing from the reactor, but instead claims that low-grade radiological material did turn up missing from their pharmacological/medical labs at the time. Paul Williams, author of The Day of Islam, published the Loftus-Mir assertions in his book and elsewhere. For his trouble, he was promptly sued by the University for $4,000,000. The suit is still pending.

But the Pilot and his atomically-inclined friends had not gone to live in a cave somewhere in Waziristan like their bosses had. Shukrijumah had much work to do for his “American Hiroshima” plan, which would detonate actual nuclear bombs in seven American cities at once. Paul Williams surmises that Osama bin Laden’s increasingly messianic pronouncements over the airwaves are psychologically tied up with his expectations of the nuclear destruction of the Great Satan—with bin Laden himself as the prophesied Mahdi, the fiery culmination of 1,600 years of Islamic history.

Whatever pangs of conscience remaining to the plotters as they contemplated burning millions of women and children alive was thoroughly assuaged by bin Laden’s diplomacy. The supremo had duly arranged for a compliant mullah to issue a fatwa, which expressly authorized the destruction of the United States of American in clouds of atomic ash. Entitled “A Treatise on the Legal Status of Using Weapons of Mass Destruction Against Infidels,” and dated May 2003, this fatwa can be read online by all the faithful. FBI chief Robert Mueller has also said that there is a “clear intent” by al-Qaeda to acquire and use nuclear weapons against the United States. As far back as 1993, said Mueller, Osama bin Laden had attempted to buy uranium from a source in the Sudan. Why should we expect him to stop in the last 15 years?

One thing is certain: homicidal doctor Ayman al-Zawahiri's made a decision when KSM was captured: Cancel that planned mass cyanide gas attack in the New York subway system. He told the operational plotters to stand down because "we have something better in mind,” which would presumably suck up all the resources then available to him. What would be “better” than a mass cyanide attack in a confined urban rush-hour space? There is only one thing more murderous.

Unfortunately, even in 2004, the American intelligence services tasked with protecting the country seemed about as prepared for the Pilot as they were for the Hamburg Cell of 9/11. One full year after KSM spilled his guts in a secret CIA prison in Eastern Europe, Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director John Mueller issued a joint press conference that everyone should be on the lookout for five exceedingly dangerous terrorists. Adnan al-Shukrijumah, the Pilot, was first on the list. Director Mueller called him the “Next Mohammed Atta.” The American Hiroshima plan was not specifically mentioned, presumably to prevent panic in the country.

It turns out that the Pilot himself need not have been panicked. Several days after the press conference naming Shukrijumah, a certain Samuel Mac, the manager of a Denny’s restaurant in Avon, Colorado, became uneasy as he served two “demanding, rude and obnoxious” patrons at his restaurant. One of them looked, for all the world, like the guy he remembered was in the Ashcroft-Mueller press conference’s first poster: Adnan the Pilot. The other one, wolfing down a health-conscious chicken sandwich and a salad, looked like the guy the FBI said was Abderraouf Jdey, the head of al-Qaeda’s cell in Toronto. They said they were traveling cross-country.

From behind his counter, Mr. Mac looked at these patrons again. He figured at least Washington, D.C., would have an FBI office, so he called there. The agent who answered the phone was uninterested and referred him to the Denver office. Calling this number, Mr. Mac was left with an endless loop of voice mail. The purported al-Qaeda officials eventually strolled out of the restaurant and took off. Five hours later an agent from the Denver field office called back, took a few perfunctory notes, and said he’d pass the info along. Mr. Mac thoughtfully preserved the plates and utensils the men had eaten with, but no one ever bothered to come over and collect them for DNA evidence, or interviewed any of the restaurant’s employees. So much for the national “Be on the Lookout” alert.

The Pilot quickly resurfaced in Waziristan province, Pakistan, home of Osama and Dr. Zawahiri. In April 2004, according to Paul Williams’ sources in the FBI, where Williams had worked as a consultant, this turned out to be a “pivotal planning session” for the American Hiroshima plot, much as Kuala Lumpur in 2000 was the final planning session for the 9/11 plot. Mohammed Babar, an indicted terrorist, was also present. (Babar’s Islamic Thinkers Society had held placards while demonstrating outside the Israeli consulate in 2006, helpfully saying, “The Mushroom Cloud is On Its Way.”)

Thus funded and instructed, the Pilot flew to Honduras the next month, where he met with jefes of the violent street gang MS-13 (Mara Salvatruchas) and was noticed by the café owner, who had seen newspaper pictures of that Ashcroft-Mueller press conference. The Honduran security ministry confirmed Shukrijumah’s presence there, and also the Pilot’s multitude of calls then to France, the USA, and Canada.

Why was the Pilot meeting with MS-13 gang leaders? The answer became painfully obvious that summer, when he was seen again in Mexico in late August 2004, near “terrorist alley” in Sonora, the main thoroughfare for illegal aliens into the United States. MS-13 was the Pilot’s new supply chain and courier of nuclear material for the bombs he was setting up.

The Pilot was now moving around at will, with no hindrance, all through Latin America. U.S. intelligence got another too-late break in November, when Sharif al-Masri, an al-Qaeda official working directly with Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, was snatched and questioned by interrogators.

Al-Masri told his American captors that his bosses had arranged for nuclear supplies for bombs to be shipped into Mexico and thus into the USA with the help of the MS-13 street gang. This created a new sense of urgency, because on November 1st, Mexican officials reported that a man looking very similar to Adnan al-Shukrijumah had just stolen and flown off with a Piper PA Pawnee crop duster near Mexicali, destination unknown.

Since 2005, the Pilot has vanished from sight.

While the mainstream media currently mostly ignore this story and the almost certain fact that a nuclear plot is ongoing today, Senator Joseph Lieberman has held at least three separate hearings in 2008 of his Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs on this very subject.

The testimony from experts summoned to these hearings has been grim. Nobody doubts that once terrorists acquire fissile material, which is either Highly Enriched Uranium (HEU) or plutonium, a bomb is within their theoretical capacity and will to make and use. A simple gun-type device, like that used for the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima, is sufficient to yield a one to ten kiloton explosion.

Al-Qaeda has been increasing its recruitment for nuclear-skilled workers. Al-Qaeda-in-Iraq leader Abu Ayyub al-Masri issued a public call in September 2006 for “people of distinguished skills and high levels of expertise…particularly…nuclear scientists and explosives engineers” to work with al-Qaeda-in-Iraq. The mainstream media and the Democratic officeholders ignored this proclamation, because the counterinsurgency effort in Iraq is supposed to be a “distraction” from the “real” war on terror, which to them presumably would not include a mushroom cloud over Chicago.

The only good news is that terrorists cannot make HEU or plutonium; they have to get it from somewhere else. HEU is not found in nature and has to be juiced up from normal uranium. For that reason, HEU is highly prized on the world’s black markets. How will Adnan Shukrijumah get hold of this HEU (or even plutonium) to assemble into working bombs?

He has a range of options. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has documented 15 incidents of theft and smuggling of small amounts of separated plutonium or highly enriched uranium confirmed by the nations involved. But these 15 cases represent the tip of the iceberg of what has actually occurred. So there is always just approaching the right people and buying it—not an easy task, but not an impossible one either.

Nuclear terror expert Matthew Bunn testified last month that “Nuclear weapons or their essential ingredients exist in hundreds of buildings in dozens of countries, with security measures that range from excellent to appalling – in some cases, no more than a night watchman and a chain-link fence.”

In recent months, shadowy surveillance teams have been reported scoping out secret nuclear weapons facilities in Russia. They probably don’t have to be: In February 2006, Russian citizen Oleg Khinsagov was arrested in Georgia (along with three Georgian accomplices) with some 100 grams of 89 percent enriched HEU, claiming that he had kilograms more available for sale. We can’t know how many thefts that occurred were never detected. Dr. Bunn told Senator Lieberman that “it is a sobering fact that nearly all of the stolen HEU and plutonium that has been seized over the years had never been missed before it was seized.”

The Pilot doesn’t need too much HEU for his seven-city destruction plan. For one “simple” gun-type design HEU bomb, roughly 50 kilograms of HEU would be needed – roughly the size of a six-pack.

The Pilot could also try hitting up a HEU-based research facility, like his old alma mater McMaster University, although McMaster apparently didn’t employ HEU per se. But some 130 research reactors around the world still do use HEU as their fuel.

Or has he already? The Washington Post, right before last Christmas, reported a strange story. Sometime in the night of November 8, 2007, two coordinated teams of armed men attacked the Pelindaba nuclear facility in South Africa, where hundreds of kilograms of weapon-grade highly enriched uranium (HEU) are stored.

One of the teams was chased off by the guards, but the other team of four gunmen disabled the perimeter alarms, went to the emergency control center and shot a worker in the chest. Bleeding out, the worker was still able to sound the first alarm.

He might not have bothered. The attack team then spent 45 minutes inside the perimeter, without anyone harassing them. What they did next is unknown to the public. The team promptly disappeared through the same hole they had cut in the fence. South African officials later arrested three individuals, but soon released them. The South African government has since been close-lipped about what really happened last November, and it has refused earlier U.S. offers to remove the HEU at Pelindaba—if indeed any remains after the attack. We don’t even know how much HEU, if any, was spirited away.

But surely the point is not whether the Pilot hit this specific facility. It is that he could well have—or dozens of others like it. We do know that if a 10 kiloton A-bomb, somewhat smaller than the bomb that obliterated Hiroshima, is set off at ground level in midtown Manhattan, the death toll would be perhaps half a million people. We could expect roughly $1 trillion in direct economic damage from this one bomb alone. Multiply this by seven bombs, and we can expect the wholesale depopulation of America’s cities in fear, incalculable economic devastation, and the end of the country as we currently know it.

Chicago naturally is on the list of targets. According to nuke expert Dr. Graham Allison, the HEU needed to nuke the city is smaller than a football. He writes, “If a bomb were put in the back of a tanker truck, driven downtown, and detonated at the Sears Tower, everything within a third of a mile would vanish. The United Center and all of Grant Park would look like the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. The resulting firestorm and cloud of fallout would reach nearly to U.S. Cellular Field and Wrigley Field.”

The experts are not talking about vague probabilities far into the future. Former Clinton Secretary of Defense William Perry and former Assistant Secretary of Defense Graham Allison are among those who have estimated that chance at more than 50 percent over the next decade. That is, two respected experts in the field believe that the nuclear destruction of one or more American urban centers is more probable than not in the very near future.

Al-Qaeda keeps increasing the number of Americans it publicly dreams of killing in its nuclear hellstorm. In 2002, Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, Osama bin Laden’s former official press spokesman, claimed the right for jihadis “to kill four million Americans.” Just one year later, in his fatwa declaring the use of WMD obligatory, Nasir al-Fahd put the number of Americans that it is permissible to kill without further ado at 10 million souls, roughly 3 million of them children.

Because a nuclear attack would achieve the greatest possible destruction on American soil, there is every reason to think that the terrorists are plotting its execution. The question confronting American policy makers is: Are we prepared to stop this threat before it becomes a terrible reality?

Christopher S. Carson, formerly of the American Enterprise Institute, is an attorney in private practice in Milwaukee. He holds a masters degree in Security Studies from Georgetown University.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=E29D7031-7223-48B3-8209-F468FD04ECD5

al-Canine

05-27-2008, 07:57 AM

New al-Qaeda video (http://www.wincoast.com/forum/showthread.php?t=76416) calls for nuclear strike

Dubai, 27 May (AKI ) - By Hamza Boccolini - A new video called "Nuclear Terrorism" has been posted on the worldwide web calling for jihadists to use nuclear or chemical weapons to strike the west.

A simple jihadi propaganda video or a dangerous message to a sleeper cell in the west? That is the question raised by the video and no-one has yet claimed responsibility for it.

"Strike civilians in the west without mercy using weapons of mass destruction" is one of the calls made in the 39-minute video.

The question now being asked is whether the video is presenting a coded message or signalling an imminent terrorist attack.

Before the video was posted on the Arab internet forum Ekhlas a banner headline appeared on the website that said: "Pray, pray, Allah is great. America is destroyed by a fatal jihadist nuclear strike."

Clicking on the banner gives the viewer access to a documentary which shows diverse images - from al-Qaeda speeches to western documentaries and other Islamist videos.

The objective appears to be to incite followers of al-Qaeda to use weapons of mass destruction to strike the west, but there may be more to it.

The video opens with two verses of the Koran that emphasise "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth". It then says "Fight them until there is no more persecution and Allah is the only object of worship. If they desist, there will be no hostility, except against those who are dishonest."

"Attack those who attack you. Fear Allah and know that Allah is with those who fear Him."

The documentary, filmed in Arabic, begins with images of a documentary distributed in November 2004 by the Italian news network, Rai News 24 entitled, The Hidden Massacre, in which US soldiers allegedly used chemical weapons against Iraqis in the city of Falluja.

It also includes the voice of an Arab jihadist who appears to be giving a lesson to a group of people on the need to conduct attacks against the US and Europe.

"This is called terrorism, but we cannot stop aggression against our countries if we do not use these arms, as Russia and the US did when they were conducting their arms race. If you have them, we must also have them."

Then a voice off camera invites mujahadeen or Muslim fighters to learn how to obtain these weapons of mass destruction and shows a document on the "rules for using weapons of mass destruction against the unbelievers" written by Saudi scholar Naser Bin Hamed al-Fahd.

The document dated 21 May 2003 was written by one of the Saudi ulema or religious leaders close to the Salafite movement and to movements opposed to the Saudi royal family that support al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden.

"They kill our people and for this reason we should also strike them with weapons of mass destruction - doing so forms part of our response to their attacks,"

"In Jihad we cannot do to them everything they do to us, for example rape our women. But we can respond to weapons of mass destruction.

"There are quantities of uranium on sale, and since the fall of the Soviet Union their nuclear weapons are available on the market.

"The second point is in respect of chemical weapons. They can be used in one of the villages of European countries. This is called terrorism but all this cannot end if we don't conduct such an operation against them.

"We cannot stop the operations against our civilians conducted by Jews and Christians in our countries if we don't do the same thing.

"The problem is nuclear arms are very expensive, while chemical weapons are cheap.

"The best weapons to use are bacteriological ones. This type of barbarous weapon is used by the international community.

"Why shouldn't we use them if the crusaders consider them an effective weapons?"

http://www.adnkronos.com/AKI/English/Security/?id=1.0.2199898302

NYer

05-27-2008, 04:27 PM

The video apparently ends with:

2B-68-aP-7m-(9)

Anyone have any clue as to its meaning?

OTOH, this could be a reprise of the infamous Countdown Clock of several years ago.

Casey

05-27-2008, 05:00 PM

Nuclear Jihad
http://wincoast.com/forum/showthread.php?p=1275928#post1275928

NYer

05-27-2008, 05:16 PM

From the Comments section on The Jawa Report. Also mentioned is a familiar name - Adnan Gulshair el Shukrijumah (http://mypetjawa.mu.nu/archives/192837.php)

September Attack? (http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=it&u=http://www.estense.com/%3Fmodule%3Ddisplaystory%26story_id%3D36930%26form at%3Dhtml&sa=X&oi=translate&resnum=3&ct=result&prev=/search%3Fq%3D2B-68-aP-7m-(9)%26hl%3Den%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-US:official%26hs%3DUyQ) Pardon the Google translation.

Casey

05-27-2008, 11:47 PM

New al-Qaeda video (http://www.wincoast.com/forum/showthread.php?t=76416) calls for nuclear strike

Before the video was posted on the Arab internet forum Ekhlas a banner headline appeared on the website that said: "Pray, pray, Allah is great. America is destroyed by a fatal jihadist nuclear strike."

[/url]

For the record, I just thought I would mention that I obtained this video and the associated message on the evening of May 25th from a forum other than Ekhlas.

al-Canine

05-28-2008, 09:52 AM

Just move along, folks... nothing to see here, according to "unidentified Intelligence officials"...

:rolleyes:

U.S. Intelligence Group Dismisses Report of Al-Qaeda WMD Tape

By Ed Johnson

May 28 (Bloomberg) -- A U.S.-based intelligence group dismissed a media report that al-Qaeda may release a video recording calling on militants to attack the West with biological, chemical or nuclear weapons.

ABC News cited unidentified intelligence officials as saying the tape may be released on the Internet within 24 hours and that the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation sent a bulletin to 18,000 law enforcement agencies across the country.

The tape referred to in the report was made by supporters of al-Qaeda and released May 26, titled ``Nuclear Jihad, The Ultimate Terror,'' IntelCenter, based in Alexandria, Virginia, said in an e-mailed statement today.

``The material in these types of videos does not qualify as an official message from al-Qaeda or any other group,'' said IntelCenter, which provides counterterrorism intelligence support to the U.S., British, Australian and Canadian armed forces. ``Considering them so would be the equivalent of considering a 10-year-old's homemade fan video of his favorite sports team to be an official team message.''

The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security have no intelligence of any specific plot or threat to the U.S., ABC News cited bureau spokesman Richard Kolko as saying.

``There have been several reports that al-Qaeda will release a new message calling for the use of weapons of mass destruction against civilians,'' the broadcaster cited him as saying on its Web site.

IntelCenter said it wasn't aware of ``any new imminent message by al-Qaeda or any other leading jihadist group in audio or video form'' that will call for the use of weapons of mass destruction against civilians.

Al-Qaeda's media production unit as-Sahab regularly releases messages on the Internet. Earlier this month, the terrorist network released an audio message from its leader, Osama bin Laden, timed to coincide with Israel's 60th anniversary and President George W. Bush's visit to the region. In it, bin Laden condemned countries that are supportive of the Jewish state.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=azMBEkl_3hCk&refer=us

NYer

05-28-2008, 11:47 AM

Punked? (http://counterterrorismblog.org/2008/05/intel_community_caught_by_appa.php)

There has been no notification posted on the usual channels, there are no glitzy advertisements, and there is no credible electronic chatter, period. Rather, the intel community appears to have (once again) fallen victim to poorly researched open source news reporting. In recent days, several fringe media organizations have published stories about a video recording posted by anonymous Al-Qaida miscreants on extremist Internet chat forums. The video consisted of a remarkably amateurish mash-up of Discovery Channel documentaries, widely published sermons by radical clerics, and stolen propaganda footage. While it is perhaps true that the video offered subtle encouragement for nuclear attacks on the United States, it featured no original content and could have been clumsily strung together with little more than two VCRs. The video was meandering, boring, and difficult to follow--and it certainly was not the product of Al-Qaida.

freeman

05-28-2008, 12:13 PM

total

al-Canine

05-28-2008, 12:40 PM

...the intel community appears to have (once again) fallen victim to poorly researched open source news reporting

Well.... better safe than sorry. Someday, one of those "open source" news bits may actually yield important clues to a possible attack.

The 801

05-28-2008, 02:49 PM

Unfortunately, sometimes, when you cry wolf, there is a wolf.
I would rather see a report than not.
At least it causes a study of the dross for future alerts.
801

Casey

05-28-2008, 05:01 PM

Personally, I feel this was a notable event.

There are several things that have not been said, including the fact that during the same time period as this video appearing, one of the last fatwa's regarding the use of WMD against the infidels was posted, both events should definitely be noted.

I watch these weekend releases propaganda or otherwise, and the flutter that takes place on the Mondays/Tuesdays depending on whether it is a long weekend or not, both in the media, and Government statements, very carefully.

IMO, it is not good what is happening especially if anyone is studying this phenomenon.

In fact the Pearl Harbor strategy comes to mind time and time again. You want to cause the West a lot of harm, strike on a weekend, better yet, a long weekend.

It is a known fact that we employ part-time, inexperienced, people on those occasions.

Just some things to consider.
__________________________

And personally, I would be a little more concerned with the latest information in the Internet Training v.4 thread
http://wincoast.com/forum/showthread.php?p=1276408#post1276408

and hope that that information is being investigated and alerts sent out to the people who need to know about it.

This information is much more threatening and slipped out under the radar via mail groups to many, many people.

2 cents.

Casey

05-30-2008, 02:00 PM

U.N. nuclear agency helping China minimize threat of 'dirty bomb' at Beijing Olympics

VIENNA, Austria (AP) The U.N. nuclear agency said Friday it is helping China minimize the threat of a terrorist targeting the Beijing Olympics with a radiological ''dirty bomb,'' although officials stressed they have no intelligence pointing to such an attack.

Anita Nilsson, head of nuclear security for the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency, said agency experts were assisting the Chinese authorities with simulated exercises designed to test their response.

Over the past 18 months, IAEA teams have overseen simulations that included a bogus attempt to smuggle a small radioactive device into an Olympics venue, and the abandonment in a restaurant of a package purportedly containing radioactive isotopes, Nilsson said.

Peter Colgan, one of her deputies, said the exercises went ''very well.'' The Chinese will use small, discreet radiation detectors at the Olympic venues, he said.

Colgan said the IAEA has held eight training courses with China's nuclear safety agency, including sessions on how to track missing radioactive materials. China has both atomic energy reactors and a nuclear weapons arsenal.

Nilsson said the IAEA is unaware of any intelligence suggesting terrorists are preparing to strike the Aug. 8-24 games but she said the international community could take no chances because large spectator events such as the Olympics always are potential targets.

''We can't afford not to take precautions,'' she told reporters. ''It's necessary to do as much as possible to have good, secure games.''

She declined to say how well-prepared the IAEA thinks China is in handling such a threat.

A dirty bomb would use conventional explosives to spread radioactive material across an urban area. Experts warn that even a device that released a small amount of low-level material could have significant psychological impact and pose serious economic consequences because of cleanup problems.

The IAEA helped Greece minimize the chances of a similar threat at the 2004 Athens Olympics the first games held after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the U.S.

The U.N. nuclear watchdog agency also helped Germany tighten security during the 2006 soccer World Cup, and its experts worked with Brazil during last summer's Pan American Games.

After the 9/11 attacks, the IAEA scrambled to improve its efforts to help member states tighten security around nuclear and other radioactive materials. ''The overarching goal is to make it very difficult for a perpetrator to steal them,'' Nilsson said.

Despite the warnings, there have been no dirty bomb attacks, prompting skeptics to question whether assembling such a weapon is as easy as experts suggest it is.

But the IAEA said the Chinese and the rest of the world need to become more vigilant as threats evolve.

''It's like an airplane full of petrol flying into a building,'' Colgan said. ''The threat was always there. It's just that no one really thought about it'' until after the 9/11 attacks.

http://cbs11tv.com/localsportswire/22.0.html?type=national&serviceLevel=s&category=s&filename=UN-Nuclear-Olympics.xml
On the Net:

IAEA, www.iaea.org

NYer

05-31-2008, 08:34 PM

Is this the same IAEA that is repeatedly shocked and surprised by Iran's intransigence? Why should the Chinese feel secure?

The 801

06-02-2008, 10:15 AM

Nuclear bomb blueprints for sale on world black market, experts fear

· Warning as Swiss destroy documents to prevent leak
· Copies may remain with data smuggling network

* Ian Traynor, Europe editor

* Saturday May 31

Nuclear bomb blueprints and manuals on how to manufacture weapons-grade uranium for warheads are feared to be circulating on the international black market, according to investigators tracking the world's most infamous nuclear smuggling racket.

Alarm about the sale of nuclear know-how follows the disclosure that the Swiss government, allegedly acting under US pressure, secretly destroyed tens of thousands of documents from a massive nuclear smuggling investigation.

The information was seized from the home and computers of Urs Tinner, a 43-year-old Swiss engineer who has been in custody for almost four years as a key suspect in the nuclear smuggling ring run by Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Pakistani metallurgist who in 2004 admitted leaking nuclear secrets and is under house arrest in Islamabad.

The Khan network trafficked nuclear materials, equipment and knowhow to at least three countries: Iran, Libya, and North Korea.

President Pascal Couchepin stunned his Swiss compatriots last week by announcing that the Tinner files, believed to number around 30,000 documents, had been shredded. The extraordinary move, prompting demands for a parliamentary inquiry, was warranted to prevent the documents "getting into the hands of a terrorist organisation or an unauthorised state", according to Couchepin.

However, there are widespread fears this has already happened or still could. "We know that copies were made," said Mark Fitzpatrick, an expert on the illicit networks at the British-based International Institute of Strategic Studies (IISS). "Both US intelligence and the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN's nuclear watchdog] had been pursuing this with great urgency and diligence. But what happened to the other copies that [Tinner] made? It is worrisome that there are other plans floating around somewhere out there."

Testimony at the 2006 trial of another Khan network suspect in Germany alleged that Tinner told investigators he had nuclear bomb designs at his office in Switzerland. The blueprints were in digital form and are believed to have been copied on to the network's computers in Dubai, the hub for the Khan operation.

"It's amazing these people had so much information, incredibly sensitive stuff on nuclear weaponisation and gas centrifuges," said David Albright, a Washington-based former UN weapons inspector. "I'm sure the US got a copy. But who else got the documents? Can you believe these two, the brothers [Marco Tinner is also in custody] were the only ones who got the stuff?"

In his first interview since 2004 with the western media this week, Khan told the Guardian that the Swiss case proved that anyone seeking a nuclear bomb could easily obtain the wherewithal in the west.

He pledged he would never assist western or UN authorities and asserted that his "confession" of February 2004 was coerced by the Pakistani regime.

While the Swiss government maintains the treasure trove of nuclear intelligence was destroyed for reasons of national security, the Americans may have been involved because Tinner is believed to have also been working for the CIA. Albright said Tinner was recruited by the American agency from 1999-2000.

"The Swiss were doing other people's dirty work," said an international official familiar with the investigation into the Khan network. "The allegation is that Urs was on the CIA payroll for a very large sum of money."

Olli Heinonen, deputy director general at the IAEA, has led the investigation into the Khan network for years. Last year his office sought and gained access to the Tinner files and some of his officials were also summoned to witness their destruction.

The Americans were also present, according to the international official. "The Americans were involved in the destruction. They were calling the shots," he said. The IAEA refused to comment publicly on the case. A former senior IAEA official said: "I am quite astonished. It's very unusual to see people destroying documents like this. They should be put somewhere very safe.

"The real question is how many copies of these documents existed. If copies were made, where did they go. That's the main issue."

The documents unearthed in the Tinner investigation were so "explosive", said the government in Bern, that it was obliged to destroy them as a non-nuclear state that is a signatory to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.

President Couchepin said: "There were detailed construction plans for nuclear weapons, for gas ultracentrifuges to enrich weapons-grade uranium as well as for guided missile delivery systems."

Had the evidence been presented in court, compromising and embarrassing information about the CIA's activities with the Khan network could have surfaced, say experts and officials.

However, destroying the evidence will jeopardise a successful prosecution of Tinner, whose brother, Marco, and father Friedrich have allegedly long been associated with the Khan network.

Friedrich Tinner's relationship with Khan goes back to the 1980s. He was also investigated for aiding Saddam Hussein's alleged nuclear bomb projects.

"The Swiss family headed by Friedrich Tinner was key to the Khan network for many years," wrote Fitzpatrick of the IISS in a study last year of the Khan network.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/may/31/nuclear.internationalcrime

The keywords to watch on google news is : Khan Network

801

NYer

06-02-2008, 03:47 PM

Blueprints for a Nuclear Weapon were freely available on the internet 14 years ago. Just saying ...

al-Canine

06-05-2008, 09:00 AM

The keywords to watch on google news is : Khan Network

801

Father of Pakistan's Bomb Stands Defiant

Khan, Speaking Out From House Arrest, Insists Government Officials Had Role in Proliferation

By Candace Rondeaux
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, June 5, 2008

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- The garden is in full bloom at Abdul Qadeer Khan's house. A lazy summer haze has settled over his manse, and at the small police substation across the way, several men chitchatted amiably on a recent day, barely glancing at the upscale villa that for the past four years has been part prison, part palatial refuge for the father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb.

Until very recently, Khan has been virtually cut off from the world -- banished to house arrest by Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf after admitting in a national television broadcast in 2004 to selling nuclear weapons-making technology and know-how to Iran, North Korea and Libya. But as Pakistan marked the 10th anniversary of its first nuclear bomb test last week, Khan, 72, publicly disavowed his confession, telling reporters that it was coerced.

"The people who were advising me to do this said, 'No one will believe it. This statement has no legal value. Everyone knows you are a national hero,' " Khan said this week in a telephone interview with The Washington Post.

Pakistan has been under pressure for years to give the United States and the International Atomic Energy Agency access to Khan. So far, the government has refused, saying Pakistan has already conducted its own investigation into Khan's nuclear dealings. Yet more recently, as Musharraf's power here has waned, so too, it seems, has American interest in Khan, according to a U.S. official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject.

"I'm sure we would oppose his release, but you know, as time goes on, I suppose his information gets less and less valuable," the official said. "No one has sort of thought about Mr. A.Q. Khan in a while."

Reviled in the West as the ringleader of an illicit international nuclear-arms bazaar, Khan remains a much respected figure in Pakistan for building the bomb. In the interview, Khan struck a defiant tone about his role in the development of nuclear technology, denying any wrongdoing and saying he would never talk to U.S. or IAEA officials about his work.

"Why should I talk to them? Pakistan is a sovereign nation. We are not a colony. I did whatever my government wanted me to do. I gave them whatever they wanted. We have not violated any laws," Khan said, noting that Pakistan is not part of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Khan, who was born in Bhopal, India, 11 years before the violent partition that led to the creation of Pakistan in 1947, began his career as a student of metallurgy in Europe in the early 1960s. After completing his PhD in electrical engineering and metallurgy in Belgium in 1971, he went to work in the Netherlands for FDO, a Dutch company that was a subcontractor to Urenco, a British, German and Dutch consortium tasked with developing nuclear fuel.

His career in nuclear espionage began shortly after he was hired, three years after Pakistan was routed in a war with India over what is now Bangladesh in 1971. In the interview, he said it was his country's humiliating defeat that had sparked his desire to help Pakistan build the bomb. He said the creation of a nuclear weapons program was a proud achievement that has kept the two longtime rivals from going to war.

"My work to support Pakistan was that we showed that we could not be overrun by India, that we should not find ourselves in the position we found ourselves in in '71 with East Pakistan," he said.

Yet, it was his work to create an international underground network of nuclear technology sales that gained him the most notoriety in recent years. Dutch officials have said that the CIA was alerted as early as 1975 that Khan was stealing plans to build centrifuges to enrich uranium -- a key component for nuclear weapons -- from his Dutch employer.

In time, Khan returned to Pakistan, where under the government of then-Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, he led the nation's nuclear development program and began cultivating ties that helped Pakistan acquire the necessary knowledge and equipment from China, Europe and North Korea.

In May 1998, Pakistan conducted five underground nuclear bomb tests. It was around that time that the outlines of Khan's shadowy dealings with nations such as Libya and North Korea began to emerge. Musharraf, in his 2006 autobiography, said he received information that North Korean nuclear scientists had visited Khan's research lab in 1999. "There could be no doubt that it was he [Khan] who had been peddling our technology," Musharraf wrote of a CIA briefing he later received about Khan's activities in 2003.

Musharraf pardoned Khan days after his confession was broadcast four years ago. The government has since insisted that neither it nor the Pakistani military was aware of Khan's secret network.

Khan, in the interview, said he would not speak in detail about his work or identify his associates, but said others in the military and in Musharraf's government were culpable in the proliferation of nuclear technology. "The truth will come out about how they are treated, who is responsible. Those facts will come out," Khan said.

Early this week, allegations surfaced in a book by Indian journalist Shyam Bhatia that Benazir Bhutto, the former prime minister slain in December, secretly carried CDs containing information about uranium enrichment to North Korea in 1993 in exchange for missile technology information. Asked whether the allegations were true, Khan said there was no way of establishing their "authenticity."

But Khan went on to say that he had regularly briefed Bhutto about Pakistan's nuclear program. "She knew the whole thing was going on," he said. "She was the prime minister."

Khan said Pakistani scientists had been hunting for a long-range missile to deliver the bomb and first turned to China for help. But China refused to share information about its longer-range missiles, he said. The goal, Khan said, was to build a nuclear weapon that could reach Pakistan's "only adversary" -- India.

"China had the missiles, but they were very restricted. They were becoming a world power and they wanted to show they could act responsibly," Khan said. "The only option was North Korea."

Khan said he is hopeful that Pakistan's newly elected government will further lift restrictions on his movements. "A lot of people are already pressing very hard for all the restrictions to go," he said. "This new government is busy with other things. They've been left almost with a dying patient. It will take some time to get their house in order, and I don't want to create problems."

Khan, who has been in poor health in recent years, said he decided to speak out now because he was worried that his legacy was in jeopardy. "I didn't want to leave behind the stigma for my family that their father or husband is a traitor or a bad man," he said.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/04/AR2008060403625.html

al-Canine

06-07-2008, 10:15 PM

Book Review: Planning ahead for terrorism

Alasdair Palmer reviews Terror and Consent: The Wars for the 21st Century by Philip Bobbit

What are we going to do when terrorists get hold of weapons of mass destruction? Philip Bobbitt is certain that it is only a matter of time - and not very much time at that, perhaps a decade at most - before a group of fanatics acquire a nuclear bomb. They won't build it themselves. They will procure it from someone else, possibly from officials who work for a sympathetic state, or possibly on the open market.

A.Q. Khan, the father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb, sold nuclear technology to several countries, including North Korea and Iran. Although Khan was arrested, the network for selling nuclear technology he created has, says Bobbitt, not been broken up and is still active.

So terrorists are going to get their hands on a nuclear device. Then what? They will use it, Bobbitt says, on a city in America or Europe.

Al-Qa'eda's goal is to kill as many people as possible in America and Europe: they've said so many times. They aren't interested in negotiation. The kind of society they want to achieve is so distant from the values that define Western cultures that there is nothing to negotiate about: for them, death is the point of the struggle.

They cannot be deterred by the prospect of an obliterating retaliation: terrorists in al-Qa'eda and related organisations want to die, and some of them will achieve that goal in the nuclear explosion they cause.

They will therefore detonate their bomb in a place that will kill the maximum number of people possible. There will be hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of casualties.

That scenario is so appalling that the overwhelming temptation is just to pretend that it can't, or won't, happen. It is one of the great merits of Terror and Consent that Bobbitt resolutely refuses to give in to that temptation: his book is shaped by his concentration on what he insists is not merely a terrifying possibility, but a terrifying certainty.

He thinks that our collective refusal to plan for it means that, when it does occur, our reaction will be so extreme and so determined by savage, uncontrolled rage, that we will end by transforming our liberal, law-governed polities into the image of the terrorists themselves - becoming 'terror states' that act outside the law, that disregard human rights and that terrorise their own citizens.

It has not escaped Bobbitt that there is a strong body of opinion that thinks that has already happened: that the destruction of the World Trade Centre and half of the Pentagon on 9/11 has led to the United States becoming a 'terror state'.

While appropriately critical of many of the stupid and damaging policies that the Bush administration has followed since the initiation of its 'war on terror', Bobbitt is also rightly contemptuous of the idea that America has slid into something that remotely resembles a 'terror state'.

He agrees with Bush that America and its allies are indeed at war with Islamist terrorists: more than that, he thinks this is the fundamental insight that needs to be accepted and appreciated before anything useful can be thought or said about how we should deal with terrorism.

He insists that Bush and his acolytes have been wrong to dismiss the role of international law, but he agrees with them that international law, as it stands, is quite incapable of dealing with the seriousness of the situation that confronts us.

Devised to stop nation states going to war again as they did in the Second World War, the current framework of international law is, claims Bobbitt, out of date in a world in which wars are increasingly between nations and terrorists.

Bobbitt argues forcefully in favour of pre-emptive strikes against terrorists and the states that harbour them. He hopes that we can achieve sufficient international consensus to re-write international law in a way that would allow the US to intervene pre-emptively in other countries, and which would also mean that the US would have broad international support when it did so.

I share that hope - but I have to say I don't see the slightest chance of it ever coming to fruition. The fault-lines that stop agreement on critical matters such as who has a right to intervene, when and where, are often the result of profound differences.

It is a beguiling illusion to think that globalisation has made all nations in the world share the same fundamental values, but it is an illusion none the less.

Even if globalisation does eventually lead to common agreement about the right to 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness', there remains the fact that much, perhaps most, violent disagreement between nations is the result simply of the inequality of power that defines relations between them.

The sense of humiliation that this inequality generates, together with the need to 'get even' for that humiliation, cannot be overcome by arguments but only by equalising power-relationships - something that I cannot see ever taking place.

I admire Bobbitt's intellectual skill and courage, and I learnt an enormous amount from his determination to find a better way to secure our collective future, even if I did not often agree that his prescriptions could be made to work.

But he still leaves us with the problem of what to do about the certainty that terrorists are going to acquire nuclear bombs. I don't know what the answer is, but I know we need to start thinking about it.

Bobbitt's book initiates that process, and for that alone it is worth buying. Read it and tremble.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2008/06/08/bobob108.xml

The 801

06-15-2008, 02:16 PM

Nuclear Ring Reportedly Had Advanced Weapon Design

Article Tools Sponsored By
By DAVID E. SANGER
Published: June 15, 2008

WASHINGTON — American and international investigators say that they have found the electronic blueprints for an advanced nuclear weapon on computers that belonged to the nuclear smuggling network run by Abdul Qadeer Khan, the rogue Pakistani nuclear scientist, but that they have not been able to determine whether they were sold to Iran or the smuggling ring’s other customers.

The plans appear to closely resemble a nuclear weapon that was built by Pakistan and first tested exactly a decade ago. But when confronted with the design by officials of the International Atomic Energy Agency last year, Pakistani officials insisted that Dr. Khan, who has been lobbying in recent months to be released from the loose house arrest that he has been under since 2004, did not have access to Pakistan’s weapons designs.

In interviews in Vienna, Islamabad and Washington over the past year, officials have said that the weapons design was far more sophisticated than the blueprints discovered in Libya in 2003, when Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi gave up his country’s nuclear weapons program. Those blueprints were for a Chinese nuclear weapon that dated to the mid-1960s, and investigators found that Libya had obtained them from the Khan network.

But the latest design found on Khan network computers in Switzerland, Bangkok and several other cities around the world is half the size and twice the power of the Chinese weapon, with far more modern electronics, the investigators say. The design is in electronic form, they said, making it easy to copy — and they have no idea how many copies of it are now in circulation.

Investigators said the evidence that the Khan network was trafficking in a tested, compact and efficient bomb design was particularly alarming, because if a country or group obtained the bomb design, the technological information would significantly shorten the time needed to build a weapon. Among the missiles that could carry the smaller weapon, according to some weapons experts, is the Iranian Shahab III, which is based on a North Korean design.

However, in recent days top American intelligence officials, who declined to speak about the discovery on the record because the information is classified, said that they had been unable to determine whether Iran or other countries had obtained the weapons design. Pakistan has refused to allow American investigators to directly interview Dr. Khan, who is considered a hero there as the father of its nuclear program. In recent weeks the only communications about him between the United States and Pakistan’s new government have been warnings from Washington not to allow him to be released.

Dr. Khan’s illicit nuclear network was broken up in early 2004; President Bush declared that shattering the operation was a major intelligence coup for the United States. Since then, evidence has emerged that the network sold uranium enrichment technology to Iran, North Korea and Libya, and investigators are still pursing leads that he may have done business with other countries as well.

While Libya gave up its nuclear program, North Korea and Iran have not, despite intense international pressure, sanctions, and repeated offers of incentives to do so.

On Sunday, Mr. Bush’s national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, said that the administration remained concerned about the possibility that additional plans have been disseminated, but he did not address any of the latest revelations about the Khan network.

“We’re very concerned about the A.Q. Khan network, both in terms of what they were doing by purveying enrichment technology and also the possibility that there would be weapons-related technology associated with it,” he told reporters traveling with Mr. Bush from Paris to London on Sunday.

“That was a concern. That’s one of the reasons we rolled up the network here three years or so ago, and fairly successfully. And part of that rolling up was to roll up the network and part of it was to pursue what kind of relationship the A.Q. Khan network had to individual countries with which they are dealing.”

The existence of the compact bomb design began to become public in recent weeks after Switzerland announced that it had destroyed a huge stockpile of documents, including a weapons design, that were found in the computers of a family in Switzerland, the Tinners, who over the years played critical roles in Khan’s operation.

In May, Switzerland’s president, Pascal Couchepin, announced that more than 30,000 documents had been shredded, saying the government acted to keep them from “getting into the hands of a terrorist organization or an unauthorized state,” according to Swiss news accounts.

But American and I.A.E.A. officials say that destroying one copy of an electronic file was more satisfying to the Swiss than it was reassuring to them. It is unclear whether the Swiss knew that some of the same material had been found in other countries by I.A.E.A. investigators.

Some details of the Swiss action and the bomb design have appeared recently in Swiss newspapers and The Guardian of London and in The Washington Post on Sunday.

The Swiss have provided little information about exactly what they destroyed, but I.A.E.A. inspectors watched the destruction and American intelligence officials were deeply involved. “We were very happy they were destroyed,” one senior intelligence official said Friday. But he added that “what else is out there” remains a mystery. The Swiss destruction of the equipment came in response in the case of Urs Tinner, who has been in custody for more than four years but has not yet stood trial.

Two former Bush administration officials said they believed Mr. Tinner had provided information to the Central Intelligence Agency while he was still working for Dr. Khan, including some of the information that helped American and British officials intercept shipments of centrifuges on their way to Libya in 2003.

When news of that interception became public and Libya turned its $100 million program over to American and I.A.E.A. officials, President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan forced Dr. Khan to issue a vague confession and then placed him under house arrest. Dr. Khan has since renounced that confession in Pakistani and Western media, saying he made it only to save Pakistan greater embarrassment.

It was not until 2005 that officials of the I.A.E.A., which is based in Vienna, finally cracked the hard drives on the Khan computers recovered around the world. And as they sifted through files and images on the hard drives, investigators found tons of material — orders for equipment, names and places where the Khan network operated, even old love letters. In all, they found several terabytes of data, a huge amount to sift through.

“There was stuff about dealing with Iranians in 2003, about how to avoid intelligence agents,” said one official who had reviewed it. But the most important document was a digitized design for a nuclear bomb, one that investigators quickly recognized as Pakistani. “It was plain where this came from,” one senior official of the I.A.E.A. said. “But the Pakistanis want to argue that the Khan case is closed, and so they have said very little.”

In public statements, Pakistani officials have insisted that the Khan “incident,” as the call it, is now history, and they publicly declared nearly two years ago that their investigations are over.

A senior Pakistani official, interviewed in Islamabad in April, said that the information provided by the I.A.E.A. was “vague and incomplete,” and he insisted that because Dr. Khan’s laboratories specialized in the manufacture of the equipment needed to enrich uranium, “he was not involved in weapons designs.”

But investigators have no doubt that he was the source of the digitized bomb design. “Clearly, someone had tried to modernize it, to improve the electronics,” one said. “There were handwritten references to the electronics, and the question is, who was working on this?”

The officials said that parts of the design were coded so that they could be transferred quickly to an automated manufacturing system for the production of parts.

Steven Lee Myers contributed reporting from London.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/15/world/asia/15nuke.html?ei=5087&em=&en=7dae8fb60503ce92&ex=1213675200&pagewanted=all

The 801

06-16-2008, 07:55 PM

Dr Khan ‘network’ back in news

* Senior US official says Washington unsure of decision-maker in Pakistan
* Pakistani officials maintain Khan had no access to weapons during incarceration

By Khalid Hasan

WASHINGTON: United States officials have warned Pakistan in recent weeks that releasing Dr AQ Khan could cause a “world of trouble,” says a report in the New York Times on Monday.

The report says that since the AQ Khan network was apparently dismantled in 2004, further evidence “has emerged that the network sold uranium enrichment technology to Iran, North Korea and Libya”. It says that investigators are still pursuing leads that he may have done business with other countries. In recent months, officials have also begun to confirm that they discovered the electronic design for a bomb among material seized from “some of Dr Khan’s top lieutenants, a Swiss family, the Tinners”. Citing a senior foreign diplomat involved in the investigation, the daily says that the same design documents were found in computers in three other locations connected to Khan operatives.

The blueprints are said to bear a strong resemblance to weapons tested by Pakistan a decade ago, say two senior diplomats involved in the investigation. “Pakistani officials have balked at providing much information about the newly revealed warhead design, just as they have refused to allow the CIA or international atomic inspectors to directly interrogate Dr Khan,” the report adds.

Uncertainty: The report quotes a senior administration official who has been involved in the effort as saying that “The problem with Pakistan these days is that you never know who is making the decision — the army, the intelligence agencies, the president or the new government.””

No access: According to the report, Pakistani officials insist that Dr Khan had no access to weapons during his incarceration. However, it notes that this is the second weapons design found in the “smuggling network”. It also cites officials as saying that a smaller warhead created from the new design is “more efficient and easier to hide,” meaning it could become a “terrorist issue”.

On Sunday, US national security adviser Stephen Hadley said, “We’re very concerned about the AQ Khan network.” The existence of the compact bomb design has become public in recent weeks after Switzerland announced that it had destroyed a huge stockpile of documents, including weapon designs found in computers belonging to the Tinner family.

The newspaper said it was not until 2005 that IAEA officials finally cracked the hard drives on the Khan computers recovered around the world. “There was stuff about dealing with Iranians in 2003, about how to avoid intelligence agents,” said one official who had reviewed it. But the most important document was a digitised design for a nuclear bomb, one that investigators quickly recognised as Pakistani. “It was plain where this came from,” a senior official of the atomic energy agency said. “But the Pakistanis want to argue that the Khan case is closed, and so they have said very little.” Investigators and American intelligence officials say they have little doubt that Dr Khan was the source of the digitised bomb design. “Clearly, someone had tried to modernise it, to improve the electronics,” one said. “There were handwritten references to the electronics, and the question is, who was working on this?”

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2008%5C06%5C17%5Cstory_17-6-2008_pg1_7

candypreet

06-17-2008, 05:39 AM

good posts

NYer

06-17-2008, 10:50 AM

This means the end to deterrence as we know it.

NYer

06-17-2008, 07:38 PM

Iran may have had technology designs for Nuke warhead for ten years. (http://debka.com/article.php?aid=1354)

http://www.imakenews.com/imediainc/word_images/7991350_image001.gif

It is Debka, however.

NYer

06-19-2008, 08:31 AM

More Homeland Insecurity. (http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/04dfa24c-3db6-11dd-bbb5-0000779fd2ac.html?nclick_check=1)

al-Canine

07-27-2008, 05:48 PM

Here's a lengthy, somewhat controversial opinion piece from LA.... thought-provoking and worth the read, imo.

The Race to Save L.A. from Nuclear Terror

By Tad Daley, LA City Beat

I once asked a journalist friend, who had been chained inside the courtroom every single day of the O.J. Simpson trial, the obvious question. "Did he do it?" Or had the LAPD, instead, planted a boatload full of fake "evidence," in an effort to frame the famous defendant?

"How do you know," she replied, "that it wasn't both?"

These days, working as a policy wonk on nuclear nonproliferation and disarmament, I am sometimes asked whether the danger of nuclear terror is "real" -- or whether, instead, certain modern-day Machiavellis are manipulating our most nightmarish fears, to promote their own cynical political agendas.

"How do you know," I am inclined to reply, "that it isn't both?"

Nuclear Terror -- Mission Impossible?

During the Cold War, it became commonplace to observe that "mutually assured destruction," or MAD, was surely the most appropriate acronym in human history. But I have always preferred the label given to fun characters like me who study these things, "nuclear use theorists," whom one can hardly resist acronyming as NUTS.

The NUTS today usually identify four broad scenarios that can loosely be called "nuclear terror." (This is the framework adopted, for example, by the excellent 2005 book The Four Faces of Nuclear Terrorism by Charles D. Ferguson and William C. Potter.)

In one, perpetrators obtain -- through theft, bribery, a paramilitary operation, pick your poison -- an intact nuclear warhead. There are probably more than 25,000 worldwide. Then, they find a way to transport it to a "high-value target" (e.g., a large American city). Then, they find a way to set it off. The sudden and unexpected vaporization of a major American city, without any warning whatsoever, by your everyday garden-variety nuclear warhead, would kill tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, possibly even more than a million. All in the blink of an eye, the snap of a finger, the single beat of a human heart. Many thousands more would die slow and agonizing deaths from radiation poisoning in the weeks that followed -- and all our modern medical marvels will do little even to alleviate their suffering, let alone to save their lives.

It could also plunge the planet into a worldwide depression. It could plunge the U.S. into martial law. It could plunge the nation into military responses -- without evidence any state was behind the dastardly deed -- that could take us from nuclear terror to nuclear war. In which case, the death and devastation would increase by a factor of 10. Or 100. Or more. (Khrushchev famously observed that after a nuclear exchange, "the survivors will envy the dead.")

In another scenario, perpetrators obtain -- through similar methods -- weapons-usable plutonium or highly enriched uranium (HEU). (The latter is far more likely, since HEU is easier to handle, easier to procure, and easier to design a bomb around.) Then they manage to assemble it into a crude nuclear device, transport it to the target (unless they had actually built it in, oh, a warehouse in Culver City), and set it off. If successfully constructed with a large enough yield, such an act could have identical consequences.

In another scenario, perpetrators attack or sabotage a nuclear power plant, causing not a nuclear explosion but a release of radioactivity. Such an act could kill thousands, and contaminate hundreds of square miles for many years to come.

Finally, perpetrators obtain a bit of radioactive material, assemble a conventional explosive around it, and set it off in a concentrated urban area -- discharging radioactivity in all directions. That's the "dirty bomb" you have heard so much about. While such a bomb could kill hundreds, contaminate several square miles, and impose a widespread psychological shock, its consequences would be nothing like those of an actual nuclear explosion.

Our focus today is on the first two scenarios. They are probably less likely than the last two scenarios. Nevertheless, they are enormously, almost inconceivably, more catastrophic.

In a disturbing article in the November/December 2006 issue of Foreign Policy magazine, Peter D. Zimmerman and Jeffrey G. Lewis constructed a chillingly plausible nuclear terror scenario. Zimmerman and Lewis argued that such a project could be undertaken by as few as 19 terrorist operatives, including a few nuclear physicists, a few expert machinists, an experienced metallurgist, perhaps one or two ballistics specialists, and perhaps a couple of electrical engineers. This team, the authors claim, in the space of a year, for a cost of less than $5.5 million, could easily construct the kind of simple gun-like device that killed more than 100,000 people at Hiroshima.

But only if, first, they had managed to procure the necessary HEU. Is that possible? Let's ask Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency and winner of the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize. In a speech in Munich in February, he said that his agency tackles 150 cases of illicit nuclear trafficking every year. Some of the material reported stolen has never been recovered, he said, and "a lot of the material recovered has never been reported stolen."

Right next to Foreign Policy on the newsstands that same month, in the November/December 2006 issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Nick Schwellenbach and Peter D.H. Stockton presented a terrifying new nuclear nightmare. Suicide terrorists might launch a lightning paramilitary operation on an American nuclear facility, barricade themselves inside, and quickly improvise a nuclear detonation right there. How? Unbelievably, simply by holding 100 pounds of HEU six feet above a similar mass, and letting go -- giving disturbing new meaning to the phrase "dropping the atom bomb." Luis Alvarez, Nobel Laureate in Physics, said famously more than two decades ago, "With modern weapons-grade uranium, terrorists, if they have such material, would have a good chance of setting off a high-yield explosion simply by dropping one half of the material onto the other half. Most people seem unaware that if separated U-235 is at hand, it's a trivial job to set off a nuclear explosion."

But surely, the American nuclear laboratories must be among the most extraordinarily secured facilities anywhere on the planet! If there are any American assets that we can guarantee terrorists will never infiltrate, it must be these, right?

Not according to the people responsible for testing such security. In 2004, a U.S. government team of mock terrorists breached the boundaries of Oak Ridge, and managed to "kill" the entire lab security force in 90 seconds. Similar episodes have apparently taken place at Los Alamos as well. Richard Levernier, who led several such mock attacks there, says, "In more than 50 percent of our tests ... we got in, captured the plutonium, got out again, and in some cases didn't fire a shot because we didn't encounter any guards." That astonishing revelation suggests the "dropping the bomb" scenario needn't take place in a nuclear lab. It could just as easily be done in that Culver City garage.

Osama bin Laden: Scratching a Nuclear Itch

Osama bin Laden's thirst for the atom bomb dates back at least to 1992, when he reportedly tried to purchase nuclear materials in South Africa. Al Qaeda operatives have apparently sought intact nuclear warheads from both Chechen separatists and Pakistani scientists -- the latter most alarmingly in a chilling meeting in Afghanistan just weeks prior to the attacks of September 11, 2001. American troops in Afghanistan discovered drawings of rudimentary nuclear devices in Al Qaeda sanctuaries. The 9/11 Commission concluded, "Al Qaeda has tried to acquire or make nuclear weapons for at least 10 years [...] and continues to pursue its strategic goal of obtaining a nuclear capability."

After his organization had murdered nearly 3,000 innocent souls on 9/11, Al Qaeda spokesman Sulaiman Abu Ghaith alleged that American policies, over the decades, had killed many more Muslims than that. He then drew what was for him a logical conclusion: "We have not yet reached parity with them. We have the right to kill four million Americans -- two million of them children."

Al Qaeda, of course, has its share of internal dissensions and disagreements. Lawrence Wright, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his masterful study The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, discussed some of them in the June 2 issue of The New Yorker. Wright described an ideological and theological civil war inside the worldwide terrorist organization. He pointed to the transformation of longtime bin Laden colleague Sayyid Imam al-Sharif, known as "Dr. Fadl," who -- writing from an Egyptian prison -- now conclusively rejects all Islamic justification for Al Qaeda's terror attacks, and also insists that 9/11 itself was, on balance, "a catastrophe for Muslims."

However, it scarcely needs saying that complete internal unity and ideological unanimity are hardly essential to pulling off a successful nuclear terror attack on an American city. Zimmerman and Lewis say that no more than 19 individuals could pull it off! Few things could be more fatuous than to read the reports of investigative journalists like Wright and conclude that because some within the jihadist world have foresworn the terrorist road, no one else remains on the march.

MAD World

The United States has immense military capabilities, including thousands of nuclear weapons of unimaginable destructive power. Surely, our massive nuclear arsenal will cause bin Laden, and his acolytes or imitators, to rethink aspirations for nuclear mass murder, and to step back from the atomic abyss. Won't it?

Of course not.

Because our nuclear weapons, and our nuclear doctrines, are all directed at the power of states. And Al Qaeda is not a state. Osama bin Laden does not control any territory. Terrorists are non-state actors. And our vast, bristling nuclear arsenal can do nothing, absolutely nothing, to deter a non-state actor.

There are at least five fundamental reasons why this is so.

First, if the terrorist does not control any territory, then there is no infrastructure, no capital city, no place to threaten to retaliate against. This is the crucial difference between Osama bin Laden and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. For all the current turmoil about the mere possibility that Iran might someday acquire a few nuclear weapons, it is inconceivable that Ahmadinejad could ever actually use one, without ensuring both personal and national suicide. But bin Laden does not face such a constraint. Mohamed ElBaradei, in his February 2008 speech in Munich, stated this as clearly as anyone. "This, to me, is the most danger we are facing today," he said. "Because any country, even if they have nuclear weapons, would continue to have a rational approach. They know if they use a nuclear weapon, they will be pulverized. For an extremist group, there is no concept of deterrence. If they have it, they will use it."

Second, if the terrorists are not traditional "rational actors" wanting to preserve their own lives, then threatening them with nuclear obliteration is no discouragement at all. As we saw on 9/11, and in many horrific terrorist episodes since, many are quite willing to commit suicide to serve their odious aims.

Third, if the terrorist does want to preserve his own life and we seek to deter him by threatening to kill him, we can do that in any conceivable circumstance with conventional weaponry alone.

Fourth, we may not know where the perpetrators are. After all, we still cannot locate bin Laden nearly seven years after the horror of 9/11. Finally, we may not even know who the perpetrators are. Some terror attacks in recent years have been followed by no claims of responsibility at all. Imagine it's the day after, the month after, the year after the sudden vanishing of an American city, and we never get any idea at all who did it.

The U.S. Army didn't protect us on 9/11. The U.S. Air Force didn't protect us on 9/11. The U.S. Navy, with its 11 "aircraft carrier battle groups" (no other country has even one), didn't protect us on 9/11. And the thing that protected us the least on 9/11 was our swollen atomic stockpile, our so-called "nuclear deterrent," our arsenal of the apocalypse. More than 10,000 American nuclear warheads, of incomprehensible destructive force. And they failed utterly to deter 19 men armed with box cutters. Nor will they deter the nuclear terrorists.

What are we going to do, threaten to fire a nuclear cruise missile through the balcony window of their $750-a-month bachelor apartment in suburban Las Vegas?

"My City Was Gone"

The Los Angeles office of Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR, the American affiliate of my own organization, International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, winner of the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize) projected the results of an atomic warhead the size of the Hiroshima bomb -- about 15 kilotons -- detonating at noon on a weekday in downtown Los Angeles. They concluded that more than 117,000 people would perish instantly, more than 15,000 more would die within a few hours, and more than 96,000 after that would slowly wither away.

Similarly, the RAND Corporation released a study in August 2006 calculating the effects of a 10-kiloton device exploding shortly after unloading onto a pier at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, the busiest in the United States. They concluded that 60,000 people would die at once, 150,000 would be directly exposed to hazardous radiation, and 2 to 3 million would have to relocate immediately because their homes would be hopelessly contaminated.

However, many of the city-busting hydrogen bombs produced during the protracted Cold War, and still in service today, are far more potent than 10 or 15 kilotons. Like 170 kilotons. Like the 550 kiloton warhead still quite common in the Russian arsenal. Like the B-83, America's largest warhead today, at 1,200 kilotons (1.2 megatons). That's about 100 times the explosive power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

You can raise those PSR and RAND casualty estimates accordingly.

The aspiring nuclear terrorists are probably not in a hurry. Time is on their side. Everything we have learned since 9/11 about those in the inner circles of terror indicates that they are tough, smart, implacably dedicated, and in it for the long haul. (Recall the enormous flap when television host Bill Maher, immediately after 9/11, asserted that men who rationally chose to slam themselves into concrete buildings could hardly be called cowards.)

That is not to say that a successful nuclear terror attack will be easy for aspiring nuclear terrorists to make happen. Many may try but fall short along the way. But if those who aspire to pull off the necessary sequence of events fail 999 times out of 1,000, but manage just a single time to obtain an atom bomb, or to build an atom bomb, and then to transport it into the heart of a large American city, we lose. "You have to be lucky every single time," the Irish Republican Army used to say. "We have to be lucky just once."

So is there anything we can do to prevent the nightmare of nuclear terror? Indeed. There are answers in the short term, answers in the medium term, and answers -- most importantly -- in the long term. Because the only long-term solution to the threat of nuclear terror -- and to all the other worrisome nuclear scenarios we can conjure -- is the abolition of nuclear weapons.

Short Term Fixes

In the short term, we must do everything possible to ensure that no nuclear warheads or materials find their way into the clutches of Al Qaeda or anyone else with similar mass murder ambitions.

Michael Levi's important 2007 book On Nuclear Terrorism provides grounds for optimism. The physicist argues that nuclear terror will likely be quite a bit more difficult to pull off than some (often with political motives) have argued. Levi argues that while the "lucky every time/lucky once" framework is not untrue when considered over the course of many plots, each individual plot can be tackled from precisely the opposite perspective. The aspiring nuclear terrorists, he argues, have to succeed at every step of a complex and difficult process. The authorities, on the other hand, only need to nab them once. Consequently, Levi advocates a systematic, interactive, many-layered strategy of prevention, one that integrates "controls over nuclear materials and weapons, military power, diplomacy, intelligence, covert action, law enforcement, border security, and consequence management," all seeking to disrupt the aspiring nuclear terrorist at many potential chokepoints along the way.

For all our worries about North Korea, Iran, and the several states that may eventually follow their lead, priority number one in the nuclear terror realm has to be Russia. Russia today has several thousand nuclear weapons, and hundreds of tons of nuclear material, at perhaps as many as 250 sites. "The actual amount of weapon-usable nuclear material in Russia," says national security expert Joseph Cirincione, "may not even be known by the Russian government." In 1997, retired Soviet General Alexander Lebed claimed that when the USSR unraveled at the end of 1991, Soviet authorities lost track of more than 100 nuclear weapons roughly the size of a suitcase. Lebed's widely publicized claim has never been conclusively confirmed or refuted. But what he put forth was hardly an implausible scenario.

The Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, instituted almost immediately after the December 1991 dissolution of the USSR to help secure the late Soviet Union's enormous nuclear arsenal, has done much to diminish these dangers. So too has the more recent U.S. Global Threat Reduction Initiative, a program established in 2004 to secure dangerous materials of Soviet or other origin which found their way into civilian nuclear programs of other countries. And the Global Initiative to Combat Nuclear Terrorism, which George Bush and Vladimir Putin unveiled together at the G-8 summit in St. Petersburg in July 2006, is another promising step. But the pace of all of them has been slow, much remains to be done, and it is difficult to understand why anything should be considered a better investment in national security than programs like these.

Russia is not the only country where we have to worry about loose nuclear weapons and materials. The long history of transfers of nuclear technology and knowledge by the now infamous A.Q. Khan network certainly suggests that Pakistan, or particular Pakistani individuals, could serve as a source for aspiring nuclear terrorists. The martial law declared by President Pervez Musharraf in late 2007, followed soon thereafter by the assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and subsequent electoral setbacks for Musharraf, set off a flurry of commentaries about the worrisome nuclear chaos inside Pakistan that -- still -- might ensue.

Of course, enhancing port and border safeguards in the United States must remain a perpetually high priority. The Bush administration, commendably, has made considerable progress in this regard since September 11, 2001. Before 9/11, not a single container crossing our border was screened for radioactivity. Today, more than 80 percent are.

Still, the sheer volume of global commerce makes this job almost impossibly big. To find smuggled nuclear materials in the vast sea of consumer goods shipped by container around the world is to seek the proverbial needle in a haystack. An article in the October 2006 issue of Risk Analysis magazine reported the results of a rigorous statistical evaluation of U.S. container screening capabilities, and concluded, "The likelihood that the current screening system would detect a shielded nuclear weapon is quite low (around 10 percent)."

So it is beyond naive to imagine that these kinds of short-term steps, no matter how elaborate, can forestall the fateful day forever. Strict controls over all things nuclear may well save us in the short term. But in the medium term, we need to reduce not just the availability of nuclear weapons and materials, but also the motivations for nuclear terror.

Medium Range Ballistic Missions

Western leaders would do well to recall that the very first word in the very first work of Western literature, Homer's Iliad, is menis. Anger. Wrath. Rage.

During the Vietnam War, it was often said that every time we killed a Viet Cong guerrilla, we created two more. Isaac Newton's laws of action and reaction do not apply only to billiard balls. The Bush administration has consistently rejected any suggestion that we consider what might motivate impressionable young Muslim men to show up on Al Qaeda's doorstep. White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan blithely dismissed the "truce" that Osama bin Laden floated on January 19, 2006, indicating that President Bush had given it not a nanosecond's consideration. "We do not negotiate with terrorists," he said. "We put them out of business."

But can't we be more in the international arena than a hammer looking for nails? Do Americans have even a clue about the depth of the bitterness, the scale of the humiliations, the extent of the resentments simmering around the planet toward us? George Bush's foreign policies have made us new foreign enemies. George Bush's defense policies have weakened our defenses. George Bush's responses to 9/11 have made future 9/11's -- possibly far worse than the original 9/11 -- far more likely to occur.

So much for Republicans being "strong on defense."

There are undoubtedly hard-core terror types out there who are determined to attack us no matter what. Obviously, we must do everything we can to prevent them from acting, and to make sure that we get them before they get us.

But thousands more out there are still thinking about it. Thousands of young Muslim men are on the fence. They have perhaps spent their childhoods in madrasa Islamic religious schools. Their families have lived in poverty for as long as anyone can remember. They are unemployed and idle. They are looking for some purpose in life, some meaning, perhaps even some cause worth dying for.

The next president must do more than simply threaten these potential perpetrators, if we want to dissuade them from marching down the dead end terrorist road. Perhaps we could talk in a serious way about global economic inequality, about the cultural humiliations arguably at the root of the so-called "clash of civilizations." We might actually seek to dry up some of the swamps of hopelessness, exploitation, and despair around the world. We might offer the dispossessed some rewards for the better choice, some hope and opportunity, some promise of full participation in a prosperous and peaceful global civilization. We might act on the world stage with a little less hubris and a little more humility. We might recall the admonition of Abraham Lincoln as our Civil War wound to its bitter close, when he said, "The only lasting way to eliminate an enemy is to make him your friend."

And he was a Republican.

But even these kinds of steps, important though they are, are unlikely to save us indefinitely from the nightmare of nuclear terror. We need to do more than prevent the bad guys from gaining access to nuclear devices in the short term. We need to do more too than reduce the motivations for seeking access to nuclear devices in the medium term. In the long term, our only real hope for saving ourselves from the nightmare of nuclear terror is to get rid of the nuclear weapons themselves. Every last one.

The Long and Winding Road

Some call it "America's nuclear hypocrisy," others the "nuclear double standard," others still "nuclear narcissism." Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad often calls it "nuclear apartheid."

Why is it that some countries can possess thousands of nuclear weapons without a whisper of comment, while when others aspire to even one, it generates a torrent of righteous indignation? What's the principle? What's the argument?

It is never said. And it cannot last.

The Reverend William Sloane Coffin, one of the great peace activists of the 20th century, who died in 2006, liked to quote Mahatma Gandhi, who said, "A fat man cannot speak persuasively to a skinny man about the virtues of not overeating." To much of the rest of the world, the nuclear double standard appears sanctimonious and self-righteous, and based on the notion that some are responsible enough to be "trusted" with these weapons of the apocalypse, while others are not.

President Bush himself, perhaps unwittingly, often manages to let slip this conceit of cultural superiority. "We owe it to our children," he said in August of 2002, "to free the world from weapons of mass destruction in the hands of those who hate freedom." "We cannot allow the world's most dangerous men," he insisted at the end of 2005, "to get their hands on the world's most dangerous weapons."

Here, surely, we have the most candid, unvarnished answer to the $64,000 nuclear question. Some are rational, sober, righteous ... and hence can be trusted with the nuclear prize. Others are simply too "dangerous," or not sufficiently "freedom loving," to be permitted the same.

And who will decide? Who will render subjective, ad hoc, case-by-case verdicts on whether certain leaders or peoples can be trusted with nuclear weapons? Who will serve as prosecutor, judge, jury, and enforcer? Why the Freedom Lovers, of course, in whose hands nuclear weapons already reside.

The nuclear double standard is militarily unnecessary, morally indefensible, and politically unsustainable. Try to imagine the human community in 2018, or 2045, or 2077, with the same small group of "great powers" still clinging to the nuclear chimera, still insisting that nuclear weapons are vital for their own national security but unnecessary for the national security of others. Then try to imagine all the other states in the world just placidly and permanently acquiescing to that -- no bitterness, no resentment, no aspirations to challenge the nuclear status quo and obtain a few nuclear weapons of their own.

The mere act of performing such a thought experiment demonstrates the wild improbability that such a future history might ever come to pass. If we refuse forever to relinquish our nuclear weapons, then we had better get used to a world not with nine nuclear weapon states, as today, but 18, or 45, or 77. That world will provide that many more opportunities for just one really bad nuclear warhead to find its way into the hands of just one group of really bad guys. And what will that mean for us, for Los Angeles?

It will mean we will simply have to await our fate, our date with our nuclear terror destiny.

A comprehensive nuclear policy agenda, one fully integrating non-proliferation with disarmament, should become the most important immediate foreign policy priority for the new president who takes office on January 20, 2009. Such a policy agenda should contain many of the kinds of short- and medium-term steps described above to diminish the danger of nuclear terror.

But that nuclear policy agenda should also state, unambiguously, that we are committed to the ultimate elimination of nuclear weapons -- ours and everyone else's. It must describe abolition not as some utopian fantasy, but instead as a concrete political goal. And it should begin to discern the path, and commence negotiations, toward a universal, verifiable, and enforceable Nuclear Weapons Convention requiring the phased dismantling and destruction of every nuclear weapon on Planet Earth, imposing strict worldwide controls with rigorous international inspection provisions over all things nuclear, and legally prohibiting nuclear weapons from ever being constructed again.

Our best shot at dodging the nuclear terror bullet forever is to get serious, now, about moving toward a nuclear-weapon- free world.

An Inconvenient Choice

On January 15, 2008, four lions of the American foreign policy establishment -- Sam Nunn, William Perry, George Shultz, and Henry Kissinger -- authored a landmark opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal, calling not just for greater attention to the nuclear peril, but also for "turning the goal of a world without nuclear weapons into a practical enterprise among nations." This call to action from such mainstream figures, has, by all accounts, transformed the nuclear policy debate, and in a stroke expanded the parameters of political possibility. "The goal of a world free of nuclear weapons is like the top of a very tall mountain," said the authors. "From the vantage point of our troubled world today, we can't even see the top of the mountain, and it is tempting and easy to say we can't get there from here."

Yet not only has the top of that mountain been painted in fine detail, but so too has the path we might take to march upward toward the summit. In 2007, a broad coalition of scientists, international lawyers, disarmament experts, and anti-nuclear organizations issued Securing Our Survival: The Case for a Nuclear Weapons Convention (available at www.ippnw.org). This extraordinary document contains an actual draft of a model nuclear weapons abolition treaty, with extensive commentary on both the components therein and on alternative processes by which it might come into being. It provides perhaps the best description yet both of what a nuclear- weapon-free world might actually look like, and how we might actually get from here to there.

The American government can choose to go down something like the path advocated here. If it does not, the American people will probably simply have to await their fate. Walt Kelly's Pogo, in another context, said famously, "We have met the enemy, and he is us." Today, in this context, we might say that we have met the victims of the device that we ourselves unleashed upon the world. And they are us.

We are the ones who devised these weapons in the past. We are the ones contemplating the use of these weapons in the present (several credible news reports have revealed that war planners in the bowels of the Pentagon have considered not just a preemptive military strike on Iran, but a preemptive nuclear strike). We are the ones who vaingloriously insist that we -- but not others -- must perpetually possess these weapons indefinitely into the future.

And now, in what must surely be one of the greatest ironies in all of human history, we are the ones who may soon feel the menis of our own invention. We are the ones who may turn out to be the authors of our own annihilation. We can get it through our thick skulls that the only long-term solution to the threat of nuclear apocalypse is the abolition of nuclear weapons. If we do not, we may well be the ones, in the end, who are devoured by our own creation.

Tad Daley, www.daleyplanet.org, is Writing Fellow with the Nobel Peace Laureate organization International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, www.ippnw.org, and its International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, www.icanw.org. He served in the past as a foreign policy advisor to Congressman Dennis Kucinich, Congresswoman Diane Watson, and the late U.S. Senator Alan Cranston. He lives and works in Los Angeles and finds the city terribly annoying at times, but on balance would like to keep it around.

http://www.alternet.org/story/92548/

Casey

08-06-2008, 11:19 PM

The video apparently ends with:

2B-68-aP-7m-(9)

Anyone have any clue as to its meaning?

OTOH, this could be a reprise of the infamous Countdown Clock of several years ago.

Nuclear Jihad
http://wincoast.com/forum/showthread.php?p=1275928#post1275928

Ok I analyzed this code "

R29ND8NZ20

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

تحليلها :

Analysis:

R29=رمضان هذا العام

R29 = Ramadan this year

ND= ضربة نووية لابن لادن
ND = nuclear strike by Bin Laden

8= ستكون في يوم 8 رمضان 8 = 8

8=8 will be on the day of Ramadan

NZ= ضربة نووية للظواهري
NZ = nuclear strike of Zawahri

20= ستكون في اليوم العشرين من نفس الشهر = 20
will be in the twentieth day of the same month

انتبه :
Warning:

إن لم تصدق ماأقول فأنت : لاتؤمن بعلامات الساعة التي ثبتت في السنة النبوية ومنكر السنة تعرف
If you are true: to insure marked am proven in the Sunnah and the evil known as the year

حكمه عند أهل العلم
When the wisdom of scholars

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Casey

08-06-2008, 11:25 PM

More chatter, another code.

1D-WSHn-CQ6Pi

أشرح لكم بعد رمضان إن شاء الله ..
Explain to you after Ramadan, God .. والله يتقبل منا ومنكم
And God accepts us and you

بس ذكّروني عاد
But I remembered back

rectar

08-07-2008, 11:45 AM

url pls, 911 acomin.....

rectar

08-07-2008, 11:58 AM

إستشهادي http://img110.imageshack.us/img110/5458/image001rv2.jpg (http://www.ekhlaas.org/forum/showthread.php?t=165283) إستشهادي

Casey

08-07-2008, 01:54 PM

The rest of your message is here:

http://www.wincoast.com/forum/showthread.php?p=1310679#post1310679

إستشهادي http://img110.imageshack.us/img110/5458/image001rv2.jpg (http://www.ekhlaas.org/forum/showthread.php?t=165283) إستشهادي

Casey

08-10-2008, 01:27 AM

Al Qaeda loses chemical weapons expert
Expert's death a heavy blow to al Qaeda ambitions for weapons of mass destruction, former CIA officer says.
ASSOCIATED PRESS

Sunday, August 10, 2008

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — The killing of an al Qaeda chemical weapons expert in a missile strike two weeks ago in a Pakistani border village has dealt a blow to the terrorist group's ambitions to build weapons of mass destruction, a former CIA case officer says.

Abu Khabab al-Masri was dubbed by terrorism analysts as al Qaeda's "mad scientist." His most notorious work, recorded on videotape, showed dogs being killed in poison gas experiments in Afghanistan when the Taliban ruled.

"If he is out of the picture, al Qaeda's weapons of mass destruction capability has been set back, which would make this one of the more effective strikes in recent years," said Arthur Keller, an ex-CIA case officer in Pakistan. Keller led the hunt for Masri in 2006.

The U.S. offered a $5 million bounty for the 55-year-old Egyptian, and the CIA had been hunting him for years. Al Qaeda confirmed his death days after the July 28 attack by unmanned drones on a tribesman's compound in the village of Azam Warsak in South Waziristan.

Masri, whose real name is Midhat Mursi al-Sayid Umar, got his chemical weapons training in the Egyptian army before joining al Qaeda.

The U.S. government says that Masri had been distributing manuals for making chemical and biological weapons since 1999.

"I believe that al Qaeda has no shortage of people adept with explosives, and I know that al-Masri promulgated training manuals for poisons," Keller said, "but I'm not sure how skilled any of al-Masri's proteges may be at synthesizing chemical weapons or toxins."

It's not easy, he said: "You need both education and hands-on experience to produce decent-quality chemical weapons or toxins."

No evidence has surfaced that Masri continued the chemicals research after moving to Pakistan.

U.S. intelligence agencies tracking Masri viewed him as frightening, said Brian Glyn Williams, a University of Massachusetts associate professor of Islamic history, who has just completed research for the U.S. government on weapons of mass destruction.

"From the U.S. government perspective, he was seen as a major threat," Williams said.

http://www.statesman.com:80/news/content/news/stories/world/08/10/0810qaeda.html

Vancouver

08-10-2008, 01:09 PM

We haven't heard from Zawahiri for a while, but I bet he mentions Abu Khabab in his next show.

Meanwhile, fighting in Bajaur (which is the site of Damadola and which borders Afghanistan) is quite heavy right now. Civilians are being evacuated in some places.

al-Canine

08-16-2008, 08:32 AM

NYPD Kicks Ass! :happy_01: Be afraid, jihadi bitches. Be very afraid. :add25:

Terror drill finds culprit with dirty bomb

It was only a drill, but the scenario was still terrifying.

A boat loaded with radioactive materials sailed through New York Harbor Friday. A multiagency task force - led by state-of-the-art NYPD boats - was assigned to stop the interloper.

"We're trying to further...protect the waterways and ports of New York City from any acts of terrorism or any incidents that may occur," said Deputy Chief Joseph McKeever of the NYPD counterterrorism division.

More than 17 boats from a variety of agencies, including the Coast Guard, FDNY and New Jersey State Police, set up a checkpoint underneath the Verrazano Bridge at the mouth of the harbor to scan all incoming vessels.

"The New York ports are probably one of the busiest in the nation, and in the world," McKeever said. "We are developing our capacity to deal with that traffic on a day-in, day-out basis."

Scores of boats were boarded and searched during the drill, which officials said was the largest counterterrorism exercise in the city's history and allowed the NYPD to test two new $750,000 radiation-tracking boats.

The Tracs boats successfully stopped a speedboat named The Last Dollar and found a device that simulated the same radiation as a dirty bomb.

"We have improved our abilities to deal with traffic in the harbor immensely in the last five years," McKeever said, "and we'll continue to do that."

http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/2008/08/15/2008-08-15_terror_drill_finds_culprit_with_dirty_bo-1.html

al-Canine

09-06-2008, 08:18 AM

A team of experts is battling to retrieve tons of nuclear material before terrorists do. But time's running out...

By Julian Borger

A little before dawn on a recent summer morning, three large blue lorries, a handful of police cars and a bus rumbled along the dual carriageway heading north out of the Bulgarian capital of Sofia.

The lorries were unmarked, the bus carrying a few sleepy policemen was old and scruffy, while the lumbering shipment was big and slow enough to explain the escort and its flashing blue lights.

But for Bulgaria, and indirectly for the rest of us, the convoy's progress marked an important transition - the departure of the country's last remaining stockpile of High-Enriched Uranium (HEU), the stuff nuclear bombs are made of.

It took two years of talks and work before the highly radioactive material - just over 6kg of spent fuel from a defunct research reactor - was fished out of the storage pools in which it had lain unused and largely forgotten for nearly 20 years. It was sealed in steel casks and lowered onto the three trucks.

During the morning of July 5, the convoy made its way over the mountains and down to the banks of the Danube, where the containers were winched aboard a black barge bound for Ukraine.

Ten days and a rail journey later, the HEU arrived in Russia, from where it had come nearly half a century earlier as a gift. In Chelyabinsk, just east of the Ural Mountains, it is to be reprocessed or blended down.

I was allowed to witness its secret journey as long as nothing was printed until the shipment reached its destination, and this small but lethal fragment of the Cold War was made safe.

Its journey was part of a programme between the U.S. and Russia in happier times, in the window of co-operation that followed the Cold War - a window that is now rapidly closing.

Russia's own HEU was never part of this and there now seems little chance it will be any time soon. If relations get much worse, the whole scheme could be frozen.

A joint effort to make the world safer could unravel - one of the many toxic by-products of the crisis in the Caucasus.

The operation I saw was part of an accelerating scramble to clean up the scattered legacy of nuclear profligacy in a race against a new and terrifying threat: nuclear terrorism.

In the Fifties and Sixties, the U.S. and the Soviet Union exported HEU-powered nuclear reactors to their allies for power generation and experimentation.

When the Cold War eventually came to an end, deals were done on dismantling the redundant weapons in the former Soviet republics.

Yet that still left thousands of kilos of weapons-grade material in civilian reactors at power stations and universities worldwide, some with no more security than a watchman and a padlock.

With the logic of deterrence and mutually-assured destruction receding from the collective memory, only to be supplanted by the fears evoked by the September 11 attacks, nuclear terrorism has emerged as the number one threat to Western security.

The suicidal extremist driving a crude nuclear device into the centre of a major city is now the ultimate nightmare.

Bush and Blair went to war in Iraq with the ostensible aim of preventing Saddam's assumed nuclear stockpile falling into the hands of Al Qaeda jihadists. Barack Obama has called nuclear terrorism 'the greatest danger we face'.

But the gap between rhetoric and effective action is startling. The U.S. has spent more than £350billion on the Iraq war to eliminate a threat that never existed.

The amount spent on removing fissile material from countries that do have the ingredients for a nuclear device has been relatively paltry.

The Global Threat Reduction Initiative (GTRI), launched in 2004 after previous efforts at eliminating the world's civilian stocks of fissile material had proved ineffectual, has an annual U.S. budget of about £75million, or roughly what the U.S. military spends in eight hours in Iraq.

Yet the threat of nuclear terrorism is real. In 1998, Osama bin Laden declared it was a religious duty to acquire nuclear weapons 'to terrorise the enemies of God'.

Just days before the September 11 attacks in 2001, the Al Qaeda leader met a Pakistani delegation, including two retired nuclear scientists, in Kandahar.

According to accounts of that meeting, Bin Laden expressed interest in how to build a bomb and was told it was technically quite simple - acquiring the fissile material was the main obstacle.

Al Qaeda has spent years trying to overcome that problem. Western intelligence officials believe the organisation was cheated several times by middlemen claiming to have weapons-grade material for sale.

An Al Qaeda defector, Jamal Ahmed al Fadl, has described helping Bin Laden clinch a deal in Sudan, his home country; Bin Laden paid $1.5million for a 30-inch cylinder supposedly containing South African uranium. The contents are widely believed to have been fake.

Ivan Ivanov, a Bulgarian businessman working for a Dubaibased building contractor, claims to have met Bin Laden in Pakistan in April 2001, and to have been approached the day after by an Al Qaeda scientist who proposed a scheme for buying Bulgarian nuclear material.

Ivanov says he refused the deal, but Bulgaria has remained a source of concern for anyone worried about proliferation.

The country's post-Soviet nuclear industry has been hit by a stream of safety scandals, and the EU has - unusually - cut off funds because of the hold that corruption and organised crime have on the country's economy.

The removal of Bulgaria's HEU last month was, therefore, more than a technicality. In theory, it represented the elimination of a significant threat.

Officials at Sofia's Institute for Nuclear Research and Nuclear Energy, where the spent fuel had been stored since its reactor was closed in 1989, claimed security had been beefed up in recent years, but the Institute was clearly suffering from years of neglect.

Feral dogs chased each other through the bushes in the grounds around the reactor.

The removal operation was overseen by a two-man American team, who represent the business end of the GTRI. They fly around the world trying to persuade governments that it is in their long-term interests to part with their stocks of fissile material.

The U.S. duo are both immigrants. Andrew Bieniawski, a 41-year-old from South Africa, is in charge of the programme at the National Nuclear Security Administration, the part of the U.S. department of energy responsible for looking after the U.S. nuclear arsenal, making sure the bombs still work and do not blow up unexpectedly.

His deputy, Igor Bolshinsky, a former mine technician from Ukraine, repatriates the Soviet-origin material and does most of the travelling and persuading - 'schmoozing for world peace,' as Bolshinsky put it.

Removing the Bulgarian HEU was not easy. On the designated day of its departure, Bulgarian security ordered the uranium convoy to leave the institute an hour earlier than agreed, without telling Bolshinsky.

He had to jump into a car for a high-speed chase along a Bulgarian motorway, pursuing the missing uranium casks. But as the cargo reached its waiting barge, and moved off, heading towards a rendezvous with a Russian train, Bulgaria became officially free of HEU.

Yet that should not give the West any cause for complacency.

There are two kinds of nuclear bomb. Modern warheads involve an implosion device, in which the fissile material, normally plutonium, is compressed by shaped charges until it reaches critical mass, and the process of nuclear fission becomes self-sustaining.

This is extremely hard to pull off reliably, and is the province of sophisticated state programmes. However, there is a much cruder form of bomb which achieves critical mass by firing one chunk of nuclear material at another. It was a 'gun-type' bomb such as this that was dropped on Hiroshima.

As the apartheid government in South Africa discovered, it can be developed by a relatively small team with basic engineering skills. It is the sort of bomb a terrorist organisation would build.

Plutonium is useless for such a device. It needs HEU - which happens to be far more plentiful and much less guarded. Under the GTRI, 610kg of HEU fuel has been returned to Russia from countries including Serbia, Romania, Libya, Uzbekistan, Poland, Germany, the Czech Republic, Latvia and Vietnam.

Hungary and Kazakhstan are next on Bieniawski and Bolshinsky's visiting list. By 2010, it is hoped that almost all the Soviet-origin spent HEU will have been removed from civilian sites around the world.

It is a race against the clock and, for Bieniawski, every day counts. 'We are very concerned about this material. We take this threat to be very real. The information that we have lets us know we have to act as aggressively as possible to remove this material,' he said.

But there is a troubling question hanging over Bieniawski and Bolshinsky's work: Could their efforts already be too late? They are running a race against an unknown enemy, blindfold.

They do not know where their adversaries are. Perhaps the terrorist groups, smugglers and bent officials with whom they are competing have already acquired the nuclear material.

Since the Cold War ended, the UN's nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), has logged more than 800 incidents in which radioactive material has gone missing or been seized from smugglers.

Eighteen of those cases involved weapons-grade material, HEU or plutonium, mostly of Soviet origin. Another seven cases of weapons-grade theft or contraband have yet to be confirmed by the IAEA, but are considered well-founded.

In a recent example, a Russian fish trader and occasional smuggler named Oleg Khinsagov was arrested in Georgia in early 2006. He had about 100g of weapons-grade HEU in his leather jacket, wrapped in a plastic bag, and it was thought he was about to sell his sample to a Muslim from a 'serious organisation' in the market for fissile material.

Khinsagov told his customer there were two more kilos available. The would-be buyer turned out to be a Georgian government agent, and Khinsagov is now in prison in Tbilisi, apparently too terrified of his Russian contacts to name them.

At a time when long- standing Russian- Georgian tensions have exploded into conflict, Moscow has been very unhelpful, claiming implausibly that it is impossible to tell where Khinsagov's nuclear material came from.

Coincidentally, an estimated 2kg of highly enriched uranium went missing when a top-secret former Soviet nuclear laboratory in the Georgian region of Abkhazia fell to Russianbacked separatists in 1993.

It disappeared into the chaotic underworld of the Caucasus where organised crime thrives on national rivalries, and it has not been seen since.

Last November, on the other side of the world, two groups of armed men broke into the emergency control centre at South Africa's 'high- security' Pelindaba nuclear facility, where hundreds of kilos of HEU are stored.

They stumbled on a senior security official who was not meant to have been there but was keeping his girlfriend company. The intruders shot him and fled.

In formal testimony to the IAEA, the South African government admitted the attackers were 'technically sophisticated' and had 'prior knowledge of the electronic security systems'. Yet they insisted the site's fissile material had not been in danger and that only a computer was taken. There have been no arrests.

Most of the nuclear thefts located by the IAEA have involved small quantities of HEU, far short of the 55kg necessary to build a gun-type bomb, but no one knows how much more has disappeared unnoticed.

Matthew Bunn, a nuclear proliferation expert at Harvard, has estimated the risk of a nuclear attack on the U.S. in the next decade to be 29 per cent - almost one in three. He says London is at a smaller risk, but still 'a real number'.

James Acton, a nuclear proliferation expert at King's College London, said: 'Even if you think that there is a one per cent or a half per cent chance of there being such a catastrophic event, it's probably worth taking a lot more precautions than we are at the moment.'

A terrorist group could make do with much less than the 55kg of HEU needed to make a 'dirty bomb' to cause widespread panic, if not a full-scale nuclear blast.

Acton believes radioactive material could also be sprayed like an aerosol across a wide urban expanse, in a stealth attack that could pass unnoticed until it was too late, leaving huge swathes of a major city uninhabitable.

'If people insist on the same standards [for radioactivity] we have now, we would have to give up large areas of the city. People would ultimately have to get used to the risk of going back to a slightly contaminated part of London,' Acton said.

Such a nuclear attack would be so easy to perform and so devastating in its effects, he added: 'I really don't know why an attack hasn't happened already.'

Dhiren Barot, a North London Al Qaeda member arrested in 2004 on terrorism charges, had been planning a dirty-bomb attack using tiny radioactive particles found in home smoke-alarms, which he intended to buy by the thousand.

Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, has said the Government is taking the threat seriously. A computer simulation of a radiological attack on London was carried out by the Home Office last year.

Senior officials in the Bush administration took part in a similar exercise involving three simultaneous dirtybomb blasts. Spain, another recent terrorist target, carried out a drill earlier this year.

Meanwhile, radiation detectors are being installed in ports around the world as a last line of defence against a smuggled nuclear device. So far they have produced millions of false alarms (a compound found naturally in bananas, for example, can set off the sirens).

The White House has its own nuclear bomb squad, which it scrambled in 2005 to intercept U.S.-bound ships suspected of carrying a weapon. It turned out they were carrying scrap metal contaminated by illegally dumped radioactive material.

This is the emerging battlefield of the 21st century. Western governments have little idea whether they are being overly paranoid or recklessly negligent in their preparations. But the potential is so horrifying, there seems little choice but to prepare for the worst.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1052896/A-team-experts-battling-retrieve-tons-nuclear-material-terrorists-But-times-running-.html

al-Canine

09-26-2008, 10:17 AM

Nuclear waste piles up at hospitals

By SEANNA ADCOX
Associated Press Writer

BARNWELL, S.C. (AP) - Tubes, capsules and pellets of used radioactive material are piling up in the basements and locked closets of hospitals and research installations around the country, stoking fears they could get lost or, worse, stolen by terrorists and turned into dirty bombs.

For years, truckloads of low-level nuclear waste from most of the U.S. were taken to a rural South Carolina landfill. There, items such as the rice-size radioactive seeds for treating cancer and pencil-thin nuclear tubes used in industrial gauges were sealed in concrete and buried.

But a South Carolina law that took effect July 1 ended nearly all disposal of radioactive material at the landfill, leaving 36 states with no place to throw out some of the stuff. So labs, universities, hospitals and manufacturers are storing more and more of it on their own property.

``Instead of safely secured in one place, it's stored in thousands of places in urban locations all over the United States,'' said Rick Jacobi, a nuclear waste consultant and former head of a Texas agency that unsuccessfully tried to create a disposal site for that state.

State and federal authorities say the waste is being monitored, but they acknowledge that it is difficult to track and inspected as little as once every five years. Government documents and dozens of Associated Press interviews with nuclear waste generators, experts, watchdogs and officials show that thousands of these small radioactive items have already been lost, and that worries are growing.

``They'll end up offered up on eBay and flea markets and sent to landfills, or metal recycling plants - places where you don't want them to be,'' said Stephen Browne, radiation control officer at Troxler Electronic Laboratories, one of the world's largest manufacturers of industrial gauges that use radioactive material.

There are millions of radioactive devices in use for which there is no long-term disposal plan. These include tiny capsules of radioactive cesium isotopes implanted to kill cancerous cells; cobalt-60 pellets that power helmet-like machines used to focus radioactive beams on diseased brain tissue; and cobalt and powdered cesium inside irradiation machines that sterilize medical equipment and blood.

Most medical waste can simply be stored until its radioactivity subsides within a few years, then safely thrown out with the regular trash. Some institutions store their radioactive material in lead-lined safes, behind doors fitted with alarms and covered with yellow-and-black radiation warning signs.

Over the past decade, however, 4,363 radioactive sources have been lost, stolen or abandoned, according to a Nuclear Regulatory Commission report released in February. Though none of the material lost was rated ``extremely dangerous'' - meaning unshielded, up-close exposure can cause permanent injury within a few minutes and death within an hour - more than half the radioactive items were never recovered, the NRC said.

Since the Sept. 11 attacks, owners of dangerous amounts of radioactivity have been told by the government to take greater precautions, such as having 24-hour surveillance, erecting barriers and fingerprinting employees, regardless of whether the devices are in use or stored as waste.

Yet in 2003, the federal Government Accountability Office reported there wasn't even a record of how many radioactive sources existed nationwide. In June, the GAO concluded that while there has been progress, more must be done to track radioactive material to prevent it from falling into terrorists' hands and ending up in a dirty bomb, or one that uses conventional explosives to scatter radiation.

``I don't think we're yet in crisis, but certainly there's information out there to suggest we may be closer to that than is comfortable for me,'' said Gregory Jaczko, a commissioner with the NRC, one of the agencies charged with tracking the material.

In 1987, four people died and hundreds fell ill after looters in Brazil found a cancer-therapy machine in an abandoned medical clinic and sold it as scrap metal. More recently, 19 small vials of cesium-137, implanted for cervical cancer treatments, disappeared in 1998 from a locked safe at Moses Cone Memorial Hospital in Greensboro, N.C. The tubes were never found and were believed stolen.

A terrorist would need to gather far more of those vitamin-sized capsules to create a dirty bomb capable of killing anyone within one city block, said Kelly Classic, a health physicist at Mayo Clinic in Minnesota.

For decades, the government urged states to build low-level nuclear waste landfills, either on their own or in cooperation with nearby states. But those efforts have run into strong not-in-my-backyard resistance of the sort that led South Carolina lawmakers to close the Barnwell County landfill to all but three states. Only one low-level landfill, in Utah, has opened in the past 30 years. One more could open in Texas by the end of next year, but it would accept trash from only Vermont and the Lone Star State.

The government never set up penalties for states that failed to build landfills.

``Congress should have gotten involved a long time ago,'' said Richard Gallego, vice president of Thomas Gray and Associates Inc., a California company that prepares low-level waste for disposal.

Rich Janati, chief of nuclear safety for Pennsylvania's Department of Environmental Protection, said: ``It's a national issue, and we should look at it as a national problem and come up with a solution.''

The government this week did move to shore up security by requiring hospitals and labs to better secure machines used to irradiate blood. Also, dirty-bomb fears have prompted the National Research Council to urge replacing the roughly 1,300 such machines in the U.S. with less hazardous but more expensive equipment.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/feedarticle/7827217

al-Canine

10-30-2008, 11:13 PM

Q&A: Will terrorists go nuclear?

Published: October 30, 2008

WASHINGTON, Oct. 30 (UPI) -- Has al-Qaida become the world's first terrorist nuclear power? An interview with Brian Michael Jenkins of the RAND Corp. think tank.

Q: CIA Director Michael Hayden said recently that al-Qaida was one of the agency's top nuclear concerns. Is al-Qaida a bigger threat than North Korea or Iran?

A: The CIA director based his assessment on intentions rather than capabilities. North Korea has nuclear weapons. Iran's nuclear weapons ambitions are backed up by a large contingent of nuclear scientists and an extensive network of nuclear facilities. The CIA, however, considers al-Qaida the bigger threat because it assumes that if al-Qaida had nuclear weapons, it would be most likely to use them.

Q: What are al-Qaida's nuclear capabilities?

A: Al-Qaida has nuclear ambitions. Osama bin Laden tried to acquire nuclear material when he was still in Sudan, and he spoke with two nuclear scientists from Pakistan shortly before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Documents later discovered in al-Qaida training camps in Afghanistan indicate interest in nuclear weapons. But insofar as we know, al-Qaida has not acquired nuclear weapons or fissile material necessary to build them. And the captured documents do not indicate that al-Qaida knows how to make a nuclear bomb.

Q: That was seven years ago. What do we know about developments since then?

A: Probably not enough. It is, however, interesting to note that even as al-Qaida's operational capabilities were being degraded by the combined action of intelligence services and law enforcement organizations around the world, its so-called media jihad was increasing in volume and sophistication. Themes of mass destruction play a significant role in its communications. Al-Qaida appears to have discovered that by claims, threats and broadcasting religious rulings granting it the "right" to kill millions of infidels, it can excite its followers, who embellish its nuclear fantasies, and create nuclear terror among its foes. Al-Qaida has become the world's first terrorist nuclear power without demonstrating possession of a single nuclear weapon.

Q: In your new book, "Will Terrorists Go Nuclear?," you make a distinction between "nuclear terrorism" and "nuclear terror." What is the difference?

A: Nuclear terrorism is about the frightening possibility that terrorists will acquire and use nuclear weapons. Nuclear terror is about the anticipation of that event. Nuclear terrorism is about intelligence, evidence, assessments of terrorists' capabilities. Nuclear terror is about our imagination. The history of nuclear terrorism can be briefly summarized. There hasn't been any -- many would hasten to add "yet." Nuclear terror has a rich history and is deeply embedded in our popular culture and policymaking circles.

Q: How likely is nuclear terrorism?

A: The experts don't agree. Their guesses range from one in a million to a virtual certainty -- "not if but when," to use the famous phrase. American estimates of the probability run significantly higher than the estimates of European respondents. Of course, none of the estimates have any predictive value. They are a reflection of perceptions, of worries, of nuclear terror.

Q: Having written the book, what is your own estimate?

A: This requires prophecy, for which I'm not qualified. The debate itself has a theological quality, with disbelievers on one side vs. the "Apocalypticians" on the other. In this debate I regard myself as a prudent agnostic. Although I don't think nuclear terrorism is inevitable, and there are no indications that it is imminent, what we do know is still grim enough. We have to take the threat seriously. Nuclear terrorism is a threat we are going to have to live with for a long time.

--

(Brian Michael Jenkins was interviewed by the Italian news agency AKI, which first published a version of this article.)

© 2008 United Press International. All Rights Reserved.
This material may not be reproduced, redistributed, or manipulated in any form.

http://www.metimes.com/Security/2008/10/30/qa_will_terrorists_go_nuclear/dd7a/

Vancouver

11-19-2008, 04:44 PM

New report and policy recommendations from Nuclear Threat Initiative:

http://www.nti.org/e_research/Securing_the_bomb08.pdf

205 pages

al-Canine

12-19-2008, 02:59 PM

Doomsday detectives battle nuclear terror

New book outlines U.S. strategy for determining source of a possible attack

By Robert Windrem
Senior investigative producer

NEW YORK — The U.S. government has developed a suite of technologies that would enable it to determine the origin of a nuclear weapon used in an attack against the United States, according to a forthcoming book on America’s nuclear detectives.

In the event of such an attack, U.S. officials believe they could determine where the fissile material used in the nuclear weapon originated, as well as who carried out the assault, intelligence historian Jeffrey T. Richelson writes in “Defusing Armageddon.”

“Not only can intelligence help prevent a nuclear terrorist attack, but also in the event one occurs, it may be able to identify the entity responsible and those who contributed, particularly by providing a bomb or components,” Richelson claims in the first book-length treatment of these counter-nuclear efforts, including the Nuclear Emergency Search Team (NEST), America’s bomb hunters.

This is important, Richelson argues, because U.S. officials believe the most likely nuclear attack would involve an established nuclear power providing either a nuclear device or components to a terrorist group. Finding out which nuclear power provided these items to the terrorists would be key in crafting an appropriate U.S. response.

Earlier this month, a congressionally mandated task force reported that terrorists are likely to strike a major city with weapons of mass destruction by 2013. It added: "In our judgment, America's margin of safety is shrinking, not growing."

Richelson says U.S. officials want prospective terrorists — and the nuclear scientists who may be tempted to help them — to understand U.S. capabilities. Denying them the certainty that they can attack without consequences, U.S. officials feel, is critical to preventing an attack.

Ferreting out nuclear explosives

An attack on the United States would trigger a series of reactions among those responsible for determining the weapon’s origin. These efforts would be coordinated by the National Technical Nuclear Forensics Center, a little-known, three-year-old operation, which works closely with an Energy Department team tasked with ferreting out nuclear explosives before they go off and developing “nuclear forensics” to unearth the origin of a weapon.

U.S. officials would begin by determining the weapon’s precise location with the help of Defense Support Program satellites — infrared spy satellites that detect heat sources — and Global Positioning System satellites, all of which carry nuclear detection packages that could help pinpoint any detonation.

To gather nuclear debris — the key evidence in the detective story — a specially equipped Air Force WC-135 aircraft called “Constant Phoenix” would be deployed. The plane is a modified Boeing 707 that carries debris sampling and air-sampling equipment as well as devices to track radioactive clouds. One problem with this part of the plan, Richelson and others note, is that there is only one WC-135 left, down from a Cold War total of ten. Energy Department officials have called for development of Predator-like drones to fill the gap.

The debris would be analyzed and compared against a database of nuclear signatures, which the United States has been gathering as part of its intelligence efforts on foreign powers. With this information, the United States should be able to determine, at the very least, which country originally produced the highly enriched uranium or plutonium.

“The possibility of attribution stems from the fact that every nuclear device has distinct signatures. These include physical, chemical, elemental and isotopic properties that provide clues as to what material was in the weapon and its construction,” Richelson writes in his book, which is set for publication next month. “The shape, size, and texture of the material would determine the bomb’s physical signature. The bomb’s unique molecular components would determine the device’s chemical signatures.”

Figuring out the reactor

The United States also should be able to determine in which type of reactor the plutonium was produced, what the operating conditions were and its age, which would provide additional clues about its origins. The same would hold true for enriched uranium. There are enough signatures to suggest what kind of centrifuge — or electro-magnet — was used to enrich the uranium to bomb grade.

“By comparing the results of the initial analysis to a database of known reactor types or samples of HEU produced by different enrichment processes, forensic workers might determine the origin of the material or at least narrow the field of viable suspects, eventually pinning the blame on the culprit with the assistance of additional intelligence and data,” Richelson claims.

With all that in hand, Richelson says, the next step would be determining “bomb efficiency,” which in turn can help identify who designed the bomb.

“That information could reveal who built it. Current computer programs can assist in debris management by estimating the pre-detonation isotope mixture, which when combined with data on the mixture after the detonation might make it possible to infer the efficiency of the bomb’s design,” Richelson writes.

In turn, that could narrow down the bomb’s origin and who may have helped. But, for example, if the bomb resembled the Hiroshima bomb, called a gun-type design, it would indicate the “serious possibility that the device was made without assistance,” because those designs have been in open-source literature for decades.

Updating the database

Richelson admits that the success of nuclear detective efforts is dependent on the intelligence community’s ability to maintain a comprehensive and updated database. Otherwise, he notes, “confidence that the United States does not have samples a country’s nuclear DNA might make that country willing to provide terrorists with a bomb or nuclear material.”

These kinds of high-tech anti-nuclear efforts are likely to get the attention of the incoming Obama administration. Vice President-elect Joseph Biden has pushed for more funding and more basic research.

In 2007, Biden told the Wall Street Journal, “We need more nuclear forensics research, more scientists to analyze nuclear samples, and an assured ability -- using our own aircraft or those of cooperating states -- to quickly collect nuclear debris from the site of any attack, in this country or around the world.”

Moreover, Secretary of State-designate Hillary Rodham Clinton sponsored legislation to double the center’s budget last year.

Ironically, and perhaps tragically, says Richelson, the nuclear forensics technologies are more advanced than those associated with nuclear detection.

"Unfortunately, despite the skill and determination of NEST personnel, it may be easier to determine who was behind a terrorist nuclear attack than to prevent it."

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28301954/