SeekerBlog

Richard Miniter is the author of “Disinformation: 22 Media Myths That Undermine the War on Terror” (October 24, 2005). The 5000 word excerpt Baggage Claim published today in the Wall Street Journal debunks the suitcase nuke myth.

Read Miniter’s article – see what you think. It looks like he has done him homework – though I’m not well-informed on the topic and might well miss gaps in his case.

One very interesting point should be fact-checkable: that radioactive decay would require frequent replacement of suitable fissionable material.

The half-life of the most likely materials in the infinitesimal weights necessary to fit in a suitcase is a few months. So as a matter of physics and engineering, the nuclear suitcase is an impractical weapon. It would have to be rebuilt with new radioactive elements every few months.

By reasoning backwards from the practical dimensions and weight a portable device, one should be able to estimate the maximum quantity of nuclear material that could be employed. And from there to the useable lifetime of the device. Would any physicist-readers care to comment on that?

Other useful info – about a third of the article covers al Qaeda’s efforts to buy, steal or construct nuclear weapons. Very serious, well organized efforts – that so far as we know today have not yet been successful.

My reading of the difficulty of building and deploying a dirty bomb is far more pessimistic. I’m convinced that pre 9/11 al Qaeda could detonate dirty bomb(s) on U.S. soil. Paris would be easier. See Getting Serious About Homeland Security (lots of resource links). And Our Hair is on Fire. Of particular concern is that terrorists can obtain the radioactive isotopes and explosives required inside U.S. borders.

Whether the terror leaders would choose that option from their menu of terror-alternatives is a “known unknown”. In MIT Technology Review, Physicist Richard Muller discussed what we can project about dirty bomb effects. The impact is largely public panic – which al Qaeda may find difficult to appraise when weighing alternative attacks. A Wall Street firm might rate the impact quite differently – in a 1/25/05 talk at the Carnegie Council Stephen Flynn said:

My nightmare scenario, which is one that comes from spending a lot of time talking and seeing how this operates, is a hardware kind of thing. The scenario I lay out in chapter 2 of my book, called “The Next Attack,” involves essentially four dirty bombs: one here in Port Elizabeth; another on the Ambassador Bridge, the world’s busiest commercial crossing between Windsor, Ontario, and Detroit, Michigan, where virtually all our automotive industry moves their stuff back and forth; the other is in the Port of L.A.; and the last is in Miami, in the Free Trade Zone. These four dirty bombs go off.

The response by the U.S. government is to immediately close all our seaports and to close the borders. The longshoremen won’t work. The Teamsters won’t drive the trucks. The mayors are saying, “I don’t want any trucks and trains coming into my city,” because the terrorists come on Al-Jazeera about six hours later and say, “We have three nukes, not dirty bombs, that we’ll set off if you don’t get out of the Middle East.”

The cascading effects are that within two weeks the entire global trade system essentially collapses. It’s because essentially this all has to keep moving to keep moving. I describe it as like being at the bottom of a very long escalator and tripping, and then everything comes crashing down. When we close our seaports, essentially all the ships that were destined to unload goods have to anchor out. Then the terminals overseas, particularly in places like Hong Kong and Rotterdam and Singapore, have to close their gates immediately to all incoming trucks because they have no place to put them; they will be in the cement mix bowl of containers. That means every truck and train coming into the terminal is stuck with a container on its back with no place to go. That means back at the factory with goods to ship there’s no truck or train to pick it up.

And does al Qaeda et al have the capability today? Who would have predicted that four years after 9/11 the U.S. could have avoided further attacks? Counter-terror operations are not publicized, so we know almost nothing of the global operations that have so far been successful.