Will America face nuclear terrorism? Probably. And what that means, we can hardly imagine. We should not be worrying about anthrax, it is a nuisance; so far this year, three people have died from it in the United States. But last year, 38,000 Americans died from influenza.
Nuclear terrorism is the overriding question that has been almost entirely missing from all that has been said and written in the wake of Sept. 11. We have learned in the most vivid way that many Muslim extremists are willing to die in order to commit terrorist acts. Can one doubt that if nuclear weapons had been available to them, the extremists would have died to use them?
It is just as certain that the explosion of even a single nuclear device anywhere in an American city would inflict death and damage to an extent that would make the explosions on Sept. 11 echo like a champagne cork. And the most important unknown is a desperate one: whether the terrorists, of whom the Middle East has a seemingly endless supply, already possess nuclear weapons.
The Soviet Union acquired nuclear weapons capability in 1949, only four years after the US nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. From 1949 to 1990, the Soviet nuclear arsenal was permanently and effectively guarded by the Red Army. In the decade since the Cold War ended, the nuclear arsenal of the former USSR has been partly dismantled, with the United States helping financially and by the guarantee of gradual downsizing of the nuclear missile fleet on both sides.
Strategic disarmament is winning out, and it is proceeding despite our failure to ratify the SALT II treaty. Both America's and the Soviet Union's intercontinental MIRV and MARV fleets were equipped with thermonuclear weapons - hydrogen bombs in the megaton range triggered by fission devices. A large portion of these have been dismantled and the eventual hope on both sides is that all of them will be. It is probably safe to say that none of these strategic weapons, any one of which could completely incinerate a large city, have been diverted to terrorists.
Smaller fission bombs, designed for battlefield use but never used, still exist or existed in the former Soviet Union. Nobody knows how many, nor where they are now. So how many might have been sold to terrorists by officers of the former Red Army? The incentives are great.
Many in the Russian armed forces haven't been paid in months, and the terrorists could pay big bucks to get hold of small nuclear weapons. I quote from an Oct. 28 New York Times story: Two years ago Sheik Muhammad Hisham Kabbani "warned that Islamic extremists... had bought more than 20 nuclear warheads and were paying former Soviet scientists to break them into chips that could be carried in suitcases."
But it is likely that the greatest danger to the civilized world today is not from megaton bombs, and perhaps not even from small, portable, tactical fission weapons, but from raw materials, namely the 100 tons of enriched uranium still stored within the former Soviet Union.
Where this uranium is, or how well safeguarded it is, is unknown. What is known is that it is weapons-grade U-235, the same stuff that, maybe 20 or 30 pounds of it, killed 70,000 people in a few seconds in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.
The explosive yield of the Hiroshima bomb, detonated in the air, was about 12 kilotons. A fission bomb of 0.1 kiloton yield, carefully placed, would probably be enough to have simply knocked over one of the towers at the World Trade Center. The explosion would release enough radioactivity to make the surrounding area within a radius of several hundred yards uninhabitable for many years. This information is not new, and I refer interested readers to "The Curve of Binding Energy" by John McPhee, which was published in 1974. There is no radioactivity at WTC Ground Zero today, except perhaps a few picocuries from pulverized smoke detectors.
With enriched uranium in hand, anyone with basic training in a machine shop and an elementary knowledge of explosives could assemble such a bomb. The basic techniques for doing this have been public knowledge for a long time. The tactical fission bombs built by the US and Russia have been designed for efficiency. But a terrorist need not be concerned with efficiency. Even a single badly-designed fission bomb, exploding below super criticality or even at fizzle yield, could kill many thousands and cause damage in the hundreds of billions of dollars.
When the Soviet Union collapsed and Russia transformed peacefully into a major democracy, its nuclear military capability remained, dormant but still dangerous. The US, recognizing that danger as well as new opportunities for forging durable peace, entered a program to buy the raw materials of Russia's nuclear arms. Transfer of these materials to America could remove the risk that they would be diverted to sinister uses, and could also support our ongoing needs in the nuclear power industry.
Professor Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University, in a well-attended lecture at Tufts on Oct. 15, pointed out that this purchase program, supported by appropriations of about $500 million, has been cut back by the Bush administration by about two-thirds, because, it is said, we don't want to be "giving money to the Russians." Any rational consideration of the danger of nuclear terrorism must regard that cutback as an act of criminal irresponsibility.
Professor Mark DeVoto taught music at Tufts from 1981 to 2000, and was a member of the Tufts Radiation Hazards Control Board.
