Can Terrorists Build the Bomb?

STEP 4: DELIVER THE BOMB

Of course, terrorists couldn’t simply air-mail their bomb to the White House mailroom. Transporting it would be
the final challenge. And depending on
its design, a crude nuke might weigh between half a ton and a few tons. Delivering the bomb to its target is “not trivial,” Levi says. “It’s one thing to smuggle a small piece of uranium into the country. It’s another thing to smuggle a fully built several-ton hunk of steel.”

Nevertheless, a huge cannon would still fit easily into a cargo-shipping
container, more than 23 million of which arrive in the U.S. every year. Approximately 5 percent of these
are inspected by customs officials on arrival. All customs workers now wear radiation detectors clipped to their belts, which sniff the air for gamma rays given off by uranium and plutonium. A uranium bomb, however, would be hard to detect. A 2002 GAO report found that the belt detectors had “limited range” and “may be inappropriate for the task.” What’s more, simple lead shielding can block gamma rays. More sophisticated radiation detectors are being installed at all ports of entry, though these might miss a lead-shielded bomb. The limitations of these scanners are one reason that the federal government gave up on a “Ring around Washington” project, which would have placed radiation sensors on major land and water approaches to the capital.


Even efficacious scanners might overlook nuclear materials that were smuggled into the U.S. in small amounts and then assembled into a weapon in the very city that the terrorists had targeted. That’s why most experts strongly agree that the best strategy is to stop terrorists at step one, by preventing nuclear material from being stolen in the first place.


After years of relative inattention, September 11 made this mission a
higher priority for the federal government. In the past three years, Congress has increased funding for the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction program, which now spends more than $1 billion a year upgrading security
at former Soviet nuclear sites such
as weapons factories and nuclear
submarine bases, reprocessing Russian nuclear material into a form that can’t readily be used for bombs, and employing 40,000 nuclear scientists who might otherwise work for “states of concern” or terrorists. The Global Threat Reduction Initiative and operations such as the one in Uzbekistan signal a new aggressiveness by policymakers who, like the president, are all too aware of the threat of nuclear terrorism.


Critics insist that these programs aren’t moving with enough urgency. At the current speed, Bunn notes, our efforts to secure Russian nuclear material will take close to a decade. The GTRI’s mandate is to remove unused uranium fuel from the world’s most worrisome research reactors by the end of 2005. But given that each operation has taken months to plan, that date seems overly optimistic. And the Energy Department doesn’t expect to retrieve spent fuel—which can also just as easily be made into a bomb—until 2010.


The good news is that, given enough time and resources, sensitive material can be secured. “Nuclear terrorism is preventable,” says Graham Allison. “If you don’t have highly enriched uranium or plutonium, you can’t make a bomb. No highly enriched uranium, no mushroom cloud, no nuclear explosion, that’s it. Locking down things that we don’t want people to steal is not brain surgery.” Unfortunately, neither is building a nuclear bomb.