Posted on 09/22/2004 10:06:51 AM PDT by Area Freeper
A trained nuclear engineer using material the size of an orange could build an atomic bomb to fit into a van, proliferation expert Laura Holgate said, sketching a nightmare scenario of a terrorist attack on a major city.
She recalled that terrorists had attacked the World Trade Center in New York in 1993 with a van loaded with conventional explosives.
Holgate told reporters at a meeting in Vienna of the UN nuclear watchdog International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that it was "not widely shared and understood" how risky the current situation is, especially since terrorists would not necessarily need top-level scientists to build a bomb.
The nuclear threat remains the big one, and all too real, said Holgate, a senior member of the Washington-based Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) think tank and a former US Department of Energy (news - web sites) official for disposal of plutonium.
She said the "raw material for nuclear terrorism is housed in hundreds of facilities in dozens of countries and inadequately secured."
"That's the central point of the Global Threat Reduction Initiative" which the United States and Russia have launched to repatriate highly enriched uranium (HEU) and to convert nuclear research reactors from HEU to low enriched uranium (LEU) use.
"We know nuclear theft is happening already," she said, saying that one institute in Russia has documented "23 attempts over eight years to steal nuclear bomb-making materials."
"We know these failed. We don't know how many succeeded and went undetected," Holgate said.
She also said she did not think terrorists had yet a nuclear weapon. "If terrorist organizations had been able to do this (obtain one), they would have used it by now," Holgate said.
The stakes are high.
"A nuclear device going off in any large city around the globe is going to kill millions of people," she said.
"The economic damage can be in the trillions (of dollars) and it can also be global," she said.
"This is in contrast to a dirty-bomb threat that tends to be hyped," she said about concern that terrorists could use conventional bombs with radioactive materials, contaminating areas with radiation rather than destroying them with the blast of an atomic bomb.
Holgate said a problem in making sure that nuclear materials are not lying where terrorists can get them is that there is "lack of acceptance" within the Russian government that "their material is not adequately secured and that there is a relationship between terrorism and these materials."
But she said the Russians seemed to be more aware of the threat since the Beslan school tragedy and a recognition of "weaknesses" in the Russian system, due to bribes and poor security.
The United States and Russia have produced most of the highly radioactive material now spread throughout the world.
Holgate said the United States and the then-Soviet Union gave out 20 tonnes of HEU in the 1950s and 1960s as part of the Atoms for Peace program for the peaceful uses of nuclear energy.
"Keeping track of where this HEU is now kilogram by kilogram is difficult." she said.
In addition, over 1,000 tonnes were created by the United States and the Soviet Union for their weapons programs, and there is no minute accounting for this.
William Potter, from the Monterey Institute of International Studies, a California-based think tank, said that in addition the Soviet Union and now Russia have some seven icebreaker ships which use nuclear fuel enriched to about 60 percent, Potter said.
HEU is uranium enriched to over 20 percent, but weapons grade uranium starts at 80 percent enrichment for the U-235 isotope.
Holgate said terrorists could do without the sophistication needed for small bombs. "A truck size is probably a more relevant size," since such a bomb could be made with lower levels of HEU.
I hope so. There are MANY things going on behind the scenes, I hope the consequences have been made very clear......
One little difference.
Hurricanes don't leave radioactive fallout trails, and our scientifically illiterate public will likely go moonbat on us. . .
That's evem WORSE. . .
One way of preparing for an attack is to try to anticipate what the enemy could do to us. If we think about our vulnerabilities and discuss them, people in a position to do something about it could be prepared.
In a city, the fallout would settle on the roof of multistory buildings. People would only need to move down a few stories to be safe -- protected by several inches of concrete and steel. Even at Chernobyl, where firefighters were exposed to intense radiation, only about 31 out of 130 of them died.
Radiation hazards are usually hyped upward by assuming longterm health hazards and extrapolated by the unproven linear no-threshold theory.
If history is any guide, wholesale slaughter of civilians will cause the opposite effect. In World War II bombers destroyed civilian populations by the hundreds of thousands. It did not weaken their will to go on. In fact, it galvanized them. They focused their energy on the war effort.
Bombing helped defeat the axis powers only because it destoyed the material means of production.
Oh no you won't. If the mad moos detonate a nuke, no matter how small in say NYC, and then announce to the Washington Post, the LA Times, Atlanta Journal, all the TV networks that if their list of demands aren't met (impossible demands, such as Bush shot by a firing squad, all troops out of the middle east in 24 hours, Israeli government arrested and shot) then the next American city will be destroyed.
Immagine the panic and lawlessness as every big city that thinks that it is a target has it's population flee for the hills. It would take months for order to be somewhat restored. Maybe a decade before we got back to where we were.
In the mean time the world economy would come to a halt. All US resources would be used to keep the US together and the mad moos would have pretty much free reign for a while until we got ourselves back together.
The fabric of civilization is thin and fragile and it doesn't take much to rend it.
[Immagine the panic]
That is the desired result of terrorism, isn't it?
No sale.
The "mad moos", as you call them, rely upon western moral restraint for their survival.
If a nuclear weapon was detonated in an American city, I think you could safely assume that the protection afforded by moral restraint would be dramatically reduced.
Savage is as Savage does.
You are thinking like a Christian. These idiots want to die for allah and take as many of us infidels with them as they can.
[These idiots want to die for allah and take as many of us infidels with them as they can.]
The giant is still not yet awake.
Rage is not a gift a wise enemy would endow us with.
They wouldn't like us when we're angry.
I agree with you 100%. My concern is how to discuss our vulnerabilities. There are vulnerabilities I am aware of that I have made the government privy to. I would never involve the media unless I saw the government purposely ignoring the problem. For some reason the media unsettles me. I feel they are much more concerned with "making news" than our well being.
*Assuming a ground burst with 50% blast yield or 5KLT equivalent. |
As our government continues to allow in hundreds of thousands of these people into our country, not to mention the millions that are just walking or driving in illegally.
BTW, Wall Street was inside the 100% death line. This did not include fire and blast.
If the bad guys had used a nuke, there is no way you'd be able to evacuate Manhattan in time to save those people...and southern Manhattan's daytime population is in the millions.
The fallout also settles in the streets--and that means nobody leaves those buildings for almost a week. Also remember that the localized EMP will clobber the local power grid--no refrigeration. The ground shock fractures the water pipes--no firefighting capability, plus no drinking water. Most of the buildings in the lethal area will not have window glass, so external air will circulate into the buildings.
Blow the thing off at lunchtime, and you've got a million-plus people out in the open for the crud to land on.
People would be able to travel in the streets to be evacuated. You can survive heavy radiation doses for a short time. I remember talking to a friend who photographed inside a nuclear reactor after an accident in the fifties. He said the film was so badly fogged by radiation that they had to go back in and re-shoot it.
A ground burst would not cause nearly the fire damage that an air burst would because the most of the city would be shadowed by the nearest buildings.
Lack of water, electricity and refrigeration are pretty much standard inconveniences that we deal with during disasters.
Getting that many people out of the death zone is not a matter of a "short time."
We may need to rethink a LOT of policies--such as the desire to stuff as many people as humanly possible into close quarters and call the result "urban planning."
A ground burst would not cause nearly the fire damage that an air burst would because the most of the city would be shadowed by the nearest buildings.
But the fires that DO start will not get put out, and will continue dumping secondary activation products downwind, complicating evacuation efforts (and, incidentally, dumping those products in now windowless buildings that you're using as fallout shelters.
The evacuation process itself would kick up an immense amount of radioactive crap for everyone to breathe in.
I think it's a big mistake to rely on government to protect us against terrorism. When the 9/11 terrorists were taking pilot training, one of the flight instructors notified the FBI and the FBI pretty much did nothing. I think there have been terrorist attacks on this country during the Clinton adminsitration that have been ignored and hushed up.
We should think more about empowering citizens rather than allowing government to take away hour rights in the name of security. The only 9/11 attack that was thwarted was stopped by citizens armed with cell phones and their bare hands.
The natural instinct of any government is to encourage people to act like sheep. They want you to:
-- not resist because you don't know what you are doing and someone might get hurt.
-- keep quiet, don't start rumors because people might panic.
-- obey anyone with a gun who says he is from the government.
-- give up anything that can be used as a weapon.
-- don't discriminate against anyone because of their looks or the language they speak. Trust everyone.
Airlines have been told that they cannot interview more than two Arab-looking passengers at a time for security concerns because that amounts to racial profiling.
No, I don't want to silence the media. We need to know what is going on. I'm not afraid of citizens panicking, I'm afraid of the government panicking.
If the government gives us our rights back -- the right to bear arms and the right to discriminate, then we will be much more secure.
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