Osama Bin Laden About to Attack the U.S., Says Terrorism Expert [suitcase nukes]

WASHINGTON, Sept. 22 /U.S. Newswire/ -- The following is a statement by Republican presidential candidate Dr. Hugh Cort:

I work with Dr. Paul Williams, the source for the September 7th World Net Daily article "Al-Qaeda Warns Muslims: Time to get out of U.S.; Afghan terror commander hints at big attack on NY, Washington." He is in touch with Hamid Mir; the Fox News Middle East expert who has interviewed bin Laden three times. Hamid Mir did the interview with Abu Dawood, the top Al Qaeda man in Afghanistan, who said all the Muslims need to leave America, especially New York and Washington, because Osama is soon going to attack with his "American Hiroshima" plan where he blows up 7 to 10 American cities with suitcase nukes.

Abu Dawood also told Hamid Mir that bin Laden will come out with a new audiotape in the next 10 days or sooner. Dr. Williams can provide media with the transcript of this interview. (NOTE: Contact Dr. Cort at 205-213-5621 between 2 p.m. and midnight Eastern Time, or leave a message at 205-313-1786 for more information).

Dr. Williams and I have located Adnan Shukrijumah, who the FBI calls "the next Mohammed Atta", who is the leader of bin Laden's "American Hiroshima" attacks, in Canada. We met with Canadian intelligence for five hours. They were very helpful. However the FBI has not been helpful. Google the name Ciro Vitolo. We have much more info that is not on the internet. We have also discovered what we believe could be the nerve center for bin Laden's "American Hiroshima" attacks. Hamid Mir, who has never been wrong to our knowledge, says bin Laden has already smuggled suitcase nukes through the Mexican border into the U.S. and is soon going to blow up 7 to 10 American cities.

Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden's number two man, said in his latest audiotape, essentially "We have warned you repeatedly, we have offered you a truce, we have asked you to convert to Islam, so now we have satisfied all the requirements (of Muslim law or "Honor Code" where you must warn your enemy, and offer him one last chance for a truce and to convert, before you strike him) and now we are justified in attacking you. Your government has hidden from you the full extent of the devastation that is coming. The days are pregnant with events that are about to be born."

In his audiotape of Jan. 19, bin Laden offered America a truce, then said "The only reason we have not attacked you yet is not because of your security precautions. It is simply because we are not quite through with the preparations. The minute the preparations are through, you will feel the attacks in your own homes."

Christianne Amanpour in the CNN special on bin Laden that aired a few weeks ago, "In the Footsteps of Bin Laden" made the point that before 9/11 bin Laden got a fatwa saying it was okay to kill civilians. Then he did 9/11. Now, she pointed out, he has gotten a fatwa, or religious order, saying it is OK to kill 10 million Americans with nuclear weapons. Guess what is going to happen next?

These attacks, which Khalid Sheik Mohammed said will be "a nuclear hell storm on America", are coming soon, perhaps as early as this Saturday, when the Muslim holy month of Ramadan starts.

The FBI needs to search every mosque in our major cities, but in surprise raids, because, apparently, according to an internet posting by the English Muslim convert Rakan Ben Williams, the bombers have a "failsafe plan" where if one of them gets caught the others are to immediately detonate their nukes.

And we must quickly catch Shukrijumah and his fellow terrorists in Canada before they blow up 7 to 10 American cities (just contact Dr. Paul Williams and myself and we will lead you to them). It is our only chance.

Also, everyone needs to immediately go to the website http://www.ki4u.com where they can order potassium iodide (KI) pills to avoid thyroid cancer in the event of a nuclear attack, and on that website they can read the ten-page article "How to Survive a Nuclear Attack" -- stay inside your house for three days, after which the radiation decreases to one hundredth of its initial strength, and then it is safe to go outside for short trips, and after 2 weeks you can go out all the time. But if you go outside in the first three days, even just for ten minutes, you will receive a fatal dose of radiation and slowly bleed to death internally over 2-3 weeks. Remember, many more people died from radiation poisoning after Hiroshima than died in the initial blast.

Please help me and Dr. Paul Williams stop these horrible attacks. Please get us some press coverage and some help from our Congressmen and Senators and FBI and CIA and NSA before it's too late.

Visit http://www.stopdoomsday.com and http://www.cortforpresident.com for futher information.

MORE ON SUITCASE NUKES...LET's EDUCATE OURSELVES ON ITS POTENCY...

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/050624.html

Dear Cecil:

I've heard talk about "suitcase" nuclear weapons, which someone could carry around and detonate anywhere. Is this possible? I'm not talking about whether someone could get hold of the proper components or be mad enough to pull it off. Rather, I always thought uranium and plutonium were really heavy and the amount needed for a bomb would be too much for one person to tote around. Gold, for example, is much heavier than most people think, certainly heavier than movies typically suggest, and plutonium has a much greater atomic weight and thus should be even heavier. In the end a suitcase-sized nuclear device in the back of a truck is just as awful as a totable one, but the image put forth in the media seems highly inaccurate to me. --Jonathan, via e-mail

Cecil replies:

As so often, we need to define our terms. If you're asking whether it's possible to make a practical nuclear bomb small and light enough to carry around one-handed in a Teletubbies lunch box, the answer is probably not. However, if we expand the menu of mininuke delivery systems to include, say, a bowling-ball bag or, better yet, a garden-variety wheeled suitcase, I wouldn't rule anything out. And if we conjure up what in my opinion is an entirely plausible scenario with a guy in a parking meter service uniform pulling an ashcan-sized two-wheeled coin vault through busy downtown streets at rush hour--well, I'll make the usual disclaimer about the proper components not being easy to come by, etc. Strictly from the standpoint of design feasibility, though, piece of cake.

While the active ingredients in a nuclear bomb are plenty heavy, they're not in the neutron-star range, as you seem to think. Gold, uranium, and plutonium all weigh around 19 to 20 grams per cubic centimeter (10 to 11 ounces per cubic inch), compared to about 8 g/cc for iron. It doesn't take much fissile material to make a bomb--on the order of 10 kilograms of plutonium, a roughly grapefruit-sized sphere. You'll also want a "shaped charge" of conventional explosives to compress the plutonium to critical mass, plus a few other precisely engineered but not especially bulky items. (A gun-type weapon that smashes two hunks of uranium together to trigger the nuclear blast is simpler to make but requires more material.) One thing you won't need is massive lead shielding to ensure the delivery person lives long enough to reach ground zero--prior to detonation, plutonium and uranium don't emit significant amounts of ionizing radiation, one reason a suitcase nuke wouldn't be easy to detect. What would the thing weigh, all told? Possibly as little as 30 kilograms, or 66 pounds. It'd be a bit unwieldy to slide under the seat as a carry-on, maybe, but still pretty small.

Guesswork, you say. True, but fairly educated guesswork. Our most recent glimpse at the state of the art in portable A-bomb design was furnished by the late Russian general Alexander Lebed, who in 1997 claimed that 100 or so Russian tactical nuclear bombinos couldn't be accounted for. Lebed said each device measured about 60 by 40 by 20 centimeters (24 by 16 by 8 inches, suitcase-sized in my book) and would explode with a force roughly equal to 1,000 tons of TNT--supposedly they were to be deployed by special forces behind enemy lines. Kremlin spokesmen roundly denied all, including the little bombs' existence. The question remains unsettled (and unsettling), but there seems small doubt that suitcase nukes are buildable, since plenty of portable if not exactly Samsonite-sized A-weapons were in fact built during the cold war. One oft-cited example is a U.S. device called the special atomic demolition munition (SADM), reportedly deployed in various configurations during the 1960s. The SADM, or anyway some SADMs, supposedly had a shipping weight of about 160 pounds, which is more like a dishwasher than a suitcase, but when assembled and ready for use may have been in the 50-to-60-pound range. In declassified photos one version looks to be about the size of a small shop vac--and remember, that's 40-year-old technology. Imagine what some nuclear nerd could come up with today.

Not to worry, the experts say: The suitcase nuke threat is exaggerated--if any were actually out there, given the global surplus of fanatics, by now they'd surely have been used. Producing weapons-grade uranium and plutonium is a huge industrial operation requiring skills and equipment not easily concealed; even the craziest terrorist knows there are easier ways to make things go boom. Despite what alarmists would have you believe, you can't just buy ten kilos of P-239 on the Tashkent black market and get a recipe from alt.nukes.made.simple. To which the pessimist, knowing that we're inevitably headed toward a more nuke-dependent world as other energy sources dry up, can only reply: Not yet.

--CECIL ADAMS

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