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The WSJ is completely accurate about that.

Yes, I think so too.

Here is the key passage to the very long article :

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So could al Qaeda make its own bomb? It appears that the terror network has tried and failed.

In August 2001, bin Laden was envisioning attacks bigger than what happened on September 11. Almost a month before the attacks on New York and Washington, bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri met with Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood and Abdul Majeed, two officials once part of Pakistan's nuclear program. Mr. Mahmood had supervised the plant that enriched uranium for Pakistan's first bomb and later managed efforts to produce weapons-grade plutonium. Both scientists were arrested on Oct. 23, 2001. They remain under house arrest in Pakistan. At their meeting with bin Laden, they discussed plans to mine uranium from plentiful deposits in Afghanistan and talked about the technology needed to turn the uranium into bomb fuel. It was these scientists who informed bin Laden that the uranium from Uzbekistan was too impure to be useful for bomb making.

Al Qaeda will keep trying, no doubt. But there is no evidence that they are near succeeding. A wide array of documents and computer hard drives found in al Qaeda safe houses reveals a serious effort to build weapons of mass destruction. The U.S. military also obtained a document with the sinister title of "Superbomb."

In addition, CNN discovered a cache of documents at an al Qaeda safe house that outlined the terror network's WMD plans. David Albright, a physicist and president of the Institute for Science and International Security, was retained by CNN to evaluate the al Qaeda documents.

In "Al Qaeda's Nuclear Program: Through the Window of Seized Documents," a research paper for a think tank linked to the University of California at Berkeley, Albright concluded: "Whatever al Qaeda had accomplished towards nuclear weapon capabilities, its effort in Afghanistan was 'nipped in the bud' with the fall of the Taliban government. The international community is fortunate that the war in Afghanistan set back al Qaeda's effort to obtain nuclear weapons."

For now, suitcase-sized nuclear bombs remain in the realm of James Bond movies. Given the limitations of physics and engineering, no nation seems to have invested the time and money to make them. Both U.S. and the USSR built nuclear mines (as well as artillery shells), which were small but hardly portable--and all were dismantled by treaty by 2000. Alexander Lebed's claims and those of defector Stanislev Lunev were not based on direct observation. The one U.S. official who saw a small nuclear device said it was the size of three footlockers--hardly a suitcase. The desire to obliterate cities is portable--inside the heads of believers--while, thankfully, the nuclear devices to bring that about are not.

Mr. Miniter is author of "Disinformation: 22 Media Myths That Undermine the War on Terror" (Regnery, 2005), from which this article is excerpted. It is available from the OpinionJournal bookstore.

Richard Miniter: The one U.S. official who saw a small nuclear device said it was the size of three footlockers--hardly a suitcase.

Richard Miniter's article in the Wall Street Journal is widely quoted on this forum. Unfortunately, it can easily lead to some very wrong conclusions.

I have personally seen MANY nukes. I have personal experience with nuke maintenance. I can absolutely guarantee that it is possible to make a suitcase nuke, including one that would NOT use tritium as a trigger, and would NOT require maintenance every six months or less.

I have also heard Richard Miniter speak. Some of what he said was right, and some of it was absolute BS.

In particular, Miniter's "3 foot lockers" comment is widely interpreted as meaning that is the smallest you can make a "portable" nuke. He did not actually say that is the smallest they can be made, but that is the impression many people got. That impression is totally wrong.

Miniter's comments about maintenance are tied to tritium triggers, which require frequent maintenance. This is then extrapolated to imply that all nukes require tritium triggers. This is NOT SO, as long as you are willing to use extra plutonium and willing to accept a smaller "bang".

As for General Lebed, I have no way of knowing if he was really the kook he is widely portrayed to be. Nor do I know if Russia ever made a portable nuke. All I can say for sure is that they are technologically possible, and that they are not really that hard to make if you have enough plutonium. The key is getting enough plutonium, which is VERY hard to get, and VERY hard to handle safely.

Bottom Line:

1. You definitely COULD make a suitcase nuke.

2. You definitely COULD design it to be easily maintained in the field if you chose to use enough plutonium.
2a. You do NOT need a tritium trigger if you don't mind using extra plutonium.
2b. You do NOT need to keep the plutonium in close proximity to components that neutron emissions would damage while the device is in storage. Keeping the components separated would greatly reduce the required electronic maintenance. Obviously, for a weapon designed for relatively long term shelf life in between major maintenance, you would need some assembly before it could be used.

3. It definitely COULD be designed to fit in a suitcase.
3a. A minimum size of "3 foot lockers" is total BS.

4. None of this means the Russians ever actually made the damn things.

5. The yield would most likely be less than 10 kilotons.
5a. That means the radius of total destruction would most likely be 1/4 mile or so. In other words, it would knock down almost everything within 3 blocks of where it went off, with decreasing levels of damage further out.

6. Just because it's possible does not mean it's real. I know for certain that it's possible. I have no idea if it's real.