Posted on 09/28/2001 12:44:29 PM PDT by smolensk
WASHINGTON — More than 100 terrorist organizations around the world have succeeded in obtaining elements for the construction of a nuclear bomb.
A United Nations report said the organizations have obtained the material from nuclear reactors in the former Soviet Union. The report said the terrorist groups have been leading clients of traffickers in smuggled nuclear goods.
The report recorded 550 incidents of nuclear trafficking since 1993.
As a result, the UN said, more than 100 terrorist groups are now capable of developing an atomic bomb. The report, first disclosed by the London-based Guardian daily, said worldwide smuggling of radioactive materials has doubled since 1996, Middle East Newsline reported.
The nuclear trafficking increased dramatically since the collapse of the former Soviet Union. Many of these incidents were not confirmed.
Western intelligence sources said the terrorist groups are led by the Al Qaeda group of Saudi billionaire fugitive Osama Bin Laden. The sources said Bin Laden is believed to have at least two nuclear bombs.
Last week, the UN held a conference in Stockholm on nuclear trafficking. The International Atomic Energy Agency urged the international community to strengthen regulations to prevent nuclear smuggling and trafficking.
The IAEA has recorded more than 370 confirmed incidents of nuclear trafficking since 1993. The agency said most of the incidents do not involve material that can be used for the assembly of nuclear weapons.
"Looking toward the future, it is clear that broad international cooperation will be needed to upgrade security measures, to improve capabilities for intercepting and responding to illicit trafficking, and to enhance the protection of facilities against terrorism and sabotage." IAEA director-general Mohamed El Baradei said.
"The most difficult challenge will be the effective consolidation of all these measures into integrated, efficient national systems, ensuring that the security of nuclear and other radioactive material is woven into the infrastructure of nuclear safety and security."
Why are fissionable elements such as U-235 so hard to come by? Is there a finite quanity on earth? Can they be manufactured or refined?
I think the real deal is China and the former commie states, versus the free world... using "terrorist" events to trigger another world war.
Size matters. Ours is bigger.
There's about five million tons of it in places where it could be economically mined, so availability isn't the problem—it's not nearly as rare as silver, for instance. Refining away contaminants such as chlorine and oxygen is also no problem—people have been doing that since 1841.
The problem is that there are basically two kinds of uranium, U-235 and U-238. The two are found mixed together, 99.3% U-238 to 0.7% U-235. U-238 is not sufficiently fissionable to be used for reactors or bombs, so the task is to "enrich" the uranium by removing U-238 atoms. (The U-238 waste material left over is what's called "depleted uranium.") Normal uranium is 0.7% U-235, as mentioned; "low-grade" uranium is about 3%, "high-grade" about 20%, and "weapons-grade" above 80%. From these numbers, you can see how much refinement is required, work that requires very advanced chemical engineering skills. For all but the most technologically advanced countries, it is much easier to acquire U-235 than to produce it.
The plutonium used in bombs is Pu-239. It doesn't occur naturally in any meaningful sense; it must be manufactured by exposing U-238 to slow neutrons. This happens all the time in nuclear reactors, however, so plutonium is surprisingly easy to come by. There's about 1500 tons of plutonium in the world, 80% of it existing in the form of nuclear waste from civilian reactors.
Extracting Pu-239 from reactor waste is much, much simpler than enriching U-235, and since Pu-239 is much more radioactive than U-235, less of it is required for building bombs. However, precisely because it is more radioactive, it requires more sophisticated bomb design—the large, crude gun-type "Fat Man" bomb dropped on Hiroshima used U-235, while to use plutonium required the smaller, more advanced implosion-type bombs tested at Alamogordo and dropped on Nagasaki.
So countries like Iraq and North Korea have a tough choice: Either they invest in very expensive, very difficult and very traceable U-235 enrichment facilities, or they have to develop complicated bombs that require very high-tech and hard-to-acquire components. Iraq chose the former route, and got its facility bombed for the effort; now Iraq is falling back to the easier-to-produce plutonium. North Korea chose the latter route, and while it now has lots of plutonium, it's having trouble developing an actual bomb to use it; so North Korea is rapidly developing uranium enrichment technology.
If there were a source of weapons-grade U-235 in the world, we'd all be in a lot of trouble. However, weapons-grade U-235 is only used for certain specialized components of advanced thermonuclear warheads, so there simply aren't large quantities of it lying around to be stolen or bought. Any "nuclear bomb material" you read about being acquired by terrorists is almost certainly Pu-239 or highly-enriched U-235, not weapons-grade U-235. Nasty stuff, but no nastier than jet fuel proved to be.
Not true.
"Breeder" type reactors can be used to produce Plutonium-239 from Uranium-238. But that's a special kind of reactor, and in any case the P-239 which is produced is at low concentrations, spread throughout a larger mass of remaining U-238, and would be useless for making a weapon without a great deal of very high-tech extraction and purification (which itself would have to be done remotely, since the mass would be highly radioactive even from the beginning).
Non-breeder reactors, which are more common, do not produce more "fuel" than they start with, and therefore it is incorrect to say that "any" nuclear power plant makes U-235 or P-239 as a "natural byproduct".
There are of course less innocuous reactors... but that is NOT what I was talking about... and the states involved HAVE the type of reactors to make the raw materials.
Furthermore the high tech manufacturing equipment needed to build the one reactor can be EASILY retooled to make the other one, with little noticeable alteration.
Iran is purchasing a rocket protection system from China to protect their nuclear reactor plant... because it is JUST such a system.
From these numbers, you can see how much refinement is required, work that requires very advanced chemical engineering skills. For all but the most technologically advanced countries, it is much easier to acquire U-235 than to produce it.One reason that it's so hard to refine the small amount of U-235 out of the larger mass of U-238 is because it's *all the same element* -- it's all Uranium (just two different isotopes of it). This means that most normal chemical extraction processes, which are so effective in other types of extractions, quite simply will not work. They have no way of differentiating one "flavor" of Uranium from the other (since they both have identical electron shells, which is the "chemical signature" of an element and what determines its chemical properties and behavior).
So you have to get a bit more tricky to separate the two. One method is to vaporize the mix, then use a centrifuge. This causes the (very slightly) heavier U-238 atoms to deflect farther outward than the lighter U-235 atoms, and causes the mixture to separate a bit. But this has to be repeated many, many, many times to eliminate most of the U-235. It's not an easy task, or one that can be hidden in a garage.
The plutonium used in bombs is Pu-239. It doesn't occur naturally in any meaningful sense;The reason is that it has a half-life on the order of tens of thousands of years. Thus, any which might have been present during the formation of the Earth has already decayed away to practically nothing. U-235 is longer lasting (half-life of millions of years), and thus although much of it has decayed since the Earth was formed, there's still quite a bit left in the ground.
Extracting Pu-239 from reactor waste is much, much simpler than enriching U-235, and since Pu-239 is much more radioactive than U-235, less of it is required for building bombs.It's easier to extract because it's chemically different from U-235, and thus normal chemical processes can be used to "grab" one element and wash it out of the other.
On the other hand, since it is much more radioactive, the extraction process is that much more "messy" -- you need greater radiation protection, and the "leftovers" are a bigger problem to deal with.
However, precisely because it is more radioactive, it requires more sophisticated bomb design—the large, crude gun-type "Fat Man" bomb dropped on Hiroshima used U-235, while to use plutonium required the smaller, more advanced implosion-type bombs tested at Alamogordo and dropped on Nagasaki.This is because the P-239 "wants" to react more vigorously, and thus as you try to bring a critical mass together, it quickly starts to react, and that reaction tends to push the pieces back apart. You can often get a fizzle instead of a big boom. It takes a higher-tech design and implosion timing to make the P-239 slam together precisely enough and fast enough that it doesn't have a chance to "fizzle" itself before it goes critical enough to make a large explosion.
Actually, the radiation of the scattered "unused" plutonium is negligible compared to the amount of radiation generated by the fission products.
An unexploded (or scattered) plutonium bomb consists of 300-600 Curies. But the amount of fission products from a 1kt detonation are (the list is only partial):
160,000 Curies of Iodine-131
38,000 Curies of Strontium-89
190 Curies of Strontium-90
200 Curies Cesium-137
15 Curies of Carbon-14
But that's only the near-term story. Plutonium has a (far) longer half-life than the fision products, which means that after sufficient time has passed, the residual Plutonium will continue to be a lasting radiation threat even after the fission products have decayed away to unremarkable levels.
I'm not so sure. Consider the possibility that OBL has a nuke and that he is saving it to use "in retaliation" against the great Satan (the United States) after we engage in a massive strike against them for the 9-11 attacks on the WTC.
In his mind, his use of a nuke in retaliation against us would gain world wide support from the Moslem world. Indeed, look at Indonesia, the largest Moslem country in the world wherein its citizens, it is reported, in mass numbers are supporting OBL and are making menacing comments about the US's treats to take action.
My great fear in all of this is that OBL has a nuke (or more than one), and there is no doubt in my mind, it is just a matter of time until it (they) are used.
That is why it is so important that we take PRE-EMPTIVE action!
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