I'm a worst-case scenario kind of thinker. My May 2005 article about the destruction of New Orleans by a Category 5 hurricane--an article published about 100 days before Katrina--certainly demonstrated as much. I think it's rational to worry about extreme scenarios in direct proportion to how bad they would be if they actually happened--not to simply dismiss them because they're "unlikely" at any given moment or in any given year.
So perhaps that's why it is that lately, I find myself thinking a lot about the possibility of nuclear terrorism in a major U.S. city. How many people, when they contemplate geting into the D.C. condo market, first research how likely it is that their new home will be vaporized within the next five to ten years?
But that's what I've been doing. An article in the November/December Foreign Policy (unfortunately subscriber only) lays out what it would take to kill hundreds of thousands in a U.S. city: A year's work, a team of just under twenty trained professionals, and about $ 5.5 million dollars. Of course the great variable in terms of both cost and the feasibility of the plan is obtaining highly enriched uranium, but as the authors note:
No one really knows how much highly enriched uranium there is in the world, or how close the wrong groups are to getting the right amount. The frightening truth is that fissile material, including nuclear explosive material, is an item of commerce, and moves from place to place. One of the side effects of our globalized economy is that opportunities for direct theft and bribing of nuclear custodians abound.
And when rogue states like Iran and possibly North Korea continue to enrich uranium, ostensibly for energy purposes, it is even harder to control what happens to it. Although building a nuclear device remains an expensive, complex undertaking out of reach for most organizations, a well-financed group that seeks to kill very large numbers ofpeople may well find it an irresistible option. A wealthy organization seeking to kill several hundred thousand people could hardly find a more economical method than the detonation of a small nuclear device. That is reason enough to consider the nuclear threat a serious one. Just because a nuclear terrorist attack hasn't happened shouldn't give us the false comfort of thinking it won't.
I am not an arms control expert (or even arms control blogger) by any stretch. Maybe this is not news to all of you--or maybe it is. In any event, the authors of the piece are big shots in this area: Peter D. Zimmerman, professor of science and security in the Department of War Studies at King's College London, and previously chief scientist of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee and of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency; and Jeffrey G. Lewis, executive director of the Managing the Atom Project at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard's Kennedy School, as well as author of Arms Control Wonk.
If these guys are worried, shouldn't we all be?
- Log in to post comments
More like this
"How many people, when they contemplate geting into the D.C. condo market, first research how likely it is that their new home will be vaporized within the next five to ten years?"
Um... me! Seriously. I moved to DC a few months before 9/11 and when asked how close my condo was from the White House (about 3 miles, I think), I'd answer, "Far enough away not to be vaporized immediately by a nuclear blast that directly hit the White House, but close enough that I'd die horribly from the radiation within days, if not hours." It started out as a joke, but I finally nosed around a bit and discovered I wasn't that far off the mark in my impromptu risk assessment (depending on the size of the bomb in question).
It's not something I mentioned when I _sold_ my condo, however. :)
If your prophetic powers hold sway, I'm glad I'll be out of the nation's capital within the next 100 days...
As a child in the 1980s I frequently read that one of the prime causes of urban blight was middle and upper class Americans fleeing city centers due fears that the city center would be 'first to go' in a nuclear war. Later it was shown that other issues, such as racism, larger homes in the suburbs, etc, played a more important role. But the fear of living near a likely nuclear target was certainly noised about a lot.
When I worry about terrorism I mainly worry about someone bringing in a nonnative type of plant or animal. Who knows what sort of havoc that could cause, We all know what happened with rabbits being brought to Australia.
I think we should not just worry but actually do something -- eg, to ensure that all the enriched uranium in nations that were formerly part of the Soviet Union is safeguarded. Bush administration efforts in that regard have been woefully inadequate and underfunded.
But, in all seriousness, how can we expect to prepare as a Nation for something that our President can not even pronounce?
He clearly thinks his mispronunciation is quaint, but it ain't.
I remember having a conversation about this with Jennifer Ouellette a couple years ago--we live a few blocks from each other.
The reality of the threat is hard to know. Most analyses I have read seem to think that construction of a nuclear device by a cell of "terrorists" would be difficult. It's not the specialized knowledge or the materials--it's the facilities needed. Exposure to enriched uranium in the quantities required for any significant amount of time would be lethal. Radiation protection and possible remote processing would be necessary. Very few laboratories anywhere are equipped for this.
It's more likely that a device would be acquired from a rogue state such as Transdniester (an anarchic section of Moldova which is known to sell Soviet-era weaponry for profit). The transportation of such a device into a major US city could probably be done via large shipping containers (maybe through the Port of Baltimore and then trucked into DC?)
A Soviet device would, of course, be much, much more damaging than a homemade bomb. There's a reason the FBI is scoping out Winchester, VA for its new facility--it's at the edge of the 50-mile "blast-zone" for a 1 Megaton H bomb, if detonated approx. 1 mile above Washington, DC.
Consider this next time you're condo shopping.
Well, the worst case scenario just got worse. I was assuming--but perhaps I shouldn't--that the first act of nuclear terrorism would at least be with a relatively less powerful nuke. If it's an H bomb....
fizz, try rats and the plague. while we've happily made some serious advances in public health since then, terrorists would be hard-pressed to figure out something insidious that'd take care of so many so quickly.
i've gotta agree w/ jennifer - a resident of any big US city, especially DC and NYC, how could you NOT consider it? moving from the west coast, where the terrorism alert colors were (if it's possible) even more of a joke than they are out here, to the new york area was a wake-up call. i regularly take a path train in and out of the WTC pit. i am uncomfortably familiar with potential biochemical weapons after my series of grad courses. and this isn't even getting into bomb territory. yup, migrating back west after a few more years sounds increasingly appealing.
so um, chris, thx for a heartening post.
Fizz,
While your example is of something that could do serious, long-term damage, it's not "terrorism," per se. Terrorism is as much (or more) a psychological attack as it is a physical one. Keeping ordinary people afraid that at any moment everything could go tto hell is the way terrorists succedd, not by introducing kudzu to the south.
As for the H-Bomb problem, yes it's difficult to build one, so the more likely scenario is getting one ready-made, either from the former Soviet Union (the weapons themselves are accounted for but all the fissile material is not) or from Pakistan. We've got a good, close eye on both of those places, but there's no way to ensure that we have 100% coverage all the time, especially considering the organized crime problem in Russia and the militant radical Islam problem in Pakistan. And who can say how long we'll be able to keep our eye on that ball?
Incidentally, I'd expect the bomb to go off in a non-American city, Moscow or St. Petersburg being likely target--because of Russia's continued problems with Chechnya and the goals (not to mention past experience) of the Chechnyan rebels, it's a perfect case of proximity to material plus ideological justification.
Of course, Pakistan and India could go at it one of these days, and then we'd all be screwed. (Quick question: who doe sthe U.S. support in that conflict? Who does China support?)
One last thing: in the intel world, no one ever says they're 100% certain about anything happening in the future. But I know more than a few analysts who are 90% sure that one of the world's major cities will go up in a mushroom cloud within a decade. They've been saying this since 2003.
Sleep tight!
Um, okay, after all this...should I buy a condo?
Decline and Fall said: "I know more than a few analysts who are 90% sure that one of the world's major cities will go up in a mushroom cloud within a decade."
These would not happen to be the same guys/gals who told us Saddam had WMD just before the invasion (tons of anthrax, delivery vehicles [kites?], biolabs, etc, etc), would they? And no, I don't buy the line that Dick Cheney was just making all the reports up in his office.
When it comes down to it, I don't think anyone really knows the status of the tons of enriched uranium in the former Soviet Republics. They just know there is a lot of it and that much of it is not properly secured (at least not by common homeowner standards -- lock the front door, keep the outside light on etc). This is what makes the whole thing frightening, of course.
On the issue of nuclear terrorism, I'd say that the most likely scenario (by far) involves the use of a dirty bomb. Scientists at FAS think so too. While a dirty bomb attack in a big city like Manhattan may not kill a lot of people outright (or even in the long term), it would instill a huge amount of fear in the populace and probably have a large economic impact (which is really what terrorism is about, at any rate).
The thing to remember is that all of these people are ful of s***. They make their living by selling fear - that makes them fearmongers, right? I give their spoutings about the same weight I give the annual psychics' predictions about the new year.
Of course some day a nuclear device might be detonated somewhere. If built by terrorists, it would probably end up being a dirty conventional bomb. But is the probability higher than DC being nuked during the Cold War? I doubt it. My advice is to live your life and consider risks logically. In other words, wear your seatbelt when driving and don't smoke.
Dark Tent,
These would not happen to be the same guys/gals who told us Saddam had WMD just before the invasion (tons of anthrax, delivery vehicles [kites?], biolabs, etc, etc), would they?
No, these are, in some cases, some of the ones who were voicing doubts just before the invasion. Others weren't privy to that information at the time. My colleagues and I use Iraqi WMD as an example for students of how NOT to do analysis (I teach at the Army Intelligence School). You're right that Cheney didn't make it up in his office, but don't use one example of a large failure failure based on faulty assumptions and political motivations to tarnish an entire group of people who have far more successes than failures to their names. (Incidentally, it wasn't just the U.S. intelligence community that dropped the ball on that one--Saddam was careful to give the appearance that he actually had the stuff, and intel agencies all over the world, including France and Germany, believed it.)
There was a lot of cooperation between the U.S. and Russia on nuclear arsenals in the early 90's, especially regarding the consolidation of nukes from the former Soviet states that had arsenals (Kazakhstan, Belarus and Ukraine in particular). So the people who work on this problem full-time do have a good idea of what's out there. The Russian stuff is, to my knowledge, all accounted for.
Gregg Easterbrook addressed some of the doomsday scenarios in a NYT article in 2003 during the great duct tape shortage:
The chance that a crude atomic device will someday detonate on American soil is, by a large margin, the worst terror threat the nation faces. Yet the new Department of Homeland Security has said little about atomic preparedness.
To think the unthinkable, if an atomic device bearing about the yield of the Hiroshima weapon went off outside the White House, people for roughly a mile in each direction might die. But most people in the District of Columbia would survive, while the main effect on Washington's suburbs would be power failures and broken windows. So the majority of people in Washington and its suburbs who would not die would need to know what to do. But do they? Generally not, because there has been scant discussion.
(Here's what to do: Remain indoors at least 24 hours to avoid fallout; remain on ground floors or in the basements of buildings; if you are upwind of the explosion stay put; if downwind, flee by car only if roads are clear since buildings provide better fallout protection than cars.)
This last point is an important one: there has been no discernible effort on the part of the U.S. government to instruct Americans on what to do if a major city goes up in a puff of smoke. Harold Smith, the guy most responsible for fixing the proliferation problem in Kazakhstan, etc. in the early 90's, now at UC Berkeley, has been working on this issue, but I don't know how far he's gotten.
Decline and fall.
Forgive me, but whenever I see a probability like 90% attached to a case with considerable uncertainties attached to it (like this one undoubtedly has), I am highly dubious. 90% is pretty damned certain in my book -- comes from my scientific training (physics).
It's not just a matter of acquiring the material, of course. It's a matter of having the knowhow, facilities etc to assemble even a crude device and then deliver it to a target city.
But I don't have any inside information like you, so I am basing my assessment completely on what I have read by scientists who know something about the issue , eg at FAS.
As far as painting the intelligence community with a broad brush, I certainly appreciate that there are probably many within the intelligence community who are very capable and who undoubtedly were questioning the pre-war claims about Saddam's WMD program.
But the fact remains, there was a massive failure on the part of US intelligence on the Iraqi WMD issue and that should be a wakeup call. I sincerely hope it is/was.
I understand the reticence about the 90% figure--it's an estimate, and let's face it, the first rule of intel analysis is that nothing is ever certain. 50% certainty is actually pretty good in a lot of cases. And yes, the intel community has done a lot of self-scrutiny after the WMD fiasco. It was definitely a wakeup call.
Dirty bombs are easy to make--get the "dirt" (chemicals, uranium, whatever) and blow them up, thus dispersing them, creating fear and paranoia as well as your fair measure of death and destruction. The H-Bomb scenario is predicated on getting one that's already been built and finding a way to detonate it, which I'm sure isn't too hard to figure out.
the 03/12 new yorker had an article about the sensor-net program being developed to detect fissile material coming into the country. it addresses some of these same concerns, and describes the impact a dirty bomb might have