It’s Worse Than You Think
Mike’s book is a major contribution to the literature on nuclear terrorism. It provides the first really careful, step-by-step, unclassified look at the difficulties terrorists would have to surmount to launch a nuclear attack that is from a point of view somewhat skeptical of the threat. (Many other skeptical accounts have been simply wrong on key points, such as John Mueller’s recent account in The National Interest, Robin Frost’s Adelphi Paper, or William Arkin’s piece in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists; I briefly take on the myths of the risk-deniers in this area on pp. 23-24 of Securing the Bomb 2007, and at greater length in the 2004 edition.) Moreover, Mike’s book provides a useful system-level overview of steps that could be taken to reduce the risk.
I remain unpersuaded, however, either that the difficulties facing terrorists are as great and as difficult to surmount as Mike suggests, or that the lines of defense coming after terrorists have gotten the nuclear material for their bomb have as much to offer as Mike hopes. The balance of evidence, in my judgment, justifies far greater pessimism on both these counts.
The difficulties facing nuclear terrorists.
In his initial post, and in the opening chapter of the book, Mike argues that the fact that terrorists would have to overcome several successive obstacles to carry out a terrorist nuclear attack “turns on its head” the traditional notion that the terrorists only have to succeed once, while the defenses have to succeed all the time. In this case, he argues, the defenses only have to succeed at one point in the plot, while the terrorists have to succeed at each stage. But that is true only if terrorists’ failure at one stage leads to the end of the plot – as opposed to just leading them to try again. For many stages of the plot, the evidence of al Qaeda’s nuclear efforts seems to be that the cost of failure is small and the group repeatedly tries again. From the 1993 attempt to purchase HEU to the 2003 attempt to buy nuclear bombs, al Qaeda has repeatedly tried to get the wherewithal for a nuclear attack, and despite detection of these efforts by U.S. or other intelligence services (often well after the fact), these failures have not put a stop to the effort. Similarly, al Qaeda has been attempting to recruit nuclear expertise for some time, and occasional detection of those efforts has not led to their end. Mike points to possible problems in terrorist bomb-making such as uranium fires and criticality accidents, and points out that defenses might detect them – but unless terrorists chose the location of their bomb effort extraordinarily poorly, the odds are very high that these events would go unnoticed, and the terrorist group involved might well regroup and try again.
The Office of Technology Assessment provided a useful summary of what would be required for terrorists to make a nuclear bomb thirty years ago, which remains one of the best available statements today (see Nuclear Proliferation and Safeguards, 1977, p. 140):
A small group of people, none of whom have ever had access to the classified literature, could possibly design and build a crude nuclear explosive device. They would not necessarily require a great deal of technological equipment or have to undertake any experiments. Only modest machine-shop facilities that could be contracted for without arousing suspicion would be required.
I would argue that it is distressingly plausible that at some point al Qaeda or some other group will succeed in putting together this level of capability, that the consequences of a terrorist nuclear attack are potentially catastrophic, and that we therefore need an urgent global effort to reduce this risk as much and as rapidly as practicable.
The later lines of defense.
Unfortunately, the later lines of defense are likely to be weaker tools in such a risk-reduction effort than Mike’s book makes them out to be. Once nuclear material has left the site where it is supposed to be, it is extraordinarily difficult to find and recover it; all the later lines of defense are variations on looking for needles in haystacks. The small size and weak radioactivity of the materials needed for a bomb; the huge length of national borders and the myriad pathways across them; and the immense legal and illegal traffic of all sorts that pours across borders every year conspire to make the nuclear smuggler’s job easier and the defense’s job harder.
The numerical examples of the possible effectiveness of border detection systems on pp. 117-118, for example, show it being very difficult for the terrorists to reduce the detection system’s effectiveness to below 75%. The reality is that today, most of the detectors deployed would have a probability of detecting even modestly shielded HEU was close to zero percent – even if the terrorists did not do the obvious and go by routes that did not have large and easily detectable radiation detection equipment in place. While Mike presents some very interesting discussion on the difficulties terrorists might face on various pathways terrorists might use to go around legal border crossings, I think far more pessimism is justified about how much better border controls and radiation detection can reduce this risk. I invite anyone who thinks we can put really effective controls in place to keep out a suitcase-sized box of nuclear material to go for a canoe trip in boundary waters between the United States and Canada, or sail on one of the many hundreds of yachts that go from Caribbean or Canada to the United States and sail up and down the coast, stopping at many small marinas with little if any inspection.
Mike argues that 9/11 teaches us that al Qaeda uses ordinary legal border crossings. I draw the opposite lesson. It seems to me that 9/11 teaches us that al Qaeda carefully studies the defenses it has to overcome (such as the screening system for passengers boarding aircraft) and devises creative ways to overcome them (such as using box cutters). When their intelligence collection tells them they can get across at legal border crossings, they do so. When it tells them the opposite, they will go elsewhere – as they do today at the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, or going into Iraq.
My bottom line: we do need some investment in these later lines of defense, and we do need the kind of system-level approach to thinking about the effectiveness of the total defense that Mike describes. But we need to understand that securing material at the source provides far higher leverage in reducing the risk, per unit money or effort invested, than any other policy tool we have.
Securing nuclear materials just makes sense but the panic over nuclear terrorism still strikes me as ridiculously overblown.
thosethingswesay.blogspot.com
December 6, 2007 2:40 PM | Reply | Permalink
Before Katrina I would have said "probably overblown" but not "ridiculously overblown". But the damage to New Orleans from Katrina was about equal to what it would have been if a homemade nuclear device had been detonated against the canal that faces downtown and the nation didn't seem to care very much - we just sat back, watched it happen, watched people die in the aftermath, and watched (and are still watching) the ruins rot. So I guess we don't mind the destruction of a city so much.
sPh
December 6, 2007 2:57 PM | Reply | Permalink
Re: But the damage to New Orleans from Katrina was about equal to what it would have been if a homemade nuclear device had been detonated against the canal that faces downtown and the nation didn't seem to care very much
The damage and loss of life from even a tiny nuke would be vastly greater than anything Katrina did. The death toll alone would be from fifty to a hundred times greater. Also, saying that nation didn't care what happened in New Orleans is a bizarre comment, since people were horrified at the incompetence of the governmment (at all levels).
December 7, 2007 3:20 AM | Reply | Permalink
How do you define "tiny nuke"? The lowest-yielding US device, the W54, had a yield equivalent to 10 tons of TNT. When ships carrying ammonium nitrate exploded in Texas City in 1947, the estimated yield was between 2-4 kilotons (i.e., 2000-4000 tons). Halifax NS, in 1917, was in the middle of that range.
Explosive yield is sometimes difficult to compare exactly. With some simplifying but valid instruction, damage goes up by the cube root of the yield. Also, nuclear explosions are extremely concentrated, so, unless you are going for a superhardened target such as a missile silo, increasing the yield just pulverizes the rubble somewhat more.
With long-range missiles, a Poseidon with six 50 KT independently targeted warheads is apt to be more destructive to a "soft" target, such as a city, than a 340 KT single explosion.
Nuclear explosions, even at the low end, are extremely destructive, but some posts do tend to overstate their destructiveness.
--
Howard
*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]
December 7, 2007 6:18 AM | Reply | Permalink
There is also the question of whether a terrorist organization possesses and can use a full-scale military weapon with a yield in the 50-400 kt range. Most of these discussions start out from the premise of stolen /fissile material/ being assembled into a homemade device, then proceed to damage assumptions based on a high-yield military device.
I don't think even in the former Soviet Union anyone would sell a 400 kt weapon to a terrorist. Some fissile material, yes - which in my utterly uninformed opinion based only on public information would result in a device with a yield of 5 kt or less. The most effective place in the United States to employ such a device would have been on the bank of the canal draining New Orleans that faced downtown; it would have shattered the downtown area and flooded the rest of the city. Which is exactly what Katrina did.
sPh
December 7, 2007 6:19 AM | Reply | Permalink
.
I note also for example that the sheriff who set up an armed barricade on a US Highway bridge to prevent people from leaving New Orleans (black people that is) was never prosecuted for that crime.
.
sPh
December 7, 2007 6:23 AM | Reply | Permalink
Consuming many SF novels and such when younger I came to expect a nuked city anyday. But time has persuaded me that while it might happen it's both hard to do and not appealing to any known terrorist or organization.
The phrase above, "crude nuclear explosive device", is so vague as to include an IED loaded with anti-static brushes, each carrying a speck of polonium. It also includes a simple gun bomb of highly-enriched uranium, which is very unlikely (who has that much HEU?).
But psyching out the possible nukers is moot if material is held closely. That's the bottleneck, and there is not really a black market in it. It can't be compared to ordinary arms and munitions, which are easier to acquire than safe drinking water in some parts of the world.
I think this is an important distinction, that the ease of a terrorist fish swimming in the civilian sea (pace Mao) is irrelevant to the nuke worry. Once a true weapon is out there, being deployed, (the setting in the movie "Peacemaker"), odds are long for the defenders. A good reason to not piss people off, perhaps, but let's just keep that stuff locked up, OK?
The more assembled weapons that exist the harder to secure all of them. We lost track of a few recently. So the best defense against nuclear terrorism is to reduce the active stockpile as well as the materials stockpile. This means arms reduction agreements.
A fantasy I entertained for a stable nuclear world gives every country (well, most) a single weapon, on a mobile and modestly accurate missile. No one can intimidate another country with it, but any aggressive use could lead to annihilation, as other countries pile on.
December 6, 2007 3:56 PM | Reply | Permalink
"The more assembled weapons that exist the harder to secure all of them. We lost track of a few recently. So the best defense against nuclear terrorism is to reduce the active stockpile as well as the materials stockpile. This means arms reduction agreements."
Every statement in this paragraph is not true.
The ability to secure assembled weapons is not dependent on the number of assembled weapons, but on the number of secure facilities. If you put all your weapons in one very high security facility, it would not matter whether there were one or 1000 in that facility, each weapon would be equally secure. If you had only ten weapons, and each was placed, by itself, in an insecure facility, then each would be equally insecure. The problem with the cruise missiles at Minot was not related to the number of missiles in the storage bunker, but to the procedures at the single storage facility.
Second, reducing the active stockpile of weapons is not the best way to guard against nuclear terrorism, unless you are only worried about terrorists stealing full-up nuclear weapons. Around the world, there are a far greater number of storage facilties for nuclear materials than there are storage facilities for nuclear weapons, and the security is much, much, higher at facilities for weapons than it is at facilities for materials (even though some improvements are still possible.) But, if you're looking at allocating fixed resources, you'll get far more "bang for your buck" by increasing security at materials storage facilities than weapons storage facilities. Numbers are higher, security is lower, and, therefore, risks are higher.
Arms reductions agreements are neither necessary nor sufficient for reducing assmebled weapons, and they are either irrelivent to the threat of nuclear terrorism, or more likely, they would make the threat worse. On my first point, nations can and will reduce their assmebled weapons if they decide it is in their national security interest to do so; they don't need a bilateral or mulitlateral agreement to make that decision. And, if they decide it is not in their interest to do, no formal agreement can convince them or force them to do so. They just won't sign.
Second, it may seem odd, but the safest place for a nuclear warhead, if you are worried about the terrorist threat, is on a missile in a silo. These things were built to withstand nuclear war, and the security is as good as it gets. Once you take them off the missiles, start moving them around, start breaking down the pieces and parts, and try to store the materials in a greater number of sites, the points of access go up and the security goes down. So this is not the best way to reduce the threat of nuclear terrorism.
The best way, as both Michael and Matt would probably agree, is to secure weapons-grade material at its source. The dispute seems to be over what to do next....
December 7, 2007 5:58 AM | Reply | Permalink
Let's say I exaggerate for effect. No one disputes the value of securing weapons-grade material.
But looking at our own stocks, it isn't hard to believe that if we had only six warheads for the Advanced Cruise Missile we would know where they were.
I do in fact worry most about theft of full-up assembled weapons, since other options are difficult and low-yield. But securing materials as well as weapons is so low-cost in comparison to military action, or even border security, that it should be emphasizied.
I agree that deployed warheads are better guarded than those on the shelf. But that is an argument for either more delivery systems or fewer warheads. Sounds like arms control is involved, a bit.
If two countries decide it is in their mutual interest to reduce stocks, they will. One state will rarely decide such on its own, absent the other state doing so. And of course we are not wasting time talking about agreements that aren't agreed to.
December 7, 2007 6:43 AM | Reply | Permalink
"But looking at our own stocks, it isn't hard to believe that if we had only six warheads for the Advanced Cruise Missile we would know where they were."
Sorry, missed this line in my first reply. Its not true, either.
The only way your comment could be true is if we only had six cruise missiles in storage facility, and they were removed without a valid order, and someone noticed that the bunker was empty. You could argue that, with hundreds of missiles in the bunker, it would be harder to notice if six had been removed without a valid order.
In the real world these missiles were moved under a valid order. The crew just took the wrong pylon, and it was the failure of accounting produres, not the existence of the missiles that caused the problem. (By the way, the warheads never went missing, they were on the missiles, and the missiles never went missing, the crews knew there were 12 cruise missiles on a B-52 bound for Barksdale, they just didn't know that six of them had live warheads.)
If we only had six cruise missiles, and we had lousy security and accounting procedures, then we may not know where they are. If we have 6,000 and they are cared for under pristine security and accounting procedures, then we'd know where all of them are. The problem at Minot had nothing to do with the number of missiles in the bunker, but with the procedures for securing and accounting for them.
December 7, 2007 7:17 AM | Reply | Permalink
You are very good at reducing my exaggerations.
When I say "know where they are" I'm not referring to an audit. I mean that, before the missiles were removed from the bunker, the statement "We know precisely where all ACM-129 warheads are" would be accurate. Whereas after those six headed off to the airplane for mounting, the statement would no longer be accurate.
The most perfect system can fail. Enough iterations of the near-perfect and you get a failure. But our accounting is not the problem; I only mention it because of proximity. I don't think anyone writing on the subject worries about our warheads going off the reservation.
If we worry about Russia's weapons getting sold off, arms control comes back into the discussion. What would make it worthwhile for Russia to reduce stocks, and therefore decrease the number of locales where accounting might fail? Surely there are security procedures that make failure a low-enough probability to be satisfying. But multiply the system across enough iterations and you ask for trouble.
Given that the only value in huge stockpiles (US and Russia) is so planners can satisfy every possible launch scenario with multiple redundancy, we should be moving much more quickly to smaller numbers. It's not the most pressing problem, though, and I don't intend to emphasize it.
Why do we maintain the large number we have without strategic justification?
December 7, 2007 8:12 AM | Reply | Permalink
"If two countries decide it is in their mutual interest to reduce stocks, they will. One state will rarely decide such on its own, absent the other state doing so."
This is still not a true statement, and can be proven empirically. In the mid 1980s, NATO reduced the number of nuclear weapons deployed in Europe by the thousands (the Montebello decision), this was not matched, conditioned, or even considered on whether the Soviet Union would do something similar. It was based on modernization plans. In 1991, the United States decided to sharply cut the number of deployed non-strategic weapons. When the President announced this decision, he said he would do it whether or not the Russians did so. (The Russians followed suit, but we still did not require a formal agreement to do it.) In 2002, Bush announced that the United States would reduce its operationally deployed forces to 1,700-2,200 warheads. This was the result of the NPR, not the result of any treaty. The subsequent Treaty negotiations existed because Russia was (a) trying to get the U.S. to reduce even further, to 1,500 warheads (they failed, we had no interest in going that low), and (b) because Russia still wanted the political benes of looking like a strategic partner. We would not have reduced if we had not wanted to and we did not need a treaty to require the reductions. Both the British and the French have reduced their numbers of deployed weapons without any treaties (or even presumed treaty partners).
The only time we did reduce weapons after signing a treaty was INF (which required much smaller reductions than the unilateral moves before and after the treaty) and START. SALT I does not count because it froze increases to a level we were already planning on and SALT II does not count because the reductions it would have required numbered in the 10s of warheads (it was a build up to a build down), and it never entered into force.
Put simply, nations will not reduce if they do not want to, and if they want to, they won't need treaties to do it. The "treaty" model assumes a numerical relationship between the two sides forces; this was a weak assumption during the Cold War and is absolutely not true now.
December 7, 2007 7:28 AM | Reply | Permalink
As the warheads modernize, so do the Permissive Action Links. The newer ones take, 12-20 digit codes, with a limited number of retries before the warhead disables itself. By disabling, that means a complete factory rebuild.
Since these are miniaturized, someone without very substantial skill and knowledge might have real trouble getting a critical mass even from several warheads.
--
Howard
*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]
December 7, 2007 9:27 AM | Reply | Permalink
I'm sorry but this entire thing is still far too close to "invaders from Mars" for my taste. Sorry but that's the reality of this. And I thought that I was cynical. But unfortunately this crosses the line of cynicism into the fairytale land of insanity.
Perhaps all this fearmongering simply goes to further demonstrate that this poor little planet simply has too many people - they've obviously got nothing remotely constructive to do or apparently contribute. It's like the giant office building full of people worrying about the TPS report so that it looks like they are doing something.
BTW, I'm considering writing a book about the serious threat posed to our country by the ever dangerous & lurking mole-people. I'd like to know if I should pursue this serious topic further... I'm sure I could book tons of Sunday morning spots in order to pimp it.
(Any publishers out the please get in touch...but in the meantime let's spend precious time & money on this, there's certainly nothing remotely as important or real than this for us to worry about.)
December 6, 2007 8:46 PM | Reply | Permalink
It seems to me that the real problem is that the very same technology that makes modern life possible makes the destruction of modern life easy.
I don't think there's anything we can do about that. But faced with one's inevitable destruction--and our destruction individually and collectively has always been as inevitable as the destruction of the dinosaurs--the best response is to make the most of life. Being consumed by the fear of losing one's life is, in my opinion, the surest way to lose one's life before it's really over.
December 7, 2007 5:11 AM | Reply | Permalink
Some technology makes civilization more fragile, but some does the opposite.
The electric grid and fuel delivery system are examples of the first, the internet is the second.
December 7, 2007 6:45 AM | Reply | Permalink
I respectfully disagree here Tom. These things all make it more fragile. They all vital to our survival and as such make us extremely vulnerable if they were to be damaged or taken away. They can make life better and even easier but they also make it more fragile. Aren't we occupying a nation in order to feed that fuel delivery system? That appears to be an irrational act done by someone fearful of a vulnerability. It also plays a huge role in why we care about Iran at all. So here you are correct.
But do we not also fear the Internet & how it could be used to cripple us any number of ways? Isn't that fear a reason they want to try and control it more?
December 7, 2007 7:40 AM | Reply | Permalink
All that you say is very true, but I would add one thing - our country's hubris & pig-headed refusal to play by any rules whatsoever (even the ones we impose embargos or invade others for) has only hastened the onset of our madness.
You know that's the funny thing about rules - they only work if applied universally across the board. Everyone needs to play by them or no one will. Simple concept really. We unfortunately like to cheat...cheat & lie. And who wants to play with a lying cheater? It's not lost on me that not very long ago George Bush, Dick Cheney and the rest of these prattling destructive fools were threating to use nukes on Iran (oh sorry the sanitized name is what, bunker buster?). I bet some still want to. I'll tell you this, I fear us using them long before I fear a terrorist first getting then using them. We seemingly meet all the criteria of a nuclear terrorist state... And believe me, all of this is not lost on the world.
And as long as we break treaties or bend them like pretzels so that we can do as we please (the world be damned) I'll do little but mock the silliness of childish fear of the infinitly remote. And at the same time I'll wryly laugh at the irony of what I see as the real root of our nation's fear - of finally getting ours after years of giving everyone the finger.
In the flavor of the season, we are like Scrooge. Perhaps those were ghosts which came to haunt him & offer him one last chance. Or perhaps they were his conscience that haunted him as he teetered on the edge of sanity that the emptiness of greed offers. Either case applies to our nation and instead of changing our ways as Scrooge finally did, we seem content to continue our selfish hoarding of all while exploiting the world for every
last dime we can. We've accepted & embraced greed and hypocrisy as our own reflections in the mirror and unceremoniously sent those last three specters of chance away. And instead we claim that those specters are terrorists with nukes or germs or simply C4. No, those specters are our consciences. And we're seemngly going to ignore them as we do wisdom & reason...
December 7, 2007 7:26 AM | Reply | Permalink