Nuclear terror
From PhiloWiki
Is the threat of nuclear terror real? Is it relatively easy to build an atomic bomb or radiation dispersal (dirty) bomb? What is the impact of a nuclear attack?
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- "Allison is actually taking small bets from colleagues that terrorists will detonate a crude nuclear bomb in a U.S. city within a decade. “If this happened tomorrow,” he says, “I could almost explain it more easily than I could explain why it hasn’t happened.”"
- "And, you know, thousands of years ago we had psychotics and we had religious fanatics and we had megalomaniacs. But about the most they could do was throw a stone at somebody if they wished evil on them.
- Today, since 1945, the ability to inflict evil, or harm, on other people in huge numbers has grown exponentially. And right now there's the knowledge around to use nuclear material. And we've got to hope that the wrong people don't get their hands on it... there are lots of loose nukes around the world."
- "Homeland Security is not secure and the American people remain vulnerable to the next terrorist attack, which will come within the immediate future and will involve nuclear and radiological weapons.
- That is the lesson of Hurricane Katrina and the chaos in New Orleans. The U.S. remains unable to evacuate the citizens, to provide emergency shelter, to contain the rampant violence and to remove the hundreds of putrefying bodies from the floodwaters. Medical helicopters and law officers have come under fire; storm survivors battle for seats on the buses that would carry them away from the chaos; murders and rapes have occurred within the New Orleans Convention Center, which was supposed to serve as a place of refuge...
- America is unprepared for even a single disaster within a medium-sized city, let alone a nuclear disaster within a major metropolitan area. As the situation in New Orleans continued to worsen, reports began to surface about nuclear weapons and materials being transported over the Mexican border by MS-13 gang members, who are now serving as "coyotes" for terrorist organizations, including al-Qaida."
- "To enrich uranium is an enormous, complex process that requires scientists and vast physical plants. But once you have it, making a nuclear weapon requires only two or three good physics graduate students. And there is an enormous amount of fissile material floating around the world. In 1993, some officials from the U.S. Energy Department, along with some Russian colleagues, went to a Soviet-era scientific facility outside Moscow and used bolt cutters to snip off the padlock-the sum of all the security at this place. Inside, they found enough highly enriched uranium for 20 nuclear weapons. In 2002, enough fissile material for three weapons was recovered in a laboratory in a Belgrade suburb. And so it goes. The Soviet Union, in its short and deplorable life, deployed about 22,000 nuclear weapons. Who believes they have all been accounted for? The moral of this story is: you cannot fight terrorism at the ports of Long Beach or Newark. You have to go get it. You have to disrupt terrorism at its sources. This is a gray area. It's a shadow war. But it is not a war that we have any choice but to fight."
