By Anthony Paul , Senior Writer
A NUCLEAR weapon in terrorist hands is one of the top 21st century worries.
A Google search, that fastest measure of what the world is thinking about, shows 30.4 million listings for 'nuclear terrorist'.
Hollywood has been catering to this fear. For the past couple of movie decades, wild-eyed men with nuclear backpacks have been threatening the central business districts of major cities.
Exploded in New York's Times Square, a 10-kiloton bomb - smaller than what was used in Hiroshima - would vaporise everything between Carnegie Hall and the Empire State Building, destroy the United Nations' headquarters and kill an estimated 500,000 people on a week day.
One such bomb detonated at, say, the Singapore Press Holdings building in Toa Payoh would obliterate Singapore.
Washington's ever-booming rent-a-threat business makes the most of the angst generated by such speculation. As the Bulletin Of Atomic Scientists recently put it, 'sometimes it seems as if the sources of newly announced dangers must be the basement of the White House or a back room at a Washington think-tank, where the thousands of monkeys who have yet to type out exact copies of Shakespeare's works are nonetheless producing dozens of new ideas for attacks on America, to be trotted out on the news at 10'.
What really are the odds of an attack by a terrorist's nuke? Probably quite low, says the most recent authoritative study of the problem.
A paper just released by London's International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) takes the view that 'the risk of nuclear terrorism, especially true nuclear terrorism employing bombs powered by nuclear fission, is overstated, and that popular wisdom on the topic is significantly flawed'.
The paper - Nuclear Terrorism After 9/11 (IISS Adelphi series, No. 378) - by Mr Robin Frost, a Canadian government analyst specialising in nuclear proliferation, looks at 'the considerable, probably insurmountable, technical challenges' in a terror group's obtaining a nuclear weapon 'whether home-made or begged, borrowed or stolen from a state arsenal'. The stolen-weapons issue has received much attention, especially after the Soviet Union's collapse in 1992. During a series of interviews that I made for Fortune magazine in Siberia in 1998, Russia's former national security adviser, General Aleksandr Lebed, told me that more than 100 suitcase-sized nuclear bombs went missing during the Soviet break-up. (Earlier, he had told a US congressional delegation that 84 such weapons were unaccounted for.)
Others were doubtful that the Soviet arsenal had such weapons. At the time, the general (who subsequently died in a helicopter crash) was a provincial governor preparing to run for the Russian presidency and was not averse to seeking headlines. I decided not to use the information in the profile of him that I wrote for Fortune. However, eight years later, Google searches still turn up what is probably Gen Lebed's misinformation.
Mr Frost says that 'no one has been able to provide, at least in the open sources, concrete evidence of a single case in which a substantial portion of the fissile materials needed to make a bomb had been, or was close to being, illicitly transferred to terrorists, organised criminals or, indeed, anyone actively seeking them' despite the endless reports and speculation.
So perhaps a terrorist group could find the scientists and funding and make their own bomb? Again, highly improbable, says Mr Frost.
The hurdles would be daunting. The simplest known bomb project - South Africa's six-nuke arsenal - required US$1 billion in 1980s purchasing power and 400 people working from the early 1960s to 1982. The terrorists would have to secretly acquire technicians, precision-calibrated and computer-guided machine tools, fissile material (either 25kg of highly enriched uranium or 8kg of plutonium) as well as at least 50kg of high explosives and a supply of Kryton switches (for a bomb's detonating circuitry) among other things.
Plutonium has bizarre physical properties - six different crystalline forms as it moves from room temperature to a molten state. The technicians would be in serious danger of radiation-induced cancer or, because of its tendency to burst into flames, of being burnt alive.
The Rocky Flats weapons core production centre near Denver, Colorado, is known to have had 31 plutonium fires between 1966 and 1969.
Production of a portable device by terrorists struggling with all these hazards is the unlikeliest development of all.
The smallest nuclear weapon known to have been built by the US was a plutonium device measuring 26.4cm by 38.5cm and weighing around 22.8kg. Yield was proportionately low - between 0.01 and 0.25 kilotons (at most, one-fortieth the force of the Hiroshima bomb).
Miniaturisation of this nature would greatly complicate development. South Africa's bare-bones nukes - identified by the IISS paper as a possible template for a non-state terrorist group's nuclear effort - weighed about one tonne and had a diameter of nearly 65cm with a length of about 1.8m.
Mr Frost argues that although it is 'extremely unlikely' that terrorist groups such as Al-Qaeda would acquire true nuclear weapons, the risks of their using radiological dispersion devices (RDDs) could be 'high'.
Such weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) would be conventional explosives designed to distribute radioactive material.
Also known as 'dirty bombs', RDDs would be 'unlikely to kill anyone immediately, except via the direct effects of the conventional explosives involved'. But fear of a slow death from cancer could quickly demoralise, and possibly empty, a city.
In Mr Frost's view, however, terrorists might even eschew these. His paper concludes: 'Terrorists in general probably share the same ignorance and fear of WMD prevalent in the broader population, and probably see little reason to turn to unknown, possibly unpredictable and certainly dangerous substances - or so, at least, we hope.'
An optimistic note? Perhaps. I'd be more comfortable if his optimism were a little less guarded.
