Customs inspectors at a pier in New York City send a sealed cargo container just taken off a ship from Istanbul through a radiation scanner. A dozen new tractors seem to be inside. Although the detector senses no radiation, the inspectors open the container anyway. Their handheld units show no radiation either, so they allow the container to leave. A private hauler drives it to a small Midwestern city. There terrorist cell members remove what was their final shipment of highly enriched uranium, concealed as 10 metal washers in the tractor engines, together weighing two kilograms. Months later an improvised nuclear device with a yield of one kiloton is detonated in Los Angeles. The blast, fire and airborne radioactivity kill more than 100,000 people. Virtually all shipping into the U.S. is halted, precipitating a financial crisis. Military operations commence in the Middle East after forensics and intelligence efforts trace the plot to cells in Pakistan and Iran.

EDITOR'S NOTE

This article was originally published with the title Detecting Nuclear Smuggling.

7 Comments

1. 1. Anderw montgomery 11:08 PM 3/20/08

   I live in Denver CO. A Number of years a go the US government had a air plane fly over Denver to find Radium tailings left over from the turn of the century. This was printed in the Rocky Mountain News. The equipment was said to be so good that it could spot every dentist office in the area. Lator the city of Denver ask to see the maps that were made and they gould not be found. This happond some time in the 70 or 80. It sounds like the equipment they were using was better than what you know about.

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2. 2. Iahmad 09:05 AM 3/25/08

   This is called stereotyping and profiling. Most of the western scientific publications are getting highly provocative and sport the war mongering Bush administration line. Why your articles does not imagine that the cargo started from UK and originated from Israel.

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3. 3. flinker two 07:20 PM 3/25/08

   Honestly, this is not profiling. It is probable that any such action would be performed by parties from Pakistan, Georgia, etc., that is, an area with a high percentage of Muslims and the chance of "loose" nuclear material.
   
   I wish things weren't crazy, but it isn't to be.

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4. 4. John_Toradze 02:58 AM 3/27/08

   Having studied and once advised congress on this area and spent time in the field finding people who talked about buyers for such, I have the following comments.
   
   1. This is the kind of project that most likely would require, and have the fingerprints of, a nation-state making use of a proxy front organization like Hamas or Hezbollah, et al. Those are mostly proxies for Iran which has run them through its Pasdaran intelligence service. It is improbable that Iran would ship nukes to the USA, but plausible. It is one thing to bomb a marine barracks and kidnap people through a proxy. It is quite another to destroy a major city, and I think Iran's most radical leaders know this quite well. The one is, for a nation, a slight irritation. The latter is not.
   
   2. North Korea could potentially also be a source, with intent, primarily for income purposes, and would want to wash it through another nation. I suspect they are quite nervous about it, and the Chinese, who have had missiles aimed at Beijing for some time now would need a motive to not inform other major powers of such if they knew. This could happen, but it is unlikely.
   
   3. Manufacturing even a low yield fission bomb is no trivial matter. It requires a lot of precision, high-strength parts, and can easily go wrong. Low yield devices are not necessarily easier to build. Suitcase nukes are very high precision devices. 8X compression of metal is not easy to acheive. This is why nation state resources are needed to build the parts for the device and specify assembly.
   
   4. More likely a bomb would be shipped intact. It doesn't really make much sense to take the risk of assembling it off site. Why? Think about it. The more steps in the operation, the more likely something is to go awry and get noticed. So shipping 10 or 50 parts really doesn't make sense. Then, if you put the device together, who is going to do it? This isn't garage stuff, this is serious machinist type labor. One mistake and either the bomb is a dud, or the bomb goes off prematurely and mostly just kills the perpetrators. I
   
   5. The only sources of plausible non-participatory weapons are Russia and Pakistan in my opinion. Russia, because prior to Putin, it was a wreck and out of control. But although roughly 100 suitcase nukes disappeared from Ekaterinburg circa 1992, they have not surfaced yet, and they are probably not useful anymore if they were when they were stolen. Who stole them is anyone's guess. Could well have been China's intelligence service, perhaps a Western intelligence organization. It is a near certainty now that they are not in the hands of terrorists because they have not been used. But it is a question. At this point, Putin's administration has tightened things up. Russia does not want an incident in it's own borders, and remember that Russia is fighting jihadists daily. For them, it's like Mexico is for us, except coming across are young men wanting to kill for Allah.
   
   6. Pakistan is quite plausible because the nation is so close to the edge and has a history of military rule using the Muslim Brotherhood groups as its power base. That is a deal with the devil, but the civilian rulers have been so extremely corrupt (Bhutto is estimated to have made off with 5% of the GNP of the country) that it is very unlikely they will be accepted in the long run. This is why the military leaders and ISI have backed the jihadists in Kashmir. It serves two purposes - A. It keeps them occupied so they don't attack the dictator. B. It keeps the core constituency that scares the crap out of the civilians happy.
   
   7. Osama bin Laden has been after Pakistan the whole time, and he timed his 9-11 provocation after nukes had been made in Pakistan. He really wasn't too fussed about losing Afghanistan temporarily. But he is still upset about the lack of active support in Pakistan that has prevented the Muslim Brotherhood from seizing power and becoming nuclear armed.
   
   Last - Georgia is not going to do this. I spent years there, and they have been both cleaned out of what material they had, and they have no interest in it either. Georgia is an almost totally christian nation that wants to join NATO and the EU very badly. They are not a threat, although they could be a transit point for black bank deals.
   
   I also know that smuggling in containers is still simple-simon easy. So is taking things out of yards from containers prior to inspections. That needs work. I know this from talking to teamsters in the yards, some of whom have tried to get their employers to be more security conscious. But with drugs, knockoffs and other matters oiling the floor, this isn't getting priority. Sorry, but that's the reality. The drug war is costing us security because there is too much motive for key players to collect payoffs. (Sophisticated ones.)
   
   The upshot of this discussion is that most focus should be on intact bombs coming in on container ships or air freight. This requires inspection out at sea, and aggressive care taken with air frieght to protect ports. But except for small devices that are very hard to make, (only the USA and USSR succeeded in making them), these things are heavy.
   
   The greatest probability threat is from the Muslim Brotherhood Sunni organizations stealing already made bombs, because they are the only ones with nothing to lose, and in their minds everything to gain. Al Qaeda learned in Sudan and Afghanistan that they can rule when nations are reduced to rubble. These groups are against civilian governments everywhere they exist. So, without the fear that a nation state has of certain draconian retaliation in kind, they are the loose cannons who we need to worry about. But would bin Laden throw nukes at the West if he had them? Hard to say, but I think probably not. He would get much more bang for his buck by keeping them as a threat, (or most of them) and/or setting them off in the Middle East. Think about what would happen if the oil terminals of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar went up in balls of flame? Think through what that would do to the Western nations economies and to the Saudi royals who are impure to the Muslim Brotherhood. (And think about how much that would benefit the other oil producers in the world if you want to understand the realpolitik of such a thing.)

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5. 5. Chiyankun 03:16 AM 5/11/08

   We need to find other more effctive approach. A possible one is resonant X-ray absorption. Using a synchrotron radiation source we can get high intensity x-ray with very find decided wavelength. If way choose the wavelenth at a reconant absorption of the uranium, Just a simple projection image could be good examination of a big cargo container. If only a thin sheet of the seeking material is in there, it would leave a dark spot in the image.

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6. 6. Steve61 01:40 PM 10/2/08

   Nuclear material crossing borders---This is a serious discussion and unfortunately very likely in the near future. The solution, under current technological limitaions, is a poly-activist approach. 1. have the best technological equipment at all ports and use it intelligently. 2. Give rewards to port staff who find any suspicious items. 3. use intelligence networks to find, identify and deal with any group that wants to play nuclear games. 4. The President , can , in secret, notify any state that harbours such groups, that that STATE will cease to exist if a nuclear event occurs in the USA. and finially 5. The MAD alternative, -make a short list of all countries that could possibly export a nuclear item to the USA, and they will automaticially be nuked if the USA gets damaged by a nuclear event!
   Steve 61.

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7. 7. Steve61 01:40 PM 10/2/08

   Nuclear material crossing borders---This is a serious discussion and unfortunately very likely in the near future. The solution, under current technological limitaions, is a poly-activist approach. 1. have the best technological equipment at all ports and use it intelligently. 2. Give rewards to port staff who find any suspicious items. 3. use intelligence networks to find, identify and deal with any group that wants to play nuclear games. 4. The President , can , in secret, notify any state that harbours such groups, that that STATE will cease to exist if a nuclear event occurs in the USA. and finially 5. The MAD alternative, -make a short list of all countries that could possibly export a nuclear item to the USA, and they will automaticially be nuked if the USA gets damaged by a nuclear event!
   Steve 61.

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