THE THREAT OF NUCLEAR TERRORISM – May 22, 2006

In 1977 a young Princeton University student, on the verge of being dropped from the rolls for unsatisfactory academic performance, came up with an original, if unusual plan, to continue his studies and avoid being expelled. John Aristotle Philips proposed for his term paper project to build an atomic bomb on his own, based entirely on scientific resources available in public libraries in the United States. The project was supervised by renowned nuclear physicist, Prof. Freeman Dyson. Before starting his project John Aristotle Philips knew little about nuclear physics, explosives or how to construct a nuclear device. He was a junior undergraduate majoring in aerospace science. His advisor, Prof. Dyson, did not give Philips any extra help or clues on how to approach the project, or how to resolve the technical problems that every nuclear bomb builder faces. Five months later the undergraduate presented his professors with his work. To the scientists’ astonishment, the device built by the young engineer proved to be fully functional. Had it been equipped with nuclear fissile material it could have been successfully detonated.

The atomic bomb built by John Aristotle Philips was designed to have destructive power comparable to the one dropped on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, during World War II.  Philips resolved all his mechanical and technical problems with The Los Alamos Primer: The First Lectures on How to Build an Atomic Bomb – a book by Robert Serber, a physicist who had worked at Los Alamos on the Manhattan Project, which he acquired for $25 from the National Technical Information Service. The book did not give a blueprint on how to build a nuclear device, but it contained scientific comments, explanations and descriptions of the work that went into building the first atomic bomb. These proved to be helpful enough for an amateur engineer. The work by Robert Serber is regarded as one of the best introductions to nuclear physics ever written, and can be purchased today in any well-stocked bookstore, or on the internet for about $35.

Though the book was extremely useful to John Aristotle Philips, he still needed more knowledge about explosives. The hardest problem he had was calculating the arrangement of explosives required to collapse the plutonium core of the bomb to cause a nuclear explosion. To solve this problem he simply called the DuPont Company, which provided him with the appropriate information to complete his assignment. The overall cost of constructing a device with a ten kiloton yield came to just $2000. In the aftermath, John Aristotle Philips’s paper term was swiftly confiscated by the U.S. government and classified confidential. FBI and CIA agents started to trail him, while the Pakistani Embassy tried to get a copy of his term paper. Later, John Aristotle Philips, together with his college roommate David Michaelis, wrote a book describing the work on his term paper project under the title of Mushroom: The Story of the A-Bomb Kid.

The U.S. government, concerned about the availability of materials that give clues on how to build an atomic bomb, decided to restrict the accessibility of these materials. In 1979 the United States Department of Energy brought a lawsuit against The Progressive magazine to prevent the publication of an article by Howard Morland detailing the construction of a hydrogen bomb (United States of America v. Progressive, Inc., Erwin Knoll, Samuel Day, Jr., and Howard Morland). The government claimed that the information to be published fell under the ‘born secret’ clause of the Atomic Energy Act of 1954. In the government’s opinion, information about the construction of a hydrogen bomb was regarded as confidential from the moment of its inception. The Atomic Energy Act of 1946 specified that all information related to nuclear weapons was considered Restricted Data until officially declassified. An amendment to the Act in 1959 gave the Atomic Energy Commission the authority to declassify the information. The magazine defended itself by pointing out that the intended publication merely contained data and information freely available in public libraries and which could easily be extracted from already published scientific books, manuscripts or encyclopedias. The defenders invoked the freedom of press and speech guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution. Eventually the government dropped the case during the appeal process and the article was published. Subsequently similar publications by other magazines and newspapers followed.

These two remarkable incidents of 1977 and 1979 showed that the government had irrecoverably lost its monopoly on the knowledge of how to construct a nuclear device. The information was freely available to almost everyone and the process could not be reversed.

The invention of the first nuclear bomb required enormous scientific, organizational and financial effort. The Manhattan Project, which started in 1939 and lasted until 1946, employed almost 130,000 people, and the total cost of the Project came to nearly $2 billion. But today, when the knowledge of nuclear physics has been thoroughly mastered by mankind, constructing a simple nuclear device no longer requires an army of scientists and engineers, as John Aristotle Philips showed in 1977. Now, an average intelligent person with no sophisticated scientific experience can manufacture a crude atomic bomb. All the necessary components, except for the fissile material, can be acquired at a relatively low cost in almost any place in the world.

The attacks of September 11, 2001, made Americans realize that the United States was the nation most hated by radical Islamic terrorist groups and therefore their primary target. Soon other Western countries joined the list of potential targets. Madrid (2004), and then London (2005) experienced similar tragedies as New York and Washington in 2001. Western Civilization as a whole is gravely endangered by international terrorism. Experts warned that if terrorists were able to plan such sophisticated and coordinated strikes, including hijacking civilian airliners and crashing them into World Trade Center and the Pentagon, they were also capable of conducting an attack with weapons of mass destruction. The possibility of such kind of an attack was confirmed recently by a report of the congressional National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States. The 9/11 Commission Report stated that Al Qaeda had tried to acquire or manufacture weapons of mass destruction for at least ten years, and there was no doubt that the United States would be a prime target of such an attack.

General Eugene Habiger, who served as commander of U.S. strategic nuclear forces from 1996 to 1998, stated in an interview with PBS on March 19, 2002, that the chance of the United States coming under a missile attack from a rogue state like Iraq, North Korea or Iran, is presently very unlikely. In his opinion “The probability of someone attempting to do grave harm to the citizens of the United States is far more likely to come from a nuclear device in a Conex container, or any kind of other device. There are thousands of lead-lined coffins of United States citizens that come back from their deaths overseas to the United States. You put a small nuclear device in a coffin with a remote-controlled device, remote-controlled trigger on it. The remains of this individual are buried in downtown Chicago, and somebody drives by and sets it off. You’ve reaped a lot of damage and loss of life. It’s relatively easy and cheap to do…” Interviewed two months later on May 26, 2002, Gen. Eugene Habiger told a reporter of the New York Times that nuclear terrorism “is not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when”.

The greatest obstacle for terrorists constructing an atomic bomb is acquiring weapons grade fissile material, without which an atomic bomb would not explode. There are two kinds of fissile materials used in nuclear weapons that can sustain a fission chain reaction: uranium-235 and plutonium-239. Uranium-235 is rarely found in nature. Only 0.72% of all natural uranium is uranium-235. The low concentration of uranium-235 in nature is not sufficient to sustain a nuclear chain reaction. The uranium has to be “enriched” to a weapons grade material. The enrichment process consists of separating out the uranium-238 (which composes over 99% of natural uranium) from uranium-235. This process is expensive, time consuming, and requires organizational effort that cannot be missed by international organizations and watchdogs. The other weapons grade material, plutonium-239, is a man-made substance which is a byproduct of civil nuclear reactors.

If terrorists somehow acquired weapons grade fissile material, it would probably only take them a few months to construct an atomic bomb. The device could be manufactured either inside or outside the United States. If built outside the U.S. it could be easily transported onto American soil without being inspected by intelligence and security agencies. In August 2003 Brian Ross, an investigative reporter for ABC News, who wanted to prove such a scenario possible, successfully smuggled depleted uranium, a harmless by-product of uranium enrichment, from Jakarta, Indonesia, to the Port of Los Angeles. A suitcase containing the dangerous material was left unopened by Port Security and was delivered to a storage warehouse one mile from the Los Angeles Convention Center. The transported uranium has an almost identical chemical signature to uranium-235 when screened for by detection devices. The fact that the uranium was not detected at the Port, and that the suitcase was left unchecked, shows that terrorists would not encounter major problems in smuggling weapons of mass destruction into the United States.

During the debate over the intended take over by a Dubai-based company of a British firm that operates ports in New York City, Newark, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Miami and New Orleans, in February, 2006, it was disclosed that only 5% of all containers that come into New York and New Jersey ports receive a full inspection. The seriousness of the situation is shown by the increase in funding by over 700% to strengthen port security after the 9/11 attacks. This dramatic increase in security spending proves two things. 1) That the government considers the smuggling of a nuclear device or fissile material into the U.S. by terrorists as a serious probability. 2) That security at ports is insufficient to prevent terrorists from achieving it.

As a result, Western countries are mostly focused on intelligence gathering that can identify efforts by terrorists to acquire weapons grade fissile materials in advance. The unity which Europe and the U.S. present in trying to limit the Iranian nuclear program shows that the threat of a terrorist nuclear bomb being detonated on U.S. or European territory continues to be very real. Western countries regard Iran as one of the chief sponsors of international terrorism, and allowing it to possess its own nuclear program is seen as making an attack even more likely.

Detonation of a nuclear bomb in a major American city would have a devastating impact not only on America itself but also on the world. It would cause a significant decline in the U.S. economy and subsequent complications for the European and Asian economies would follow. A considerable emigration could result from a rapid rise in unemployment and a fear of other strikes. There would be military consequences as well. Evidence linking any country or countries to direct or indirect involvement in the attack would bring a crushing military response that could eventually affect many countries and turn into a major international conflict.

Sebastian Aulich

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