An Interesting Article On Missing Radioactive Material

SoonForgotten2

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/aug/23/nuclear.terrorism.united.nations

Some of the highlights:

Since the end of the cold war, the United Nations has logged more than 800 incidents in which radioactive material has gone missing, often from poorly guarded sites. Who is taking it - and should we be worried?

...As the logic of deterrence and mutually assured destruction recedes from the collective memory to be supplanted by the fears evoked by the September 11 attacks, nuclear terrorism has emerged as the number one threat to western security. The suicidal extremist driving a crude nuclear device into the centre of a major city is now the ultimate nightmare. George Bush and Tony Blair went to war in Iraq with the ostensible aim of preventing Saddam's assumed nuclear stockpile falling into the hands of al-Qaida jihadists. Barack Obama has called nuclear terrorism "the greatest danger we face".

The gap between rhetoric and effective action, however, is startling. The US has so far spent $648bn on the war in Iraq to eliminate a threat that never existed. The amount spent on removing fissile material from countries that actually do have the ingredients for a nuclear device has been paltry by comparison. The Global Threat Reduction Initiative (GTRI), launched in 2004 after previous efforts at eliminating the world's civilian stocks of fissile material had proved ineffectual, has an annual US budget of about $150m, or roughly what the US military spends in eight hours in Iraq. Britain allocates a respectable £36.5m a year to the programme, most of it on helping to secure nuclear sites in the former Soviet Union, but that still pales in comparison to the £1.7bn cost last year of keeping troops in Iraq.

...There are two kinds of nuclear bomb. Modern warheads involve an implosion device, in which the fissile material, normally plutonium, is violently compressed by shaped charges until it reaches critical mass, and the process of nuclear fission becomes self-sustaining. This is an extremely hard trick to pull off reliably, and is the province of sophisticated state programmes. However, there is a much cruder form of bomb, which achieves critical mass by firing one chunk of HEU at another. A "gun-type" bomb such as this, Little Boy, was dropped on Hiroshima. As the apartheid government in South Africa discovered, it can be developed by a relatively small team with some basic engineering skills. It is the sort of bomb a terrorist organisation would build. Plutonium is useless for such a device. It requires HEU, which happens to be far more plentiful and much less well guarded.

Since the end of the cold war, the UN's nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), has logged more than 800 incidents in which radioactive material has gone missing or been seized from smugglers. Eighteen of those cases involved weapons-grade material, HEU or plutonium, mostly of Soviet origin. Another seven cases of weapons-grade theft or contraband have yet to be confirmed by the IAEA, but are considered well-founded.

...At a time when long-standing Russian-Georgian tensions have exploded into conflict, Moscow has been unhelpful in the extreme, implausibly claiming that it is impossible to tell where Khinsagov's HEU came from. Coincidentally or not, an estimated 2kg of HEU went missing when a top-secret former Soviet nuclear laboratory in the Georgian region of Abkhazia fell to Russian-backed separatists in 1993. It simply disappeared into the chaotic underworld of the Caucasus where organised crime thrives on national rivalries, and has not been seen since.

...Most of the nuclear thefts located by the IAEA to date have involved small quantities of HEU, far short of the 55kg necessary to build a gun-type bomb, but no one knows how much more has disappeared unnoticed. Matthew Bunn, a proliferation expert at Harvard, has estimated the risk of a nuclear attack on the US in the next decade to be 29%. He was once asked by an investment bank to carry out a similar exercise for London. He will not say what he told the bank, revealing only that he estimated a smaller risk than his US estimate, but still "a real number".

...A terrorist group could make do with much less than the 55kg of HEU necessary to achieve critical mass and detonate whatever it had managed to steal or buy on the black market in the form of a "dirty bomb". Acton said radioactive material could also be sprayed like an aerosol across a wide urban expanse, in a stealth attack that could pass unnoticed until it was too late.

"If people insist on the same standards [for radioactivity] we have now, we would have to give up large areas of the city. People would ultimately have to get used to the risk of going back to a slightly contaminated part of London," Acton said. It would be so easy to perform and so devastating in its effects, he added: "I really don't know why an attack hasn't happened already."

I'm curious what people think about this. Scare-mongering or legit threat? Either way, it highlights what a waste of money the Iraq war is compared to how the money could be spent to protect the nations involved.

ccRyderzz

Yes Our government was into sharing the wealth at one time in History.. damn
and what part was this ? a mistake... but not really.. they don't make mistakes with the Think Tanks of the idiots that think we are ignorant..
What part of all of this is the point.. FEAR PROPAGANDA TO SCARE THE FOLKS INTO SUB-MISSION,,,,,,,, we are gona take it anymore.. J. Hendrix play that song again.. HEY JOE.. 96.1 KZEL{ ORE GONE} BLUES AND R & B >> BB KING MAC COURT
PLAY IT AGAIN SAM SAME PAGE DIFFERENT YEAR IN TIME>> 1969 1968 1963
1962.. 1952.. 1900..800,,,, OUT OF THE WAR NOW>> BRING OUR BOYZ HOME NOW>>> ASAP>> E----% 5's Unite.. Blue ANgels UNite.. east west North south
Time to rock on the CC.. center Stage.. ON BROADWAY ON PARK PALACE..
Stevie Nicks .. calling all from the dark side of the sun.. Nova.. soosn 5 days