Hide the Nuclear Salami

We’re all concerned about rogue nations – like Iran and North Korea – spreading nuclear weapons to other rogue states and perhaps to terrorist groups like al Qaeda. Or rogue scientists – like Pakistan’s infamous Dr. A.Q. Khan or several former Soviet nuclear experts now in the employ of the shadiest of nations – promulgating the specialized knowledge required to fabricate nuclear weapons. Or careless (and hence roguish) governments whose processes to safeguard their nuclear weapons/materials stashes leave much to be desired. That’s what the nuclear summit addressed in the recent 47-nation gathering in Washington.

Sting operations have proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations are trying to buy materials for a dirty bomb (the exploding suitcase spreading nuclear contaminants over a relatively small area) or the real thing (capable of taking out New York City). Scruples? Guilt over killing millions? Not even the slightest of deterrents. It would be a badge of significant accomplishment to any terrorist group to have killed more “non-believers” with a single blast than any other debacle in the history of mankind.

Our intelligence operations have long believed that it would be easier to trace nuclear weapons in the field that it would be to keep them from being smuggled into the United States (or any other fearful Western power). After all, the border is porous, but the number of nuclear weapons and fissionable material should be easier to track. Maybe. Perhaps. You think? The problem, of course, varies from corrupt officials willing to look the other way as a few “samples” slide out of government hands into the anxious paws of well-funded terrorists to fallen governments with nuclear weapons stored somewhere that simply have no experience in guarding and tracking what they have. And then there are simply the careless handlers who really screwed up. Like the 765 kilograms of plutonium from our own Los Alamos labs which was unaccounted for in a 2004 – enough to make 150 nuclear bombs.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s and splintered into numerous separate nations, some with large Muslim and anti-Judeo-Christian militant groups within their borders, the nuclear weapons and fissionable material (along with more than a few key scientists) parked within their new national borders fell into the dead zone of unguarded facilities and internal power struggles where “stuff” went missing. We still don’t know where enough material to blow more than one city sky-high is located.

This little story, reported by ABC News on February 16, 2005, pretty much says it all: “[Then CIA-director Porter] Goss said: ‘There is sufficient material unaccounted for, so that it would be possible for those with know-how to construct a nuclear weapon.’ A former top official at the Department of Energy told ABC News that Goss's statement understated the threat. There could be enough missing material in the Russian inventory to make hundreds or thousands of nuclear weapons, but no one -- neither the Russians nor Western intelligence agencies -- knows for sure, the former official said. ‘There is no way to determine the quantity of missing material in Russia, the source said, because neither the Russian government nor the Soviets before them ever adopted a ‘mass balance’ inventory system that tracks how much nuclear material is produced and where it ends up being used. The U.S. government adopted a mass-balance inventory system in the 1960s, the source said.”

Is it a matter of “when” or “if” Are we living on borrowed time? Was the nuclear summit just a meeting of leaders to note the problem or will they take significant and meaningful steps to curb this menace? The threat is real and growing. There are just too many people on this planet with death in their mind’s eye and America as the likely first target. It’s not about wasting our resources on wars we cannot win, wars that make us an increasingly obvious target, but likewise, it is about deploying our resources against the specific targets that mean to do us in.

I’m Peter Dekom, and the earth is not exactly a friendly plant, especially when you are on top of a hill that everybody wants to take.