Is anyone else concerned about the possibility of nuclear terrorist attacks? No, I don’t mean what you usually hear on the news about dirty bombs or Iran/North Korea. I mean an actual terrorists with an actual nuclear bomb. There are a suprising number of nuclear weapons on the bottom of the ocean. Has it occured to anyone that someone with enough funding and determination could actually retrieve one of them. Maybe they already have?
In its campaign to discredit General Lebed’s revelations, the Russian government insisted that the loss of a nuclear weapon was unthinkable. No responsible party could lose something so important. But to the contrary, we know that not only the Soviet Union, but also the United States, lost numbers of nuclear weapons. At least four Soviet submarines, armed with a total of 40 nuclear weapons, sank during the Cold War. According to press reports, one of these was partially recovered from the Pacific Ocean floor by a unique deep-water submarine, the Glomar Explorer, owned by the reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes. Three nuclear missiles and two nuclear torpedoes were recovered. The Department of Defense has acknowledged a number of what it calls “Broken Arrows” (nuclear weapons lost by U.S. forces), although it has never said how many. The confirmed reports include a 1965 case where an aircraft loaded with a B43 nuclear bomb rolled off a carrier stationed near Japan. Neither the aircraft nor the weapon was ever recovered. A year later, the U.S. Air Force accidentally dropped a 20-megaton nuclear bomb in the Mediterranean Sea during a high-altitude refueling mission near Palomares, Spain. After three months of frantic searching, it was found. Given the sensitivity of such events, it is reasonable to infer that the few official confirmations are merely the tip of the iceberg.
Notice that many of the incidents mentioned at your link don’t involve nuclear bombs at all: many involve leaks at research facilities and power stations. Here’s a chronological list of radiation incidents that caused injury from the start of the 20th century onwards. The vast majority don’t involve nuclear bombs.
Historically, unless you were in Hiroshima or Nagasaki, you would have been less likely to die from a nuclear bombing than you would have been to die from a radiation leak, picking up a lost radioactive source without recognizing it (or living with someone who’s brought one into your home), being poisoned with radiation by a coworker, or medical overexposure. (Note also that the list is surely incomplete.) It is possible that this trend will reverse in the future, but it’s not obvious that it will.
More generally, gwern sounds about right to me on the subject of terrorists putting together their own nuke. (Or hauling one up from the bottom of the ocean.)
I am not. To even suggest that that this is a possibility anywhere near the level of a sovereign actor giving terrorists nukes is to dramatically overestimate terrorist groups’ technical competence, and also ascribe basic instrumental rationality to them (a mistake; see my Terrorism is not about Terror).
Even if a terrorist could marshal the interest, assemble in one place the millions necessary, and actually hire a world-class submersible and in the scant days they can afford, find the wreckage of a bomb, it would probably be useless. US nukes are designed to failsafe, so if the wiring has corroded, or the explosives are misaligned? And that’s ignoring issues with radioactive decay. (Was the bomb a tritium-pumped H-bomb? Well, given tritium’s extremely short half-life, I’m afraid that bomb is now useless.)
Maybe, although remember there are a lot more players interested in obtaining nuclear weapons then just a few terrorists. And the best crimes are the ones no one knew were commited. Unsucessful criminals are over represented as opposed to ones that got away. I suspect the same is true for terrorists. Blowing up a building isn’t going to achieve your goals, but blowing up a city might. After all, it’s ended a war once and just the threat stopped another from ever happening. Also, even if the bomb itself is useless, it is probably worth quite a bit of money, more then the millions it would take to retrieve it (maybe thousands as technology improves? There are some in shallower water. In 1958 the government was prepared to retrieve a lost bomb, but never located it.) I don’t honestly know a lot about nuclear weapons, but the materials in it, maybe even the design itself, would be worth something to somebody. Maybe said organization has the resources to salvage it, after all, they already had enough money to get it in the first place.
Even if no bombs go off, I wouldn’t be suprised if the government eventually gets around to searching for them and finds they’re not there. And there are other nuclear threats to. Although I can’t find anywhere to confirm it, it was floating around the internet that up to 80 “suitcase nukes” are missing. This quote from wikipedia particularly distrubed me:
The highest-ranking GRU defector Stanislav Lunev claimed that such Russian-made devices do exist and described them in more detail. These devices, “identified as RA-115s (or RA-115-01s for submersible weapons)” weigh from fifty to sixty pounds. They can last for many years if wired to an electric source. In case there is a loss of power, there is a battery backup. If the battery runs low, the weapon has a transmitter that sends a coded message—either by satellite or directly to a GRU post at a Russian embassy or consulate.” According to Lunev, the number of “missing” nuclear devices (as found by General Lebed) “is almost identical to the number of strategic targets upon which those bombs would be used.”
Lunev suggested that suitcase nukes might be already deployed by the GRU operatives at the US soil to assassinate US leaders in the event of war. He alleged that arms caches were hidden by the KGB in many countries for the planned terrorism acts. They were booby-trapped with “Lightning” explosive devices. One of such cache, which was identified by Vasili Mitrokhin, exploded when Swiss authorities tried to remove it from woods near Berne. Several others caches were removed successfully. Lunev said that he had personally looked for hiding places for weapons caches in the Shenandoah Valley area and that “it is surprisingly easy to smuggle nuclear weapons into the US” either across the Mexican border or using a small transport missile that can slip undetected when launched from a Russian airplane.
I will leave it at that for now, I’m not one of those paranoid people that goes around ranting about nuclear proliferation or whatever. If there really is a problem, there’s not much we can do (except maybe try to get to those lost bombs first, or take anti-terrorism more seriously.)
I don’t take Lunev seriously. Defectors are notoriously unreliable sources of information (as I think Iraq should have proven. Again.).
The problem with nuclear terrorism is that atomic bombs come with return addresses—the US has always collected isotopic samples (eg. with aerial collecting missions in international airspace) precisely to make sure this is the case. (Ironically, invading Afghanistan and Iraq may’ve helped deter nuclear terrorism: ‘If the US invaded both these countries over just a few thousand dead, then it’s plausible they will nuke us even if we cry to the heavens that we just carelessly lost that bomb.’)
Is anyone else concerned about the possibility of nuclear terrorist attacks? No, I don’t mean what you usually hear on the news about dirty bombs or Iran/North Korea. I mean an actual terrorists with an actual nuclear bomb. There are a suprising number of nuclear weapons on the bottom of the ocean. Has it occured to anyone that someone with enough funding and determination could actually retrieve one of them. Maybe they already have?
And here is a public list of known nuclear accidents
Notice that many of the incidents mentioned at your link don’t involve nuclear bombs at all: many involve leaks at research facilities and power stations. Here’s a chronological list of radiation incidents that caused injury from the start of the 20th century onwards. The vast majority don’t involve nuclear bombs.
Historically, unless you were in Hiroshima or Nagasaki, you would have been less likely to die from a nuclear bombing than you would have been to die from a radiation leak, picking up a lost radioactive source without recognizing it (or living with someone who’s brought one into your home), being poisoned with radiation by a coworker, or medical overexposure. (Note also that the list is surely incomplete.) It is possible that this trend will reverse in the future, but it’s not obvious that it will.
More generally, gwern sounds about right to me on the subject of terrorists putting together their own nuke. (Or hauling one up from the bottom of the ocean.)
Coincidentally I just the other day learned of the banana equivalent dose as a way of placing the risk of radiation leaks in context.
I am not. To even suggest that that this is a possibility anywhere near the level of a sovereign actor giving terrorists nukes is to dramatically overestimate terrorist groups’ technical competence, and also ascribe basic instrumental rationality to them (a mistake; see my Terrorism is not about Terror).
Even if a terrorist could marshal the interest, assemble in one place the millions necessary, and actually hire a world-class submersible and in the scant days they can afford, find the wreckage of a bomb, it would probably be useless. US nukes are designed to failsafe, so if the wiring has corroded, or the explosives are misaligned? And that’s ignoring issues with radioactive decay. (Was the bomb a tritium-pumped H-bomb? Well, given tritium’s extremely short half-life, I’m afraid that bomb is now useless.)
Maybe, although remember there are a lot more players interested in obtaining nuclear weapons then just a few terrorists. And the best crimes are the ones no one knew were commited. Unsucessful criminals are over represented as opposed to ones that got away. I suspect the same is true for terrorists. Blowing up a building isn’t going to achieve your goals, but blowing up a city might. After all, it’s ended a war once and just the threat stopped another from ever happening. Also, even if the bomb itself is useless, it is probably worth quite a bit of money, more then the millions it would take to retrieve it (maybe thousands as technology improves? There are some in shallower water. In 1958 the government was prepared to retrieve a lost bomb, but never located it.) I don’t honestly know a lot about nuclear weapons, but the materials in it, maybe even the design itself, would be worth something to somebody. Maybe said organization has the resources to salvage it, after all, they already had enough money to get it in the first place.
Even if no bombs go off, I wouldn’t be suprised if the government eventually gets around to searching for them and finds they’re not there. And there are other nuclear threats to. Although I can’t find anywhere to confirm it, it was floating around the internet that up to 80 “suitcase nukes” are missing. This quote from wikipedia particularly distrubed me:
I will leave it at that for now, I’m not one of those paranoid people that goes around ranting about nuclear proliferation or whatever. If there really is a problem, there’s not much we can do (except maybe try to get to those lost bombs first, or take anti-terrorism more seriously.)
I prefer spending my precious mental CPUs on worrying about the US government going really bad.
Admittedly, a terrorist nuke (especially if exploded in the US) would be likely to cause the US government to take a lot more control.
I don’t take Lunev seriously. Defectors are notoriously unreliable sources of information (as I think Iraq should have proven. Again.).
The problem with nuclear terrorism is that atomic bombs come with return addresses—the US has always collected isotopic samples (eg. with aerial collecting missions in international airspace) precisely to make sure this is the case. (Ironically, invading Afghanistan and Iraq may’ve helped deter nuclear terrorism: ‘If the US invaded both these countries over just a few thousand dead, then it’s plausible they will nuke us even if we cry to the heavens that we just carelessly lost that bomb.’)