Just what you want in that first email check waiting for the shower to heat up.* That would be the item in this morning’s email feed from Harvard’s news office featuring loose-nuke expert Graham Allison and his panel on the future of nuclear weapons that I missed in meat-space last Wed.
Tons of depressing stuff to choose from…like this:
There is a crap load of bomb-grade uranium and plutonium floating around. Leaving aside the good stuff contained in 23,000 nukes already in national arsenals, there is enough plutonium and highly enriched uranium around and about to build 100,000 more. The knowledge needed to do so is widespread. Which means that any paranoid scenario you can think of is plausible.
Here’s one of Allison’s:
…Size is not a limiting factor. The enriched uranium needed to detonate such a weapon would fit into a six-pack of beer, said Graham Allison, one of a coterie of analysts at the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) who specialize in security and nuclear terrorism. Shielded in a lead container, he said, such a weapon could be smuggled into the United States “in a bale of marijuana.”
Lot’s more good cheer in a pretty short piece. Try this one on the prospect of an attack on the US with a “mere” dirty bomb. That one got me going — because
Even just one “dirty bomb,” an explosive that disperses radioactive material over a wide area, could “evaporate” American civil rights, said [nuclear proliferation expert and former Cheney stalkee Valerie Plame] Wilson. A dirty bomb is more a “weapon of mass disruption” than destruction, said [Harvard Kennedy School Prof. Matthew] Bunn, though the costs could still be high, and the materials to make one are available in any Western hospital.
The event was part of what has become a theme of Allison’s advocacy — he’s a leader in the Global Zero movement that aims for the complete elimination of nuclear weapons.
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I must confess to a mild sense of deja vu on this. I was in the room back in 1984 (I think) when Carl Sagan and others did the first big public nuclear winter announcement, in which a very distinguished group of scientists and policy people followed the implications of simple (one dimensional) climate model analyses of what would happen after a nuclear exchange flooded the atmosphere with smoke from burning cities. (The first Science paper from the modeling group, known as TTAPS from the author’s initials, came out on Dec. 23, 1983.)
Those results predicted that a nuclear war would produce a massive sustained cooling that would drive the earth into a prolonged “nuclear winter,” which would obviously harm any survivors, possibly to the point of near or complete human extinction.
Most important, those early studies suggested that there was a threshold level of nuclear destruction that would produce this effect. I don’t have the transcript of that meeting in front of me, but I recall that the modeling group reported that an exchange as limited as 100 megatons could generate enough smoke to drive the earth into the freezer.
The point Sagan and others made at that early public announcement was that given the potential existence of such a threshold, the only long term guarantee of human survival would be to drive global nuclear arsenals down to below that 100 megaton inventory.
Didn’t happen of course, or more properly, hasn’t happened yet. Nuclear winter research has had its twists and turns since the ’80s, the most important long term take-away being that there would likely be major environmental and climatological impacts from a significant nuclear exchange, even if those early predictions of utter disaster have been modified.
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But we’ve still got buckets of nukes out there, and thanks to our GOP friends, arms reduction efforts are at least a temporary stand still.
So I’m cynical a bit on two levels: first, I distrust proclamations of the apocalypse — or rather, I think that the natural tendency to seek some reason beyond the obvious that could actually “force” us to do the right thing leads people to overstate threats.
__
If the fear of nuclear devastation on its own terms is insufficient to bring about proper controls on the material essential to the construction of an al Qaeda bomb, then how can we expect that yet more elaborate risk scenarios will produce the necessary response. Back in the ’80s I asked in print why someone thought if 2 billion dead of blast and shock and prompt radiation weren’t enough to scare us straight, the extra billions slowly shivering to death in the dark would somehow tip the scales.
This time it’s different, of course. I fear that Allison and his colleagues are right: nuclear terrorism is a real threat on the scales they suggest. If I have my doubts on the real-world feasibility of the demand for zero nukes…it still makes sense as an aspirational goal and as a rhetorical device to get us to focus on the buttloads of U 235 and Pu lurching through what we laughingly call “the system.”
But that still leaves the second bit of depressed world-weariness. This challenge seems to me to be beyond our capacity to deal with as long as one party in this country has decided that there is no such thing as governance — just politics in which success is defined by making sure that the other side fails…on everything. If we can’t even address a START treaty that is obviously in the US interest, it’s impossible to imagine we’ll get any of the hard (and expensive) work done on the control of wandering nuclear materials. After all, ho cares about loose nukes when a tax hike of a nickle or so on the marginal dollar of a zillionaire’s income is the final descent into Kenyan-Islamo Socialist Facism.
That’s the wrong attitude, I know. The issue of uncontrolled fissionables really is a big f**king deal. Losing a city or few some years down the road because we just couldn’t get our acts together now is unacceptable, and the work being done by Allison and Plame and the others connected with Global Zero is the right thing to do.
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That won’t persuade our friends across the aisle, of course — the START posturing tells us that. But in the end, that doesn’t leave those of us who actually love our country (and the world) off the hook. It’s a deep problem when one major party in a democracy chooses pure nihilism as its platform and practice. But we still have to find ways to be effective as the grown ups in the room.
Frankly I’m not sure what that would lead us to do right now on this particular issue. Here’s where Wednesday’s panelists ended up:
Eliminating nuclear weapons would require tools that are not yet available, said Mowatt-Larssen, including a “global intelligence capacity,” along with the willingness of nations to share information, and better technology for detecting smuggled nuclear materials.
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Currently, said Wilson, detectors have to get within inches of hidden enriched fissionable materials that are shielded by lead.
Maybe the answer to nuclear disarmament is just to get close to the goal, said Bunn. He offered one proposed scenario among many: Reduce each nation’s stockpile of nuclear weapons to 50, all of them disassembled and guarded by U.N. overseers. “We’ve got to think harder,” said Bunn, “about what we think of as zero.”
I won’t go charging off on yet another tangent — but while I think that particular idea has about an ice cube’s chances here, its essence is a call for transparency in nuclear security. A notion of such openness lay at the heart of some of the first ideas about eliminating nation-state control of nuclear weapons. We’ve been talking a bit about secrecy and its costs/dangers lately, I believe, and without adding yet more verbiage on Wikileaks, I’ll just stop by saying here that while the costs of revealing secrets are often weighed, the various dangers of keeping them must be as well.
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*Yes I am that pathetic — iPhone in the bathroom checking email before my third eyelid opens. A 12 step program beckons.
Images: Study for Heinrich Schlitt “In the Magic Forest (Im Zauberwald)” 1902,
and, by popular demand (reader capture, anyone), a bit of Bosch:
Jheronimus Bosch “The Ship of Fools, or the Satire of the Debauched Revelers,” betw. 1488 and 1510.
kindness
Cough, cough….wow that stuff knocks your socks off!!!
Silver
Why would you smuggle it in a bundle of marijuana? Does weed have magic gamma ray absorption qualities that I’m not aware of?
Seriously, I’m at odds to figure out what the point of that was, besides fear mongering about drugs.
kdaug
@Silver: Established pipelines, and all that.
Bnut
Bunn’s answer to the problem sounds very similar to the “House nukes” kept by the prominent families in Dune.
beltane
@Silver: If Cheech & Chong ever have a reunion, this would be a great a idea for the plot of their next movie.
Thanks for the Bosch, Tom. Lately I’ve been searching for some tranquility in the work of Antoine Watteau, which doesn’t seem to fit our current times very well.
Tom Levenson
@Bnut: Thought of that. Never really did get that detail (I just reread Dune, SciFi geek that I sometimes am/always was). It just seemed to me that Herbert felt that given when he was writing he had to get nukes in there somehow. I don’t know if a writer in current pop culture would feel the same sense of “it’ll be odd if I don’t get that in there” that those Cold War authors did.
gnomedad
Tax cuts will fix this right up. First things first.
freelancer
I just want to spit in Kyl’s face right now.
Berto
Who imports marijuana into America? The good stuff is grown here in the US. Is the point of this article that the CIA (America’s biggest drug importer) is moving plutonium?
daveNYC
Forget the hospitals. I remember reading about some kids in a Brazilian (I think) landfill who got deaded because they were playing around with a discarded x-ray machine from the states and they busted open the cesium.
geg6
And it’s one, two, three,
What are we fighting for?
Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn.
Next stop is
VietnamKurdistan.And it’s five, six, seven,
Open up the pearly gates.
Well, there ain’t no time to wonder why.
Whoopie! We’re all gonna die!
It’s places like former Soviet republics that will be the cause of the end of humanity. My former prof, an expert in the area, says he has no doubt.
And the idea that anyone in the US government will address this issue is exactly zero. Not when the most “respected” person in the Senate is now saying that DADT can’t be repealed because the economy sucks: “I will not agree to have this bill go forward,” he said. “Because our economy is in the tank.” http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/12/mccain_on_dadt_repeal_i_will_not_agree_to_have_thi.php
This, my friends, is why I hope the dirty bomb detonates right on my lap.
stuckinred
@geg6: damn dawg, hang in there
wasabi gasp
Hard to know because they smuggle it in bricks of heroine.
Maody
bad Chernobyl art
I have a friend whose father is a nuclear physicist who spent the last 18 years working to secure fissionable material in what used to the the Soviet States. He was hopeful until 2001.
stuckinred
@geg6: And as long as we are doing Country Joe
Please Don’t Drop that H Bomb On Me, GO Drop IT On Yourself
Kyle
We can all be thankful that brave patriots Cheney, Rove and Libby destroyed Plame’s network of contacts for preventing the proliferation of nuclear material. And only a couple of years after being too arrogant, ideologically-blinkered and lazy to stop 9/11. I feel so much safer.
Bnut
I just hope that when the bomb goes off in NYC I’m in lower Manhattan when it does. That bomb is gonna be dirty, but the explosion not too big. If I’m at at home in Brooklyn it’s gonna be a nice long radiation death.
stuckinred
@stuckinred: From Monterey Pop
And that means all you people out there in record land
To sing along with your old friends Country Joe & The Fish.
We will say an old time prayer as we look up to the sky and we ask the Lord:
Please, don’t you drop that h-bomb on me, go and drop it on yourself, alright …
Well, I said please,
Please don’t drop,
Don’t drop that h-bomb,
H-bomb on me
Yeah, I said please,
Please don’t drop,
Don’t drop that h-bomb on me.
Yeah, I said please,
Please don’t drop,
Don’t drop that h-bomb on me, yes,
Well, you can drop it,
Oh, you can drop it on yourself.
Martin
@wasabi gasp:
What, is that like a slurry of Wonder Woman and Batgirl formed into bricks?
Seems like a shameful waste of fit hotties in revealing outfits to me.
KG
two thoughts:
1. I don’t know how you put the genie back in the bottle on nukes, dirty or otherwise. Honestly, a dirty bomb isn’t the one I worry about. It’s the electro-magnetic pulse that would wipe computers, like on Dark Angel. Reset all bank accounts to zero, Project Mayhem-style, and the shit really hits the fan.
2. I’m not an iPhone in the bathroom-type, but I’ll admit to checking my email on my lap top while the shower warms up.
Brachiator
Gee, I remember the good old days when people were just afraid that a dirty bomb might, you know, kill people.
Aside from this, I’m not sure what the goal or point here is. That is, I don’t see how the worthy goal of having sovereign nations reduce their nuclear stockpiles relates to keeping nuclear material from terrorists, especially when the knowledge of building dirty devices is supposedly easily obtained. And I would think that getting nuclear material, for someone dedicated, is as easy as getting a batch of AK-47s.
I’m also not sure exactly what is supposed to make India, Pakistan, Iran or North Korea, let alone other nations, give up either their nuclear arms or their nuclear ambitions.
Maody
I forgot to add that when Chernobyl melted down, we were living in France. One Sunday while at the market, the national police came through with lots of trucks and guns … and geiger counters. They were followed closely by garbage trucks. They flipped all the produce into the streets and said it was contaminated. It was scary.
This is way bigger than START – though I agree that spitting in certain faces is appealing. Think of all the countries that won’t tell what they have in the way of nuclear materials or where they are and if they are secure.
Thanks for the Bosch. I know several of us suggested him.
licensed to kill time
@Martin: Heroines will be the death of me.
freelancer
No one likes us-I don’t know why
We may not be perfect, but heaven knows we try
But all around, even our old friends put us down
Let’s drop the big one and see what happens
Martin
@Bnut: Hate to break it to you, but any half-competent dirty bomber will have that explosion take place in a small aircraft or helicopter (easy enough to steal and almost impossible to stop) 5,000-10,000 feet over the target.
That said, a dirty bomb won’t have that much loss-of-life aspect to it. It’ll have a life reduction aspect, but even that will be limited. It’d be an economic armageddon, however, since it’d require full evacuation of some critical section of the country. How long would it take to restore the economic workings of NYC (the NYSE, the Federal Reserve, etc.) elsewhere in the nation since nobody could live there for a while? And what would the cost of cleanup be? (jobs program!) Most significantly, though, the bedwetters of the nation (that is, the GOP) will go full-metal Nazi on us.
Martin
@Brachiator:
Well, that was before 9/11 when we didn’t realize what fucking cowards were were.
Recall
People take dirty bombs seriously? You can get the same effect by dumping ground up radioactive material out the window of a moving car.
The Other Chuck
@Martin:
She’s a BRICK …. HOUSE!
Martin
@Recall: It’s the emotional toll on the populace that does the real damage. Bombs do that. Littering doesn’t.
Allan
I think I’ll call Kyl’s office and tell them that a dirty bomb made of unsecured Russian nuke materials just detonated in Phoenix, and ask if the Senator has any comments…
KG
@Recall: yeah, what Martin said. And I “worry” about dirty bombs the same way I worry about getting hit by a bus, which is to say, yeah, I think of it occasionally, but I don’t rearrange my life to avoid the very low possibility of it happening.
KG
@Allan: I’m sure it’ll be something along the lines of, “see, we needed to secure the border because this was obviously done by terrorist anchor babies”
Cat Lady
Re Bosch- we’re all living in the right panel of The Garden of Earthly Delights tryptich. There are loose nukes in there somewhere, I’m sure. I think Bosch had taken “long walks” through his own Magic Forest.
Fuck! A Duck
Gotta love Lou Reed, though. Just to avoid confusion he wrote songs called “Heroin” AND “The Heroine.”
NB: No linkies due to a terminal case of back-door work-slacking.
kdaug
And a “dirty-bomb” is different from living next to a Superfund site how, exactly?
Recall
@Martin: That little anthrax episode seemed to get people worked up.
R-Jud
@kdaug:
SCARY BROWN PEOPLE!
kdaug
@kdaug: Oh, no, nevermind – now I get it.
Only poor people live next to Superfund sites.
Gin & Tonic
@Kyle:
I am curently reading Richard Rhodes’ Arsenals of Folly, about the 1970’s-80’s arms race, otherwise a proto-history of the neocons – Cheney primary among them. He’s been a sick fuck his whole professional life.
kdaug
@Recall: Really? ‘Cause I’ve heard Republicans – and Bush himself – say we didn’t get hit after 9-11.
Maybe the fact that the anthrax was traced back to an Army base had something to do with that?
matoko_chan
well…..since we apparently cant burn down the jihaadi factory, and we dont seem to be very good at proselytizing jeebus democracy with guns…..praps we could STOP BEING EVIL?
Fuck! A Duck
Anyone wanna bet that Davis-Besse NPP is gonna blow before a dirty
sanchezdoes. That’d be a real Cleveland steamer.Martin
@Recall: A bit. But how much of our security state is built up around the anthrax event and how much around the shoe bomber, who didn’t even kill anyone? Everyone who gets on a plane still takes off their shoes. Anyone have to go through special measures to get their mail? I had an anthrax threat mailed to my building of 4 offices within the last year. Special mail handling lasted 2 weeks.
Everyone lost interest in the anthrax case. They’ve never even solved the case, and nobody seems to care. Most Americans don’t even remember it since they are still willing to give Bush the ‘no attacks since 9/11’ credit.
geg6
@kdaug:
Not much, really. But try living next door to a nuclear reactor and living with your iodine pills in your medicine cabinet and your desk at work. It gets you thinking about these things quite a bit. Believe me.
Maody
@Fuck! A Duck: lots of issues at Davis-Besse and my local Shearon Harris.
Andy K
Once, when I was a kid, I smuggled nerve gas into an REO Speedwagon concert by placing it in a dime bag of Jamaican Redbud.
Yeah, it was pretty awesome.
geg6
@Maody:
Or my local Shippingport. The nation’s oldest, I might add.
Fuck! A Duck
Maody: Don’t worry, the free market will solve everything. What could possibly go wrong?
Martin
@matoko_chan: You know, nobody is going to bite at your ‘evil’ assertions.
At the most basic level, ‘evil’ is a nihilist term. You can’t debate a policy that you’ve already declared to be evil because there’s nothing to debate, it’s been declared supernaturally, inherently bad and so you’ve essentially reduced America to being an irredeemable entity that can only be reformed by destroying it. And I don’t see how anyone here or anywhere outside of North Korea is going to recognize anything you say as anything but being totally unhinged.
Do you really believe that absolutely nothing America does is virtuous?
trollhattan
@kdaug:
I suppose we can spin up all sorts of scenarios, but a built-up modern city in which dozens or hundreds of high-rises are contaminated would be, well, impossible to clean up to any meaningful standard. Think Chernobyl and the sarcaphagus, times “n”.
I worked in environmental cleanup for about fifteen years and rad sites can be super-challenging because depending on what radionuclide you’re chasing, you might be hunting down literal particles. There may be no economically feasible way to scale up that kind of effort for a city, and you’d have to evacuate it for decades in any case (again, depending on which radionuclides).
Recommended viewing:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirty_War_(film)
Fuck! A Duck
Even my local Calvert Cliffs has spent an inordinate amount of time inactive for repairs. Profit seeking + NPP = brown trousers time.
It’s a race to see who can create the next mass casualty event first: terrorists or the private sector.
Calouste
@Martin:
You say that like shutting down Wall Street for a few months is a bad thing.
WyldPirate
Damn. Robert Oppenheimer must be rolling over in his grave right now…
If atomic bombs are to be added as new weapons to the arsenals of a warring world, or to the arsenals of the nations preparing for war, then the time will come when mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and Hiroshima. The people of this world must unite or they will perish.–J. Robert Oppenheimer, Acceptance Speech, Army-Navy “Excellence” Award (16 November 1945)
Poor guy must have been tortured realizing the role he had in letting the genie out of the bottle.
Oh well….this seems peaceful if not fitting…
Images of broken light which
dance before me like a million eyes
That call me on and on across the universe
Thoughts meander like a
restless wind inside a letter box
they tumble blindly as
they make their way across the Universe
Don
Not sure that’s true. My belief was that much of the damage of a dirty bomb is all the garden-variety particulate matter it irradiates and spews into the air. Detonated above ground it only atomizes its container. At ground level it’s a lotta dirt and crap.
I suspect from a terrorism standpoint they’d prefer the ground-level detonation anyway. Invisible death from above is horrible but these folks want the pizzaz of a big ass crater.
Bill Arnold
@Silver:
The “bale of marijuana” line was being used by Richard Garwin in talks on nuclear disarmament in the mid/late 1980s.
The point is that we can’t stop drug smuggling, so the problem of smuggling fissionables is reduced to a known problem. Sort of a geek joke.
Maody
@geg6: Yeah, ours isn’t that old, but man, the UCS sure hates it. The problem is often twofold:
1. Beavers/muskrats making nests in the intake water pipes to cool the waste containment storage.
2. The phalanges connected to spent fuel rods are so awesomely corroded that a hot fire could start when they start to fall after not being able to be moved about in cooling cycles.
I’m no scientist as you can tell by my writing, but at least I know something; mostly stuff about cats, art, love and food. Also, too … who is a Wingnutted Astronaut from Hell and who isn’t.
daveNYC
Shutting down the NYSE and AMEX is not even remotely close to the same thing as shutting down Wall Street. Hell, the BATS exchange is headquartered in Kansas City. Though they do have colocation hardwear in the NYC area.
All the major banks have backup trading sites.
Now making the DTCC stock certificate vaults unusable would be a problem, but I’m pretty sure there would be a workaround.
The Dangerman
@Maody:
Let’s see, what important event occurred in 2001 … think … think… think. There was 9/11, of course, but I’m thinking of something that happened much, much earlier in the year.
Maody
@The Dangerman: You mean that pesky SCOTUS decision? Ah yes indeedy, that’s what made him lose optimism of any kind – mostly because of CHENEY Asshat and his fellow corporatist hawks that came along with Dubya’s inauguration.
Bill Arnold
@Bill Arnold:
Wow it was hard to find a cite for that. The first instance of “bale of marijuana” for smuggling weapons I could find was in
Commentary, March 1985
in a long letter to the editor by Hans Bethe. That might be where Garwin got the line or vice versa. (They were both involved in nuclear weapons design way back when, and were both actively opposed to “Star Wars” (BMD).)
Martin
@Don: Nuclear material is especially heavy. It falls – fast. It’ll still get all bound up in that crap but in dense urban areas the structures limit the initial dispersal, cause it to clump up in ways that will be easier to clean up.
And there’s no atomization in a dirty bomb. It’s like a big suicide bomb full of nails and shit, except that the nails and shit are grains of cesium or enriched uranium that flies all over the place. It’s small enough to get into nooks and crannies that are hard to clean. It gets into the water and food. It gets picked up by vermin and tracked all over the place. It gets into ventilation systems. It’s relatively harmless until you inhale some of it or swallow it, and then with such close proximity it really whacks you. And if it’s spread around enough, anyone in that region could get a moderately high dose at random.
It’s like having around 5,000 poison-resistant mosquitos that will live for years in a big office building and you know that about 10 of them carry ebola. Is it dangerous? Well, sure, to the 10 people that get bit. How do you get rid of it? By tracking down and killing every single mosquito in the building, probably by hand. It’s mostly just a gigantic fucking pain in the ass problem to solve that scares the shit out of people along the way.
p mac
That counts as guilt by association I think. Why would anyone want to smuggle in an incomplete bomb in the first place?
Even for a dirty bomb–it would be easier to smuggle the entire thing with a shipping container or private yacht.
The drugs part is just for headlines, and to confuse the dubious War on Drugs with the real problem of non-proliferation.
WyldPirate
@Martin:
Depending on the isotopes involved, their levels and types of radioactive emissions and half-life, the a dirty bomb could render a city unlivable for quite a number of years along with making clean-up next to impossible.
The most difficult thing for terrorists intent on setting of a “dirty bomb” is making a device and setting it off in such a manner as to maximize the fallout pattern and spread the radioactive material as widely as possible.
The hysteria from the ignitiion of a dirty bomb would cause the most problems. As the original post notes, it would really damage civil liberties in this country.
Our biggest worry by far is in securing the fissile material. OBL and his ilk most assuredly have their hearts set on the “big enchilada” of obtaining one and detonating it in a major western city.
Scamp Dog
@Martin: I think the cowards are the people at the top: back in the ’70s and ’80s, terrorists hijacked airliners, etc, and the country didn’t make any horribly bad decisions. Bin Ladin’s stroke of genius was to hit the country’s elite: Wall Street and the Pentagon. They’re the ones who panicked, and are willing to sell out civil liberties so no airplanes hit them again.
How we get a new elite put in charge stumps me, I have to admit.
Cheryl Rofer
Something I wrote a while back in response to a Graham Allison attack of the vapors.
Sean
As opposed to a package of something completely innocuous, like vegetables or cars or any of the other perfectly legitimate things that used to come from this country, but now come from south of the border. If you really want to smuggle something, you’ll transport it in something else that agents aren’t already looking for.
Silver
@Bill Arnold:
Ah, thank you very much. I think in 1985 I was worried about what was going to happen to the Snorks, so I didn’t have the background on that.
Marshall
The bale of marijuana bit set my bullshit detector going.
Marshall
I could believe it was Richard Garwin. He is an interesting character.
He is thinking (in jest) like a mathematician – the reduces the problem t one that has already been solved.
Wilson Heath
My favorite post of the day just for the use of the phrase “meat space.” Not used often enough. That and “clown sourced.”
Li
Do you ever consider that the reason that Republican’s don’t care to do anything about the nuclear problem is that they look forward to the ‘evaporation’ of American civil rights? I mean, they were looking forward to a Pearl Harbor style attack on America so that they could go rampaging all over the Middle East, and when we got that, rather than stepping back from the horror for a few weeks they jumped to it, pushing through an (apparently already written and ready) bill to damage our civil rights as much as possible.
Restricting travel, silencing speech, and Xe patrolling our streets on behalf of the plutocracy is the Republican leadership’s American dream!