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.
Just To Make Your Day: Marijuana Nuke edition.Post + Comments (71)