Atomic Obsession by Mueller John

Author:Mueller, John
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2010-03-21T16:00:00+00:00

Constructing an Atomic Device

Once outside the country with their precious booty, terrorists would need to set up a large and well-equipped machine shop to manufacture a bomb, and then populate it with a very select team of highly skilled scientists, technicians, and machinists. Moreover, stresses one physicist, the process would also require good managers and organizers. Physicist Richard Muller, who has been shown bomb designs in detail, concludes, as noted earlier, that “a nuclear weapon designed by anything less than a top-level team is likely to fizzle”—rather like the one tested by the North Koreans in 2006 after the country had invested enormous resources and effort over decades on the project.39

The group would have to be assembled and retained for the monumental task while no consequential suspicions were generated among friends, family, and police about their curious and sudden absence from normal pursuits back home. Pakistan, for example, maintains a strict watch on many of its nuclear scientists even after retirement.40 The Japanese terrorist group Aum Shinrikyo did establish and maintain a fairly extensive research facility, which suggests that this tricky task is not impossible, though that enterprise was not carried out in an environment in which police were scouring the world for recently purloined fissile material.

Members of the bomb-building team would also have to be utterly devoted to the cause, of course. And, in addition, they would have to be willing to put their lives, and certainly their careers, at high risk, because after their bomb was discovered or exploded, they would likely become the targets in an intense worldwide dragnet operation, facilitated by the fact that their skills would not be common ones. Applying jargon that emerged in the aftermath of an earlier brutal conspiracy, their names would become Mudd.

Some observers have insisted that it would be “easy” for terrorists to assemble a crude bomb if they could get enough fissile material, and one popular article even declared the task to be “child’s play.” But there are those who beg to differ. Atomic scientists, perhaps laboring under the concern, in the words of investigative journalist William Langewiesche, that “a declaration of safety can at any time be proved spectacularly wrong,” have been comparatively restrained in cataloguing the difficulties terrorists would face in constructing a bomb. However, physicists Wirz and Egger have published a paper that does so, and it bluntly concludes that the task “could hardly be accomplished by a subnational group.” They point out that precise blueprints are required, not just sketches and general ideas, and that even with a good blueprint the terrorist group “would most certainly be forced to redesign.” They also stress that the work, far from being “easy,” is difficult, dangerous, and extremely exacting, and that the technical requirements “in several fields verge on the unfeasible.” They conclude that “it takes much more than knowledge of the workings of nuclear weapons and access to fissile material to successfully manufacture a usable weapon.”41

These problems are also emphasized in an earlier report by five Los

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