#3
Moscow Times
November 9, 2001
Terrorists One Step Ahead
By Pavel Felgenhauer

Following the Sept. 11 attacks, air traffic security has been strengthened. U.S. air defense forces have been ordered to shoot down passenger airliners without much paperwork if there is a real threat that the plane could ram an important military or civilian target. There is talk of putting armed guards on board passenger planes and of giving guns to pilots so that they would be able to fight possible hijackers. In short, a repeat of the Sept. 11 outrage is highly unlikely.

However, the increased security has not been foolproof. Instead of air attacks, there has been a stream of anthrax-contaminated mail that did not kill many but terrorized a large number of people. The authorities again reacted after the fact. In several months, the United States will be x-raying and sterilizing all mail. In a year or so, most industrialized countries may be doing the same. Anthrax in envelopes will be dead on arrival.

It seems as though we are winning the war. However, it's troubling that terrorists are each time one step ahead, as the authorities patch up the previous security loophole. Where will the clever "villains" hit next and will the authorities be as unprepared as before?

During a joint news conference with French President Jacques Chirac on Tuesday, President George W. Bush said that Osama bin Laden has threatened in the past to use chemical, biological and even nuclear weapons. Bush also said that there is no evidence that bin Laden or his al-Qaida terrorist organization possess such weapons.

In 1997, retired General Alexander Lebed (today the governor of Krasnoyarsk) surprised and alarmed the world when he announced that at the time of the demise of the Soviet Union, Moscow lost track of more than 100 suitcase-sized nuclear weapons. There have been reports that bin Laden may have obtained some of these Russian loose nukes.

However, the Russian military strictly denied any nuclear weapons were unaccounted for, and the United States officially supported the denials. The State Department announced in 1997 that the United States did not place much credence in Lebed's remarks. A statement issued on the subject said "there is no evidence other than hearsay to support claims of portable Russian nuclear weapons gone missing."

Bin Laden and al-Qaida may have no usable nuclear weapons yet, as U.S. authorities assume. However, experts from the International Atomic Energy Agency warn that there is a category of weapons that is in many respects worse than nukes and much easier to make: radioactive bombs.

Such a weapon is, in essence, a device designed to inflict a deadly and massive dose of radioactive contamination on a large area without a nuclear explosion. This can be a mix of explosives with a highly radioactive substance such as spent nuclear fuel, cesium used in medicine or industry, or plutonium from a nuclear weapon or conventional nuclear power station that is unsuitable for weapons manufacture.

The explosion of such a bomb creates a radioactive cloud that can cause severe and very long-lasting contamination. If such a thing happened in New York, humans might have to abandon parts of the city for hundreds, if not thousands, of years, as they have the town of Pripyat in Ukraine, near the Chernobyl disaster area. The Soviet Union tried to clean up Pripyat, but it is practically impossible to clean a modern city of radioactive dust. And it's impossible to live there.

In the 1950s, when Russia and the United States did not have many nukes, radioactive weapons were developed and tested. They were later replaced by tens of thousands of regular nuclear bombs, but now the ease of making radioactive weapons and the terrifying results of their use may attract terrorists.

It's much easier to obtain radioactive materials in the republics of the former Soviet Union than true nuclear bombs. Radioactive materials are plentiful and they are poorly guarded. As a scientist in Soviet times I easily obtained relatively large amounts of radioactive isotopes for research and no one ever seriously inquired about what I did with them next.

Almost all recorded cases of nuclear smuggling from the former Soviet Union up to now have primarily involved radioactive substances, not weapons-grade nuclear materials per se. The use of radioactive weapons by terrorists would probably not cause mass deaths of civilians, but the ensuing panic and economic losses make radioactivity a tailor-made terrorist weapon -- as devastating, if not more, than anthrax, smallpox or other biological weapons.

Pavel Felgenhauer is an independent defense analyst.

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