Apocalypse ahead: everyone's talking about the film 'The Peacemaker' - but when it comes to nuclear terrorism, truth is scarier than fiction

Washington Monthly, Nov, 1997 by John Leifer

This fall's Blockbuster movie "The Peacemaker" pits actors Nicole Kidman and George Clooney against a Bosnian terrorist headed for New York City with a grudge against the West and a backpack full of nukes. The duo's desperate attempts to prevent the bomb-toting villain from pulverizing the Big Apple make for an over-the-top, nail-biting thriller. But although Hollywood has taken its usual artistic license with the film, "The Peacemakers'"s central premise is less implausible than viewers may suspect--and far more possible than government experts and scientists want the public to know.

"I could build a fifteen-kiloton bomb in my kitchen--certainly powerful enough to kill a million people in the middle of Manhattan," says Ted Taylor, one of the chief weapons designers at the Los Alamos National Laboratories during the days when it was still the primary design facility for U.S. nuclear weapons. Taylor is now a professor at Princeton, and like many who've worked in the nuclear field, he's gravely concerned about the prospects of a real-life Peacemaker scenario.

A decade after the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the progressive dismantling of the Soviet military-industrial complex, Americans bask in the belief that the specter of nuclear destruction is but a vanquished demon, an anachronistic menace that no longer has a place in a post-Cold War world. But although the odds of a strategic nuclear attack may have disappeared along with the former Soviet Union, the possibility that a rogue state or terrorist organization will use weapons of mass destruction in some unconscionable act has, if anything, increased. The growing threat, say physicists, congressmembers, and members of the intelligence community, is the result of the convergence of four key developments: the proliferation of knowledge about how to construct such weapons, the increasing amount of fissile material, the deterioration of the security systems protecting that material, and the changing face of international terrorism.

You Don't Have to Be a Rocket Scientist

Twenty years ago, a writer named Howard Morland made headlines by publicly unveiling his design for a homemade thermonuclear bomb. Predicated on information gleaned from sources ranging from the Encyclopedia Americana to a host of declassified documents, Morland's 270-pound device bore little resemblance to government photos depicting hydrogen bombs as 20-foot long, 20-ton behemoths. Morland's point in developing the schematic was to heighten awareness of the proliferation of potentially dangerous information, and to debunk the belief that weapons of mass destruction were impossibly difficult to either construct or transport. The viability of his amateur schematic--and the validity of his assertions--was made evident when the U.S. government unsuccessfully sued to prevent its publication. (The design eventually ran in the November 1979 issue of The Progressive.)

Morland's schematic was more conceptual than tactical--precise details were missing--leading some skeptics, including a group of scientists assembled by the Nuclear Control Institute (NCI), to assert that a layman still lacks sufficient information to build a bomb. "The detailed design drawings and specifications that are essential before it is possible to plan the fabrication of actual parts are not available," the group pointed out. Furthermore, "the preparation of these drawings requires a large number of man-hours and the direct participation of individuals thoroughly

informed [about] ... the physical, chemical, and metallurgical properties of various materials to be used, as well as the characteristics affecting their fabrication."

But cut through the scientific mumbo-jumbo, and one finds that such knowledge is a lot easier to obtain than these scientists care to admit. For instance, a key piece of information that would-be nuke builders might require relates to the critical mass of fissile material needed to induce fission under select circumstances. Now granted, this is not the type of technical calculation your run-of-the-mill terrorist can work out by conducting experiments in his bathtub. According to Ted Taylor, however. "if someone gets a hold of the Los Alamos critical-mass summaries, he can see how much material is critical in various forms--various ways of shaping the metal, various reflectors wrapped around it" Not planning a trip to New Mexico anytime soon? No problem. Critical-mass summaries can be obtained by writing to the National Technical Information Service in Washington, D.C. "They cost three dollars," offers Taylor.

In any event, such detailed information may not even be necessary. Luis Alvarez, a physicist of Manhattan Project fame, claims that if one possesses the right material, even imprecise information is sufficient to achieve a nuclear explosion. "With modern weapons-grade uranium," Alvarez points out in a NCI study, "... terrorists, if they had such material, would have a good chance of setting off a high-yield explosion simply by dropping one half of the material onto the other half. Most people seem unaware that if separated U-235 is at hand, it's a trivial job to set off a nuclear explosion.... Even a high school kid could make a bomb in short order."