Terrorists could get N-device at little cost

12-10-2006

WASHINGTON: Terrorists will need just $5.43 million to make a nuclear device and launch an attack, says a new study.

According to researchers Peter Zimmerman and Jeffrey Lewis, writing in the current issue of Foreign Policy, terrorists can construct a nuclear device within the United States, which could be a highly-enriched uranium bullet that they could fire through a gun. Once complete, the device is likely to be less than nine feet long and could be transported in a van or a small panel truck.

The two scientists recall that eight years earlier, aides to Osama bin Laden met Salah Abdel al-Mobruk, a Sudanese military officer and former government minister, who offered to sell weapons-grade uranium to the terrorists for $1.5 million. He proffered up a three-foot long cylinder. The Al Qaeda representatives agreed to the purchase. The cylinder turned out to be a dud. But had it actually contained highly enriched uranium, and if bin Laden’s deputies had managed to use it to assemble, then transport and detonate a nuclear bomb, history would have looked very different. September 11 would be remembered as the day when hundreds of thousands of people were killed.

They write, “Osama bin Laden’s longstanding interest in developing nuclear weapons is deeply troubling, and the attempt to purchase uranium from the Sudanese was far from an isolated incident. Al Qaeda operatives have repeatedly tried to acquire nuclear materials over the years. In August 2001, a month before the September 11 attacks, bin Laden received two former Pakistani nuclear officials, asking them to help recruit other Pakistani scientists with expertise in building nuclear weapons. After the military effort to oust the Taliban from Afghanistan, US forces found extensive documents, including crude bomb designs, at an Al Qaeda safe house in Kabul. In 2003, bin Laden sought a fatwa from an extremist Saudi cleric permitting the use of weapons of mass destruction, calling their acquisition a ‘religious duty’.”

As for the physics and computation of the device, a senior physicist with two assistants could be hired at a cost of $200,000. Metallurgy and casting would cost $270,000, precision machining and construction $230,000, gun design, assembly and training $230,000, electronics, arming, fusing and firing $150,000, other facilities $200,000, fissile material between $300,000 and $500,000 and transportation $153,000. The total cost would be $5,433,000. khalid hasan