Nuclear Hijacking
Ingram, Timothy H.
Nuclear Hijjcking : Now within the Grasp of Any Bright Lunatic by Timothy H. Ingram mention hijackers seizing a plane filled with A-bombs and what comes to mind? James Bond...
...The investigator reported that the Mafia controlled a number of trucking firms, drivers, and union officials, and that it could “easily” get hold of nuclear materials, which it could supply to weapons...
...He read books by the hundreds about rockets and built model rockets as a hobby...
...That evening the newscaster simply added at the end of the broadcast: “Would the person who wrote the letter in red ink to city hall please contact the police...
...More than one weapons specialist has clicked his tongue, saying, “It’s a whole new ballgame...
...The note indicated that if the police wanted to know where the material came from, all they had to do was call the AEC, because the material was from its shipments...
...For reactors, the ore must be upgraded to two or three percent U-235...
...Shipments of enriched uranium and plutonium are regularly sent, unguarded, by air and truck all over the country and overseas...
...Dr...
...the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency a. While there is some difference of year ago hired a Washington think opinion, most experts consider that tank to consider what options were the design and manufacture of a crude open to officials if they received a nuclear explosive device, even without threat to blow up a city with nuclear previous access to classified data, is no longer an extremely difficult task...
...Congressman Hosmer, dismisses the threat: “So what if Negroes take over the Kitty Hawk...
...It was a very tight situation...
...Question: What disturbed you...
...An old length of sewer pipe will do, When I was at the Explosive Ordnance Disposal School in the Army, instructors used to use as training manuals an old copy of Life magazine with good diagrams of a bomb...
...The AEC’s own officials privately acknowledge that the AEC’s open publications contain virtually all the information a bomb-builder would need...
...A standard 1,000-megawatt light-water reactor (about the requirement for a city of one million people) will produce 200 to 300 kilograms of plutonium per year...
...International arms organizations would love to get their hands on such bombs for trade abroad...
...But even this plutonium-240 pollution brake on the spread of reactortobomb possibilities will be lost with the development and spread of breeder reactors, whose plutonium is free of What makes adequate safeguards so important to experts is the phenomenal rate at which this weapons-grade material will start to stockpile after the breeders go into operation...
...Until recently, Dr...
...but little or no security is imposed at, say, the private reprocessing plant, where huge quantities of nearly bomb-ready plutonium from old reactor rods are constantly handled...
...While director, he pushed hard for tighter safety regulations...
...Carl Walske, assistant to the Secretary of Defense for atomic energy, declined an interview, his executive aide saying, “We don’t want to get into these questions...
...But the six-hour racial melee on board the carrier U. S. S. Kittv Hawk raised troubling possibilities...
...The student was given a suspended sentence with the stipulation that he receive psychiatric treatment and was released under the supervision of a juvenile court counselor and local psychiatrists...
...Customs officers look for heroin, not radioactivity . Military Arsenals In spite of all the flaws in civilian nuclear fuel handling, most specialists assume that military security is of a higher order...
...The official report on the incident was imaginatively entitled “Inadvertent Export of Special Nuclear Materials...
...The new private industry era of atomic plants and the decisions to speed up overseas reactor development has introduced a dangerous double standard-strict security is required for all phases of the military nuclear production process, which leads to the manufacture of an actual weapon...
...But this does not do the job, because there is always some material missing...
...What if rebels commandeered the nuclear bombs aboard a carrier, or worse, a Polaris submarine...
...Senator Symington: Well, I can’t go into that...
...Knowing it was a hydrogen device gives a chilling twist to the comments reported in the paper...
...In its natural metallic form, plutonium could be smuggled in anything, from a set of weights to inside the fender of a car...
...A concerned United States works out an arrangement whereby Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) technical experts visit the facility periodically to make sure it is safe...
...The truck shipments would be even easier prey for hijackers, since the drivers have no escort, no radio transmitters, and no weapons...
...General Burchinal: I do not consider there is much risk that our weapons could fall into the hands of any foreigners, in a condition where they could be either effectively usedSenator Symington: With great respect, I say I have investigated that myself and I cannot agree...
...His sobbing mother said her son wanted to be a scientist or engineer, and that, “He would write or tell people about this new rocket fuel he invented, but no one took him seriously...
...With the usual sense of Army security, someone had stamped the magazines “secret...
...And the people with custody responsibility would be the last to take part in a revolution...
...An open trial on the matter, and possible leakage of the news that a hydrogen bomb was the threatened weapon, was avoided...
...Ralph Lapp, a Washington writer and consultant on nuclear matters, says, “About several dozen people, if you know what you’re doing, and a very good ordnance man...
...Mideast Solution...
...Senator Symington: That’s a good question...
...On May 26, 1970, as chairman of the foreign relations subcommittee on U. S. security agreement and commitmen ts abroad, he questioned General David A. Burchinal, deputy commanderinchief of U. S. forces in Europe...
...They couldn’t do anything with them...
...Perhaps most alarming, there is no way to make sure the drivers or plant technicians themselves might not walk off with the isotopes...
...What makes it all the more frightening is that the AEC couldn’t honestly assure Orlando-or any other town faced with an immediate nuclear bomb threat-that no material was missing...
...It has a radioactive half-life of 24,400 years...
...The material for the atomic warhead is not the product of an expensive backyard Manhattan Project, but has been hijacked only five weeks previously from a commercial airline flight from London to Frankfurt...
...What happened next is not entirely clear, with some insiders’ accounts of the event conflicting with the incomplete, partially misleading version given at the time by Orlando Police Chief Robert Chewning...
...In some of the larger experiments involving, say, 800 kilograms of materials, the uncertainty could conceal several kilograms of stolen materialenough for a bomb...
...The bomb is a dud...
...A small bit of metal around it will foil any geiger counter...
...Conveniently for the nuclear thief, it doesn’t take much to hide plutonium...
...Since this would mean monthly plant shutdowns, the industry was particularly incensed...
...the material is not shipped in special, secret compartments, but goes in with the suitcases and golf bags...
...The numbers are nothing less than staggering...
...We passed the word around the office,” Thornton said, “and had our regional people contacted to see if all shipments were accounted for...
...He doesn’t have the dozen pounds required for a Nagasaki-type atomic bomb, but he does have some of the most fievidishly toxic substances known...
...Like any other bit of merchandise, it sits on a pallet in a warehouse...
...But it’s not that simple...
...instead, highly toxic plutonium particles are scattered over a wide area, killing hundreds outright, some within a month, and developing cancers in o them .Keeping the Peace...
...It has generally been assumed that nuclear electric plants in normal operation do not produce plutonium of sufficient purity to construct high- y ield , quality nuclear weapons-though terrorists could still use it to fashion a mod...
...The stuff is valuable, too...
...General Delmar Crowson, relating the incident in April, 1971, before a Senate appropriations subcommittee, commented, “Well, at the present time we don’t have a capability of searching the system in a timely fashion.,’ Crowson continued, “We found nothing missing and we notified the FBI the following day...
...All of these are considerably easier because of the ways in which we have invited nuclear sabotage: surrounding our major cities with nuclear power plants, complete with four-lane access highways...
...Russell P. Wischow, Thornton’s predecessor as AEC safeguards chief, acknowledges: “I was involved at the AEC at the time and am aware of the incidents, but it would be improper for me to discuss it, as it may be a matter of national security...
...The best the AEC can do is estimate the normal MUF and work from there...
...Industry would finance and own the new plants, with federal supervision only to ensure the secrecy of methods and that no uranium was superpurified to bomb quality...
...It is nearly as hazardous as botulism toxin: quantities of less than one-thirty-millionth of an ounce will produce cancer...
...But several blackmail threats-including the nuclear destruction of Orlando, Florida-have panicked officials into thinking about the unthinkable...
...The million dollars was assembled and the ransom would have been paid, but the would-be bomber was found through conventional police methods...
...He eventually has close to a pound of plutonium...
...Militant publications have talked about it, but thank God they aren’t ready for that yet...
...Bu.t there’s no way of knowing if a portion of any shipment had been smuggled out at some point, either in transit or at a plant...
...That monopoly is now in danger of being broken, as a number of countries experiment with one or more of the 30 processes which theoretically will lead to the relatively cheap production of enriched uranium...
...The compromise approach chosen by the AEC is a “checkbook” system -making audits of the material at each stage of processing, and then looking to see whether any is missing...
...General Delmar Crowson of the AEC says, “We figure you are going to need a dozen people, a very good set of metallurgists, and a very good set of physicists in order not to blow yourselves up, and it is not just a one-man type operation...
...In late 1972, at the Pugwash meeting of leading Eastern and Western scientists at Oxford, which followed on the heels of the Munich Olympic killings, a heated debate centered on the use of nuclear plants as targets for saboteurs, criminals, or political fanatics...
...Conservative Congressman Craig Hosmer, a senior member of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, speculates about “the psycho [who] doesn’t know how to build a bomb, but lays his hands on a bucket of plutonium and mixes it into an odorless, tasteless, invisible gaseous compound...
...Israel takes the more traditional route, building a 24-megawatt test reactor at Dimona, obtained secretly from France, and purchasing the uranium fuel in Argentina and South Africa...
...The AEC and the Department of Defense are, in public, either silent or blase’, but privately they are becoming increasingly concerned about the threat of nuclear blackmail...
...Even more conveniently, due to Department of Transportation rules, it is labeled “Radioactive Material...
...The potential for blackmail seems almost limitless: sabotage of atomic plants...
...The crumbly survival biscuits in fallout shelters across the country gather dust as a busy nation goes to work and worries about things closer to home...
...Wayne Henderson, who worked on the case, found a magazine article about missing nuclear material, and it mentioned this same general...
...Orlando contacted the FBI, which notified the safeguards division of the AEC and asked whether any material was missing...
...It is just as hard today to build a hydrogen bomb as cook a pancake...
...Once the important first step is taken-getting the six kilograms of plutonium or 20 kilograms of enriched uranium necessary for a bomb-the rest would be a snap . “Someone who was set up in advance to fashion a bomb could build it in two weeks or less after he received the material,” Taylor says...
...He urged, for example, mandatory monthly inspections of plants to take a physical inventory of materials...
...Missing or Unaccounted For In 1966 a U. S. contractor operating a fuel-fabrication plant reported that more than 220 pounds of Uranium235 had either been lost or “unaccounted for” over a six-year period...
...For fun and/or profit he threatens to spread the stuff all over Manhattan some day.’’ Plutonium is toxic almost beyond human experience...
...I was not satisfied with what I found...
...the grain is U-235, the fissionable material whose reactions produce power or explosigns...
...Senator Symington: I think that you can say in a general way that we’re not being as careful with our nuclear stockpile in the Far East as we are in Europe...
...Once special nuclear material is successfully stolen in small and possibly economically acceptable quantities,” he said, “a supply-stimulated market for such illicit materials is bound to develop...
...One could easily don a TWA cargo worker’s white overalls and cart the stuff off...
...The AEC hired a consulting firm, Wright, Long & Company, to study the threat of hijacking by the Mafia and other organized groups...
...The area where the warheads are stored would be demolished if opened...
...Did you come back satisfied that those stockpiles were being handled in a secure kind of way, and can’t be taken over by Thieu...
...In the last few years, these hazards have prompted a series of conferences and reports: .At a 1969 safeguards symposium at Los Alamos, AEC Commissioner Clarence E. Larson told those assembled that a nuclear black market was “likely” to develop...
...It is only a one-tenth of a kiloton device, one-two hundredth the size of the Hiroshima bomb, but still capable of wiping out a village...
...That’s classified...
...Domestic air shipments go on normal, commercial flights...
...The amount was enough to make five Hiroshima-type bombs...
...The “enrichment” process that jazzes up the raw ore is, of course, one of the technical secrets the U. S. has tried hardest to guard...
...As with any gaming, it’s tough to know how seriously to take the scenarios...
...cover the spectrum-each expert usually answering according to the quality of bomb he would build...
...Consider the following scenarios, representative of the type now being mulled over by arms-control experts and the Atomic Energy Commission: msloppy But Effective...
...encouraging a world-wide speed-up of nuclear power programs...
...or, as actually was threatened by hijackers last November, crashing a plane into a major nuclear plant, like the one at Oak Ridge, Tennessee...
...If these scenarios sound far out, then realize that these and other nuclear theft and blackmail war games are being considered in deadly earnest by AEC, arms control, and energy industry safeguards specialists...
...One independent consulting group has estimated it would take seven hours to get all the European Theater’s nuclear weapons unlocked and ready to go...
...They’re easy to assemble...
...some foreign tyrant...
...Under the seat is a crude, radioactively dirty A-bomb, homemade by guerrillas...
...Over the next eight years, the AEC expects to pass on license applications for 150 nuclear power reactors, worth a total of about $45 billion...
...The radioactive material can simply get lost, like any other kind of baggage...
...The reactor is capable of producing enough plutonium for about one bomb per year...
...a sailors’ rebellion, leading to the takeover of an aircraft carrier with A-bombs aboard...
...The answers one gets” as to “how difficult...
...Thornton simply admits, “Yes, I was fired...
...When contacted by phone, Orlando Police Chief Chewning said: “We had been assured by the general in Washington [General Delmar Crowson, Dr...
...How difficult it is to fashion an A-bomb depends on what kind of nuclear material you have to work with, and what degree of sophistication and reliability you are aiming for...
...Others remembered that the same boy had been mowing the lawn at the house on Mosher Drive...
...There have been a number of threats against AEC installations...
...But the crudeness of these estimates-the fivefold difference between .2 per cent and one per cent-may be enough to conceal important losses of material...
...It proved to be a dud...
...When enriched uranium is “burned” in a reactor, some of it is transformed into plutonium, the second main ingredient for making bombs...
...C. D. W. Thornton, former director of the AEC’s Division of Nuclear Materials Safeguards...
...The study concluded that no present central Civil Defense office or group was prepared to handle such a situation adequately...
...The vacant house where the reply letter was to be sent was staked out, but a curious neighbor saw the letter in the mailbox and foiled efforts by removing it...
...He daily removes from manufactured 12-foot reactor fuel rods one or two thimblesized plutonium pellets weighing .05-ounce (quantities small enough as to be relatively undetectable by monitoring apparatus at the plant...
...The average MUF for plutonium, for example, is .2 to .5 per cent, sometimes rising to one per cent...
...You pay a price for all those locks,” Hosmer said...
...More than one bomb-amount shipment of material has reportedly been aboard planes hijacked to Cuba...
...He saw the U. S. dependent on plutonium for 70 per cent of its electricity by the year 2000, with a resulting store of 720,000 kilograms of plutonium...
...The Orlando Sentinel ran six articles on the arrest and a follow-up to the threat to “blow up” the city, but never mentioned that the blowing up would have been done with a nuclear weapon...
...Israel has not signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1968, which bans non-nuclear-weapon nations from acquiring nuclear arms, and thus is not subject to international safeguards inspettion...
...in foreign countries...
...Last year Thornton was reorganized out of his job, under rumors that the industry had applied pressure against him...
...Senator Symington spoke of the nuclear weapons America has placed all over the world, saying, “at least in some places, we do not guard them properly,” and asked the General about the risk of the weapons falling into the wrong hands...
...A limited atomic arsenal grows...
...No elaborate delivery system...
...If 10 pounds of the stuff were administered with absolute efficiency, they could produce cancer in every human being on earth...
...A pound would be worth close to $5,000 on the open market, five times as much as heroin, 10 times as costly as gold...
...The prospects of a floating Bomb are not dismissed lightly, even by those who assure you there will be no chance of anyone getting at the weapons...
...Some popular commentators have immediately equated that with 400 Nagasaki-type bombs...
...Thornton’s former safeguards counterpart on the management side of AECI that no material had been stolen...
...The Orlando Case On October 27, 1970, a red, typewritten letter addressed ^to “The Citizens of Orlando” arrived at the Orlando, Florida, city hall...
...The high-explosive component goes ofL but with no atomic blast...
...The straight-faced judge somberly told those present that if the boy was placed with hardened criminals, “especially considering the youth’s knowledge of science and rocketry,” he might develop bad attitudes and associations which could divert his talents into a destructive vein...
...Evacuating a large metropolitan city would surely mean panic and the possibility of accidental death for scores of people...
...The only thing everyone seems to agree on is that, fissile materials are like diamonds or any other valuablessomebody’s eventually going to try to steal them...
...On January 19, 1972, Senator Symington, returning from a monthlong trip to India, Japan, Korea, Okinawa, Taiwan, Thailand, South Vietnam, and Cambodia, was asked at a press conference by John Finney of The New York Times about our Southeast Asian nuclear stockpiles, and the danger of their being overrun, as during American withdraw a1 Question: Didn’t you say that at the outset, that one reason you took this trip is that you were running into disturbing rumors on how we were handling the stockpiles...
...The work required to produce bomb-grade 90-percent uranium would have been largely done, so that even a small enrichment plant could turn it into the makings of a bomb...
...And I’d rather leave it right there...
...But, Lt...
...I cannot for the life of me see why there is all this secrecy about the nuclear picture...
...Multiply that times the .5 per cent MUF loss now encountered, and it becomes easy to see where the materials for a 5-kilogram bomb would come from...
...No Minuteman missile...
...We wish to keep it down, for obvious reasons I’m sure you can appreciate...
...He broods...
...Under present conditions, only luck can keep some band of terrorists or an ambitious nation from taking the quick, cheap step to nuclear status by simply stealing the ingredients for a bomb, and making it themselves...
...Charles R. Newhouser, who directed for two years the now-defunct National Bomb Data Center of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, sums it up by saying: With a little bit of rip-off it’s possible to build an A-bomb...
...They recalled that a local boy had recently reported to the sheriff‘s office that he had found a bomb...
...For example, in April, 1970, a drum of waste containing a small amount of high-grade uranium was consigned for delivery from one firm to another in the same California city...
...If the question is, what does it take to build a device with a completely unpredictable yield, with a two-out-of-three probability that it would yield more than a tenth of a kiloton, (enough to blow up the Capitol building,) and could be carried in a car, you get a very different answer...
...theft of just a few of the thousands of nuclear warheads stationed at our military bases in the U. S. and overseas...
...This led to the convening of an outside review panel, and the creation in 1967 of a new office of safeguards and materials management within the AEC...
...This deficit-which the AEC calls Material Unaccounted For (MUF)arises from inevitable processing losses...
...He decides world peace can be achieved through blackmail and threatens to inject plutonium dust into the ventilating system of the United Nations, or scatter the toxic stuff at the Capitol by means of a World War 11 surplus thermite smoke bomb unless his demands for peace are met...
...James Bond cavorting through the skies, pursuing and thwarting the master-cooks who have threathened to blow up civilization...
...Instead, it was routed to Tijuana, Mexico...
...The public is vaguely cheered by the disarmament talks going on in Geneva, Vienna, and Helsinki, and the Non-Proliferation Treaty has put to rest our old fears of bombs spreading into every little sheikdom...
...According to Cornel1 University political scientist Lawrence Scheinman, contributor to several monographs on nuclear safeguards, the hijackers didn’t realize what was aboard - and, to the relief of AEC officials, apparently neither did Cuban airport inspectors...
...Juvenile Court Judge J. Chester Kerr called the ruling “tailor-made,” saying, “I do not believe that he expected his action to be taken seriously...
...It hates not to know where the stuff is, but controlling it more tightly would mean an unpleasant confrontation with the private nuclear power industry it has so carefully nurtured...
...To make uranium good enough for either a reactor or a bomb, the main task is to “enrich” the raw ore...
...In its early stages, the atomic business was strictly a top-clearance military operation...
...Some of the material blows out through vents, sticks in pipes, falls in among scrap, is tracked out on workers’ gloves or lunchpails...
...The boy was arrested at the local high school the following day...
...The police got a handwriting sample of the neighborhood youth and found that it matched the note...
...The rest is non-fissionable U-238...
...There are, however, a few little details left to take care of...
...The 14-year-old was an honors science student...
...The best that Orlando could be told was that there were no overt displacements or missing shipments...
...In the 0rland.o case, the FBI’s call went first to Dr...
...Nuclear Hijjcking : Now within the Grasp of Any Bright Lunatic by Timothy H. Ingram mention hijackers seizing a plane filled with A-bombs and what comes to mind...
...The boy’s mistake was in writing one of the notes in longhand...
...dropping little caches of nuclear weapons across half the surface of the world...
...Muffing It The public never learned of the incident, but word spread quickly among police departments across the country...
...A diagram of the hydrogen bomb device was included to prove the threat was authentic...
...A year and a half ago, the federal government announced it was phasing out its programs to stock fallout shelters, finding them no longer the necessity they were 10 years ago...
...He also demanded that receipt of the letter be acknowledged over a local television news program at six p.m...
...But, in a startling move on December 8, the AEC announced that private U. S. companies would be encouraged to build their own enrichment plants, breaking the federal government’s monopoly on plants and technology...
...AEC officials have even met informally with police chiefs, and raised the question of what would be done if they received a nuclear bomb threat...
...As the October, 1964, issue of Science Newsletter reported, “Aspiring nuclear scientists from all over the world can now find most of the information they need in their public library...
...There is no way of knowing whether all of it is processing loss or whether half represents pilfering...
...Hundreds of reactors throughout the world, burning uranium for the production of electric power, are continually turning out ‘plutonium as a by-product . The amount of plutonium produced depends on the type of reactor and the operating conditions...
...The writer threatened to blow up the town with a hydrogen bomb unless he was paid $1 million in small bills and given safe escort out of the country...
...To “channel his scientific abilities in the proper direction,” the chief engineer of Martin-Marietta Corporation in Orlando and the wing commander at McCoy Air Force Base agreed to assist in counseling the boy...
...In its natural state, uranium is 99.3 percent chaff and .7 percent grain...
...He works for a reactor fuel fabrication plant and is a frustrated engineer...
...No SAC bomber, Just an ordinary jeep or VW van, driven across a desert border into Israel...
...Herbert Scoville, former head of the Central Intelligence Agency’s science and technology group and now an arms expert with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, argued with the former head of the Soviet nuclear program that, indeed, a terrorist organization could develop its own atomic capability, and that steps should be taken now to guard against that very real possiblity...
...programs ensures that slightly enriched uranium will become an abundant commercial item...
...Meanwhile, a small chemical reprocessing plant is built secretly, preparatory warhead development and design is begun, all awaiting the diverted plutonium...
...Thornton, the man who took the Orlando call, was in charge of the division...
...A dynamite bomb was on the window ledge of an administration building next to one reactor...
...Making a Bomb .More serious...
...To get the technical data, one would go through the same procedure as in any other scientific research project-starting at the Commerce Department’s National Clearinghouse for Federal Scientific and Technical Information and run a title search for specifications and research papers on atomic weapons...
...The continued growth of nuclear power...
...Hosmer added that what worried him was not theft, but that “with all those locks, you don’t know if they will fire in time...
...Easing Manhattan’s Congestion Yet another nightmare is that some crackpots and terrorists might decide to sidestep tinkering with bombs altogether and rely solely on the fiendishly toxic nature of radioactive wastes...
...Neighbors were questioned...
...When asked about it again, he admitted to us that the material might be gone...
...No one could explain quite how it got there...
...The only public figure who has openly raised the question about the security of our nuclear weapons, especially those stored in foreign sites, has been Senator Stuart Symington, a former Secretary of the Air Force...
...As best as can be reconstructed, the sequence was as follows: Two days later the police received a handwritten note repeating the demands for money, and ordering a reply to be mailed to a vacant house at 1603 Mosher Drive...
...For bombs, it must be nearly pure U-235-90 per cent or better...
...Within the AEC, responsibility for controlling losses lies with the Division of Nuclear Material Safeguards...
...The next step is to get one of the two raw materials for bomb-building: uranium or plutonium Until recently, the five nuclear powers had a monopoly on producing enriched uranium, the basic ingredient for most bombs stockpiled by the major powers...
...Much like the horrors of accidental and not-so-accidental nuclear wae depicted in Fail Safe and On the Beach, nuclear blackmail seems passe in the age of detente, a subject better suited to light fiction than to genuine fears...
...The Cubans returned the planes, through benevolence or oversight, with cargo sections intact...
...The problem for the weaponbuilder is that reactor-bred plutonium is highly polluted with the isotope plutonium-240...
...Years ago, the technical data on building simple bombs, like those used on Hiroshima, made its way into unclassified, scientific publications...
...Minute quantities inhaled or imbedded in the skin can be lethal...
...This whole question of plant controls and keeping track of fissile material is a touchy issue for the AEC...
...For groups that just want to build the sloppy, little bomb, the answer is that it is not very hard...
...second-rate - 1 A-bomb...
...Since that time, confidence has not noticeably increased...
...Theodore Taylor, a Washington consultant and former government physicist who has designed nuclear warheads, says: If the question is, what does it take to build a nuclear explosive of the type that is in the Minuteman missile, there is one answer...
...Whether the result of a hoax or actual nuclear threat, the condition would be nightmarish and in tolerable...
...If the slightly enriched uranium that comes from these plants ever reaches the black market, it will put the potential bomb-maker about 60 to 80 per cent of the way to having weapons-grade material...
...Police took the drawing to nearby McCoy Air Force Base, where an armament officer concluded yes, it would probably work...
...It has been years since Civil Defense officials ordered routine bomb drills for schoolchildren...
...Former AEC Chairman Glenn T. Seaborg gave a speech in October, 1970, outlining “The Plutonium Economy of the Future...
...Washington atomic consultant Dr...
...Worse, the radioactive halflife of plutonium is over 24,000 years, making possible the eternal contamination of an area...
...According to the AEC, there have been no known overt attempts to steal nuclear materials...
...Question: Can’t you talk about it in general terms without going into the details...
Vol. 4 • January 1973 • No. 11
