A threat that’s not going to go away anytime soon

This did not turn out like the Goiânia accident, but it’s still a scary story that illustrates that these kinds of problems are likely to persist over time. I’ve decided to quote rather extensively from the piece:

“Compared to a nuclear explosion, a dirty bomb would be a hiccup in terms of destructive force. The real problem would be panic. A light coating of radioactive dust raining down on Manhattan might cause only a minor increase in cancer rates, but it would definitely result in a major national freak-out. Set off at a major port, a dirty bomb would cause a chain reaction of precautionary closures and painstaking inspections that could bring the entire U.S. economy to a crawl within weeks. “The idea that dirty bombs could cause major destruction is complete bullshit. What they could do is cause billions and billions in economic damage,” says James Acton, an analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Dirty bombs are weapons of mass disruption.”

In the U.S., officials have significantly beefed up security at the nation’s ports since 9/11, and according to the Department of Homeland Security, 99 percent of incoming cargo is now scanned for radiation once it hits U.S. soil.” [...]

“So after 10 years and more than $1 billion spent on scanners, radiation detectors, and beefed-up intelligence, most U.S. ports are still scanning containers onshore, after unloading. Unfortunately, the detectors are easily foiled. Lots of harmless things are slightly radioactive — kitty litter, ceramic tiles, even bananas. So most detectors are set to ignore low radiation levels. Basic shielding would be enough to mask all but the strongest sources. “The radiation portals that were deployed in the aftermath of 9/11 are essentially fine, except for three problems: They won’t find a nuclear bomb, they won’t find highly enriched uranium, and they won’t find a shielded dirty bomb,” says Stephen Flynn, a terrorism expert and president of the Center for National Policy. “Other than that, they’re great pieces of equipment.”” [...]

“On the day Montagna scanned container 307703 — July 20, a week after it was offloaded — the two men were driving back from a meeting in the nearby town of Varazze. Calimero wasn’t surprised to see Montagna’s name on his cell phone — he sometimes called about bureaucratic stuff. But this was no routine matter.

Montagna quickly told them about his readings, and Calimero and Garbarino headed for the port, stopping at their office to pick up their own gear, well-used radiation detectors packed in padded aluminum cases. They arrived at Voltri less than an hour after Montagna’s phone call and found him and an official standing about 250 yards from container 307703, now moved to an unused area on the eastern edge of the port.

The first thing on everyone’s mind: Was there a nuclear bomb inside? Instruments in hand, Calimero and Garbarino walked toward the container, confirming Montagna’s readings. At 25 yards away, Montagna had measured radiation levels of 0.1 millisieverts per hour. (The maximum allowable exposure for radiation workers in the U.S. is 50 millisieverts per year.) Calimero and Garbarino didn’t want to get anywhere near the thing. The high readings were actually good news. The active ingredients of a nuclear device, plutonium or uranium, can be surprisingly difficult to detect. “Bombs don’t have such high levels,” Montagna says. “If it were a nuclear bomb, there would be much less radiation than was coming out of this thing.” [...]

“After arriving and conducting their own analysis, fire department specialists decided to use a line of containers to create a quarantine zone. It wasn’t a great solution, but it bought some time. Over the next few days, Calimero and Garbarino managed to figure out exactly what they were dealing with. The hottest spot was about 2 feet off the ground, in the center of the container’s long left side. The team then brought in one of the most sensitive portable detectors on the market, an $80,000 Ortec HPGe Detective DX-100T. Inside the unit, a 1.65-pound chunk of germanium cooled to -260 degrees Fahrenheit releases electrons when hit with gamma radiation. As they decay, many radioisotopes emit gamma rays, and those occur at specific energy levels. Whatever was in the box was giving off gamma rays at 1,173 and 1,332 kiloelectron volts. It could be only one thing: cobalt-60 slowly alchemizing itself into nickel.

Cobalt-60 is usually sold as a solid piece of metal to be used in medical devices like teletherapy machines and blood irradiators. Other isotopes are better suited for dirty bombs. [...] Nobody had any good explanations of why cobalt-60 would be in this container. And even if it wasn’t a bomb, what could they do with the box? It couldn’t stay in the port, but no one in the port would move it. The threat had been downgraded to a serious environmental hazard, but officials still couldn’t entirely rule out some kind of terrorist plot. “The radiation is so high it’s not possible for humans to go inside. We need to use robots,” Garbarino said last spring. “The final answer will come when they extract the source.” [...]

Today, Voltri is the gateway to northern Italy’s industrial heartland. In addition to containers, 50,000 cars a year come through the port on their way to dealers across southern Europe. “Historically, Genoa has always based its life on the port,” says Ivan Drogo, head of Multicon, a local business association. “Shutting down the port would shut down Genoa.”

For six months after the container was discovered, officials made no public announcement about it, and the port’s business continued as usual. But rumor spread through the city. For a while, the only reaction was from port workers. Giacomo Santoro, whose FILT union represents most of the port’s longshoremen, claims Voltri management had his members move the container before adequately explaining the risks involved. And because the box spent a week on the dock between the time it was offloaded and when Montagna scanned it, dozens of people may have been unknowingly exposed to dangerous radiation. In protest, port workers staged a 24-hour strike in August 2010, three weeks after the container landed on the dock. For the next five days, the terminal’s union workers struck for two hours each shift.” [...]

“Genoese officials were stuck. No shipping line in its right mind would transport container 307703 knowing only that it was radioactive but not what was inside. Neither Saudi Arabia nor the United Arab Emirates were willing to take it back. As a temporary measure, six months after the container was delivered the port built a three-sided “castle” of triple-stacked yellow containers half-filled with concrete around the unwanted box, which still sat at the terminal’s unused far end. Signs reading pericolo — radiazione ionizzante (“Danger — Ionizing Radiation”) were posted at regular intervals, reminding port workers to keep their distance.

After months of wrangling over who was responsible for the removal operation — priced at $700,000 — the port and the Italian ministry of the interior finally decided to split the bill. On July 18, 2011, just over a year after the box was unloaded in Genoa, 40 firefighters, a police bomb squad, representatives from the port authority, a team of robot operators, and Calimero and Garbarino descended on the Voltri terminal. Five huge green tents were pitched on the port’s blacktop to house computers and gear. Ten fire trucks and emergency vehicles were parked 100 yards behind the shield wall.

Using a remotely controlled excavator specially fitted for demolition work, firefighters drilled a foot-wide hole in the corrugated steel roof. Because there was still an outside chance that the container might hold a bomb, the fire department then tested for chemicals that would indicate explosives. When it didn’t find any, a waist-high tracked robot with three high-resolution cameras was lowered by crane onto the top of the box. Using the robot’s cameras, the bomb squad searched the inside of the container’s door for tripwires or detonators. All they could see were the radiators and copper wire that were officially supposed to be in the box — more than 22 tons of it.

Confident that container 307703 wasn’t going to explode, firefighters let the excavator go to work. “We ripped it open like a tin can,” says Alessandro Segatori, then the Genoese fire department’s second-in-command. That part was easy; finding the radioactive bit was not. A piece of metal weighing less than 6 ounces had to be plucked out of nearly 50,000 pounds of scrap.” [...]

“Finally, on July 29, the object was sealed inside several inches of lead and placed into a green and yellow steel tank bolted to the flatbed of a truck. A police car escorted the truck across the docks, through the gates, and onto the highway.

Aside from a few scratches, there are no identifying marks on the cylinder to help investigators figure out what it is or where it came from. The encapsulated chunk of cobalt will make its way north to Leipzig, Germany, where a specialized firm will search it for a serial number and eventually melt it down and recycle it. Judging by its size and shape, the object was probably part of a medical device or a machine used to sterilize food. Disposing of such material is expensive; Italian officials won’t speculate on how it got conveniently lost in a Saudi scrap yard. No one knows how the cobalt got into the container or how the container got into the system.”

Questions

Just some random questions I have been asking myself. If you think you know the answer to one or more of them, please leave a comment.

1.
a) What would in your view happen if a nuclear weapon would explode in a major American city, ie. New York or Washington, within the next 25 years?
b) How likely do you find such an event?
c) Would the retaliation be nuclear?

I would really like to know the answer to that last question. I have absolutely no idea. Also,

d) how big a deterrent is the nuclear retaliation threat to potential (the non-suicide of them) terrorists?

2.
a) Which places are more likely to become involved in nuclear warfare during this time period than the US?
Tyler Cowen thinks Japan is the most likely target, and that Pakistan is second. It’s very popular to focus on the Middle East these days when discussing foreign policy, but there are a lot of other ‘interesting areas’ to consider when it comes to this discussion. I agree with Tyler that Pakistan is a likely candidate, but I disagree with his views on North Korea. North Korea, or rather Kim Jong-il, would – at least within a reasonable time span – only contemplate using a ‘bomb’ defensively, in case of an invasion, and if he was to use one it wouldn’t matter one bit if it hit ‘his fellow Korean countrymen’ or not, in my opinion it would most likely hit Seoul, just like thousands of artillery shells would. The idea that this guy would even have second thoughts about killing people from SK seems ludicrous to me, he has no problem killing his own ‘true countrymen’ in droves. In short, there’s no way to ‘liberate’ NK without SK being bombed back into the stone age, both the Koreans and the American military advisers know this, and that’s one of the main reasons (there are others too, of course) why NK hasn’t yet and never will be ‘liberated’ by outside forces. The North Koreans are poor, but their military expenses are big enough for them to have a lot of shit pointing in a very ugly direction. Also, as long as China implicitly backs Kim Jong-il, nothing much will happen up there except people starving and getting killed and all that usual stuff. On the other hand, there is an important reservation to this analysis, the ‘within a reasonable timespan’ part. A nuclear NK might in the long run turn into a serious threat, Kim Jong-il is a power-crazed Stalinist dictator after all, so the most likely scenario is that SK will eventually get the bomb thus establishing a new status quo equilibrium of mutual deterrence.

Which other places might be of interest here? I’m thinking Moscow or another big Russian city, it’s certainly not impossible that the ‘situation’ in Chechnya will cause something really ugly to happen again. Also, it might be easier for terrorists to get their hands on nuclear material in Russia than it would be a lot of other places.

3. Which new countries will have obtained nuclear weapons in 20 years? Here is one relevant analysis, it is a transcript from a conference on proliferation. As mentioned above, SK seems like a likely candidate. Japan is having this discussion too. Also, not only because of NK but also in light of China’s recent and massive mobilization efforts, I would also not find it unlikely that Taiwan might choose to go nuclear. Moving west, Iran is almost a safe bet. Egypt and the Saudis would probably not like them to be all alone with those nice weapons, so they will surely go in the same direction. Probably Turkey too, but this depends a lot on how all that EU stuff develops. Going to the Americas, if Venezuela goes nuclear so will Brazil, and probably Argentina too. I don’t know how likely this is, but it certainly can’t be dismissed out of hand, it’s not a year since Chavez by a slim margin didn’t manage to establish himself as a lifetime dictator. He’ll try again, next time he might be succesful, and two of his best friends (Iran and NK) are both going nuclear.

4)
There are 9 nuclear powers today. The number will only go up, not down. How do we deal with this, how do we slow down this development as much as possible? Is a slowdown even possible? Is it unconditionally preferable?

Ok, those are tough questions, too tough to demand an answer for. The following is tough too, but it’s probably somewhat easier.

Now, this particular foreign policy subject strikes me as inarguably one of the most important of all areas of foreign policy. Yet nobody talks about it. When discussing foreign policy, people in the West talk a lot about terrorism, they talk about islam, they talk about Iraq and Afghanistan, they talk about Venezuela, Darfur and Zimbabwe, they talk about all kinds of stuff. But they almost never talk about nuclear proliferation. Why is this?

5)
The last point is not a question, just a remark. I’ve mentioned it before, I’ll probably mention in again, non-state proliferators are a big and often overlooked threat here that needs to be dealt with somehow. As the transcript linked to above concludes:

James Russell of the Naval Postgraduate School discussed potential non-state proliferators of nuclear weapons and emphasized that the list of potential adversaries is far greater than just al Qaeda. Other non-state actors seeking nuclear weapons include industrial entities and trading groups, quasi-governmental organizations, non-governmental organizations, warlords and militias, transnational criminal networks, and violent non-state actors motivated by anarchist, nationalist, secular left-wing, or religious causes. Globalization makes it more difficult for governments to track or the stop world flow of nuclear materials and information. Non-state actors play a critical role in the proliferation market by providing components and services generally prohibited by states. They also are flexible and adaptive and thwart attempts at regulation.

One important question Russell examined is if we are missing the ball by focusing on the Osama bin Laden-WMD connection? The millennial extremist waves seem to be on the decline. Religious nationalists are not really interested in weapons of mass destruction due to the difficulty of obtaining and using them, and in general they can get what they want using conventional weapons. By focusing on Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, the U.S. government may be missing other non-state actors that are just as dangerous.

The current thinking on proliferation to non-state actors is that it will be a direct transfer from states to non-state actors, either voluntarily or through unauthorized acquisition or theft from an existing site. Another possibility exists for indigenous production using dual-use components and either leaked or stolen materials. Proliferation in 2016 will be a buyers’ market for components, and non-state to non-state transfers will become more common. However, without a whole program nuclear weapons development components are useless.

The non-state proliferation problem is more significant than many people realize, and is about more than just violent non-state actors. The state-non-state divide is creating hybrid organizations that pose a more serious proliferation problem, especially on the supply side of the nuclear marketplace. The collapse of some states has turned them into criminal organizations, such as North Korea. The next problem that might emerge is non-state to non-state transfer of WMD materials, and it is not clear what can be done about it.