The Big Flash!

This article was written by a man in Australia a number of years ago, and proves almost prophetic in light of the events of September 11, 2001 and the horrendous possibilities that face us if unbridled Islamic terrorism is allowed to spread its evil machinations around the world.

By Joseph Huang

As the news helicopters flew over the scorched city below, recording the terrifying scene on live-telecast for an eager world to see, the images were terrifying. Just the day before an atomic bomb had devastated the city. Those on the outskirts saw a rising mushroom cloud and then city streets with tall buildings on fire. People were running in the streets screaming, their clothes and hair on fire. When the bomb vaporized at a temperature of several million degrees centigrade, creating a fireball and radiating immense amounts of heat, all civilians within a five kilometer range of the hypocenter were doomed.

Heat, radiated by the bomb, burned every living soul more than three kilometers from the hypocenter. Instantaneous fires erupted over a wide area creating a firestorm that engulfed all major buildings around the city that had not succumbed to the blast the day before. All ten square kilometers of the city had already been burnt out, while some scattered fires were burning throughout the metropolitan areas. Chernobyl would pale in significance compared with this mammoth devastation.

Except for the humming of the numerous inquisitive helicopters in the sky, dead silence fell upon this once bustling metropolis. The winds did not clear out the radioactive smoke hovering above the city, restricting the helicopters' ability to record the destruction below. Those buildings that survived the blast were gutted by the subsequent fires. Dead bodies were scattered everywhere throughout the wreckage. Half-consumed human body parts could be seen among the smoking ruins where injured dogs had torn apart their masters and feasted on them.

Fallen houses and twisted commercial buildings turned this once thriving city into unimaginable rubble. The whole world stood still -- shaken -- as it watched the unfolding horror on satellite TV. Three percent of the bomb's energy was released in invisible neutrons and gamma rays. These rays affected people during the ensuing days as they spread out through the air and water. Finally, the message sunk in -- the city was New York, that Great City! Nuclear terrorism had finally arrived! Some of you reading this article may think this scenario is far-fetched, but frightening indications and the opinion of nuclear experts make this scenario highly probable. Authorities have stopped at least seven cases of nuclear components from being smuggled into the West from Russia. No one knows how many more have passed through undetected.

After the end of the Cold War and over half a century since the dropping of the first atomic bomb over Japan, the world is entering a new, potentially more dangerous era. The immediate threat of mutual nuclear annihilation may now be behind us, but before us is a brave new world whose troubling nuclear dimensions are only now beginning to be realized.

The material is weapons-usable plutonium, created in civilian reactors that generate electricity for cities rather than in military reactors that produce material for bombs. The problem is that although the intended use of these two types of reactors is different, the byproduct is the same -- plutonium -- an essential ingredient of nuclear weapons. Civilian power reactors are typically much larger than their counterpart military production reactors -- and therefore produce many times more plutonium. The year 2000 will mark the point in human history when more atomic bomb materials begin circulating in civilian commerce than exists in nuclear weapons.

A Harvard study released in March, 1996 warns of "nuclear anarchy" in the immediate future. The irony overshadowing it all: the end of the Cold War removed the looming threat of mutual destruction, yet has ushered in a new and equally frightening one through nuclear terrorism. The end of more than four decades of armed confrontation, of the ceaseless production of ever more advanced weapons that went unused, has now left the former Soviet Union in utter shambles. The dangers of proliferation are threefold. Firstly, basic weapons -- tanks, planes, ships of all kind, submarines, missiles, rocket launchers, artillery, whole bases by the many thousands -- produced by the best and most brilliant scientists are now viewed as surplus. Secondly are the vast quantities of nuclear weapons, the reactors that produce the plutonium that goes with them, and the large quantities of the raw plutonium itself, that are kept in storage. And finally, the presence of thousands of nuclear scientists and technicians who designed built and serviced these materials and equipment. All are now either unusable or superfluous in the former Soviet Union.

The first shock to the Western world occurred in July, 1994, when German authorities expressed concern over their first discovery in the black market of weapons-grade plutonium from Russia. The substance, a powder in a red mercury solution that turned out to be plutonium 239, the material in the heart of the bomb that destroyed Nagasaki in 1945, was seized in Tengen-Weichs.¹  The plutonium was part of a growing pile of bomb-grade materials made available when the United States and Russia complied with their mutual arms-reduction treaties. Bernd Schmidbauer, the minister responsible for Germany's intelligence service, warned that nuclear smuggling had reached a dramatic turn in that Mafia-like organizations were becoming involved. Knowing that the West is entering a new era of nuclear terrorism from the former Soviet Union he warned on German television: "We have reached a spectacular new dimension... Perhaps the most dramatic thing about it is that this material came from Russia's nuclear weapons industry." ²

After the Cold War, the nuclear superpowers dismantled some 30,000 warheads, thereby reducing the danger of a nuclear holocaust but, ironically, greatly increasing the opportunities for nuclear theft and, eventually, nuclear terrorism around the world. Even though the Russians have vowed that their nuclear safeguards are among the safest in the world, Western experts doubt very much that this is true. Nuclear analysts around the world are well aware that Russian morale has plummeted and working conditions have seriously deteriorated for the 100,000 people once employed in their nuclear-weapons complex. This presents the prospect that some would prefer to profit from it in order to improve their living conditions. With the potential black-market price of a bomb-size amount of plutonium in the region of hundreds of millions of dollars, it would not be surprising to find that some discontented and unpaid plant workers willing to steal some of this material.

As a result, nuclear contraband is moving down the same pipeline as used by Afghans to move guns, heroin and looted Buddha artifacts. As of July, 1994, Germany has registered 241 cases of attempted nuclear smuggling. What was revealing was that examination of the 6 grams of plutonium 239 discovered in Tengen-Weichs showed that it could be traced back to one of Russia's three big nuclear installations. Nuclear experts consulted by Stuttgart public prosecutors were reported as saying that they suspect as much as 148 kg of weapons-grade plutonium is on the black market in Europe -- enough to make around 10 nuclear bombs.

Further investigations indicate that enriched uranium and other substances for making nuclear weapons are being smuggled out of the defunct Soviet Union and are for sale in clandestine arms bazaars outside of the former empire. One of these bazaars is in Peshawar, a Pakistani city next to the Khyber Pass, where nuclear material and the much sort after plutonium are actively traded.³ Strategic nuclear equipment, looted from high-security sites and military installations in the former Soviet Union, is being shipped down the smugglers' route to Peshawar through Turkmenistan and across Afghanistan's Hindu Kush mountains. Nuclear salesmen are offering to sell such dangerous wares as enriched uranium, super-powerful magnets, catalysts and alloys for making the shells of thermo-nuclear weapons. Traders said there are Iranian colonels and majors, among other traders, walking around with Assonate suitcases full of hundred dollar bills, who are shopping for this kind of material. The possibility of terrorists acquiring some nuclear weapons in Peshawar is real. Islamic extremists from many countries converged on Peshawar as early as 1979 to plan their jihad or holy war, first against the former Soviet Union and now their enemies abroad -- including the United States.

The alarms are ringing the loudest over Russia where there are tens of thousands of atomic weapons left over from the Cold War -- not to mention more than a thousand tons of highly enriched uranium and plutonium. "As you look at all of the possibilities out there now, I would conclude there's more chance that one or two or three weapons could be used perhaps with unconventional delivery systems that would kill literally tens of thousands of people," said US Senator Sam Nunn, the leading expert on the military in the American Senate Armed Services committee. The prospect of tactical nuclear weapons, or "loose nukes," as the phenomenon is called is the most sensational part of any discussion of the former Soviet Union. As many as 22,000 tactical weapons -- nuclear artillery shells and short-range rocket warheads -- are held in storage, most of which are not subject to international verification systems. These may be of far greater threat to Western security than any of the city-busting behemoths on Russia's ICBMs. While in Russia, a Greenpeace activist, Josh Handle, described a gentleman in the taxi who said: "I know somebody in a nearby base, why don't you come and take a look at one of the major military pieces of hardware in the base?" So the activist and his companions casually crawled under a fence, over a fence, under a fence, and there they were -- easily in one of Russia's nuclear storage areas.

Many of these nuclear materials were subsequently smuggled out of the former Soviet Union. One Western diplomat in the Pakistan capital, Islamabad, said: "Many of these things being hawked around are radioactive. Not only is this dangerous to the individuals who are moving it around, but there's also the potential for a terrorist group buying up bits and pieces."

One Western art expert, expecting to see plundered antiquities from Afghanistan was instead shown a 1,200-kilogram stash of enriched uranium, enough for 100 nuclear bombs, hidden in a densely populated area of Peshawar. Led inside a well guarded house, he watched as the floorboards were lifted and metal boxes revealed. Packed inside each box were five-kilogram cylinders of uranium that he said looked like "medicine jars." He said: "I got the impression that these smugglers didn't know how to handle the stuff at all."⁴ A super-hard alloy known as moraging steel, used in making atomic submarine hulls and nuclear bomb casings, was also being peddled in Peshawar by a Russian engineer. The Russian claimed it had been brought down via Turkmenistan into northern Afghanistan along the old smuggling routes and carried across the pass of Parachinar into Pakistan's tribal territories.

Further up the smuggler's route, in the northern Afghanistan town of Mazar-e-Sharif, enriched uranium was also offered to a foreigner working for an aid agency. Even the  Pakistan Interior Minister, General Naseerullah Babar, admitted that his government has been approached by smugglers with a nuclear shopping list.

The Russian abandonment of her six former Islamic republics has left a vast volatile region filled with people who now own some of the most sophisticated and deadliest weapons in the world. So far, Russia's atomic smugglers have been lone insiders, scientists and servicemen -- disaffected and underpaid. But this "disorganized" crime could easily turn to more lethal Russian Mafia types offering terrorists and profiteers a virtual nuclear supermarket. Within Russia, at a plutonium warehouse, windows were broken and boarded up. At a nuclear submarine base, one of the Russian navy's main storage areas for atomic fuel, anti-nuclear activists were able to take pictures from close range. "Russia itself is in many areas unstable, and the systems and materials aren't being protected anything like what we would like," Senator Nunn said.

U.S. investigators charged that Russian scientists are also for sale. A spokesman for a Hong Kong weapons company that posted brazen help-wanted advertisements in Russia said: "We have detailed files of hundreds of former Soviet Union experts in the field of rocket, missile and nuclear weapons...These weapon experts are willing to work in a country which needs their skills and can offer reasonable pay." It is estimated that two thousand Russian nuclear scientists, who were disenchanted with the disintegration of the former Soviet Union, are now working for the Chinese, while a Russian consortium of nuclear companies was formed in 1990 to sell nuclear weapons to third world countries "for ecological purposes."

As more "outlaw" nations gain nuclear capacity in a more fractured and dangerous world, the risk increases dramatically that forces "beyond state control" are getting their hands on nuclear weapons. Many among fanatic Muslims believe that to die for a cause is to gain an immediate passage to paradise. They are an increasingly younger generation who have the education and sophistication to construct weapons their fathers would never have dreamed of.

The United States has long been a major terrorist target, but most of the assaults on Americans and their organizations have taken place overseas. Terrorist attacks inside the United States have been extremely rare, but it is changing. As the only remaining superpower, the United States already is the Great Satan to Islamic fundamentalists, the protector of Israel, supporter of the perceived infidel President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, and the prime enemy of theocratic Iran and Islam. The chief Iranian Islamic leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, called for a holy war against the West, saying -- "The struggle against American aggression, greed, plans and policies will counted as a jihad, and anybody who is killed on that path is a martyr."⁵

The spread of mass weapons, nuclear, chemical and biological -- and the means to deliver them -- is now out of control and is the single greatest threat facing the civilized world. In an investigative book entitled Critical Mass, writers William Burrows and Robert Windrem propound the theory that third-world nations are using unconventional means to acquire nuclear capacity.

During the 1980s, the Soviet presence in Afghanistan propelled Pakistan into a nuclear weapons program that paved the way for the country to procure seven atomic bombs as early as 1994.⁶ Two Muslim nations -- Pakistan and Kazakhstan -- possess nuclear weapons.

Iran has been shopping for a ready-made nuclear bomb while, during the height of the Cold War, the United States and the former Soviet Union, as well as France and the United Kingdom, sold advanced weapons, technology and information to their puppets and proxies while showing by example that nuclear weapons seem to guarantee sovereignty, power and a healthy economy.

The successor to Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini, Ali Akhbar Rafsanjani, has good reason to believe that Iran is the leader of Islam by virtue of the nation's size, location, history and the purity of its religion. As early as 1991, Iran's Deputy President, Ataollah Mohajerani, called for an Islamic bomb: "Because Israel has nuclear facilities, the Muslim states, too, should be equipped with the same capacity. I am not talking about one Muslim country, but, rather, the entirety of Muslim states."⁷

While Libyan Colonel Qaddafi has a long standing offer to purchase a nuclear weapon, he, too, has been expanding his chemical weapons arsenal. Chemical weapons were considered a "poor man's atomic bomb" -- a substitute for a real atomic bomb. But Qaddafi recognizes that to stand up to the West, he knows that he will need a bomb that has a deterrent force capable of hitting the United States. Recalling the U.S. air strikes on Tripoli and Benghazi in April, 1986, Qaddafi told his citizens that only superweapons, or rather an Islamic bomb and Arab hegemony could hold the United States at bay. "Because if we had possessed a deterrent -- missiles that could reach New York -- we would have hit it with missiles and even nuclear weapons. The world has a nuclear bomb, we should have a nuclear bomb."⁸

Since 1982, Iranian backed Hezbollah, the radical Islamic fundamentalist group, has been seeking the destruction of Israel and the elimination of the entire American continent, if possible. Dedicated to a jihad, suicide bombers are only too pleased to fulfill their sacred mission to turn Israel into a "fiery hell" and are threatening suicide terrorist attacks around the world. In October 1983, the Hezbollah conducted a suicide truck bombing of the United States embassy and marine barracks in Beirut. In September 1984, they hijacked the TWA flight 847, and in March 1992, it was alleged, they car bombed Israel's embassy in Buenos Aires -- killing 29 people. Not content with that, they struck a Jewish community center in Argentina which killed a further 69 civilians.

In March 1996, Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, in an unprecedented admission, told the London-based Arabic publication Al-Wasat: "We didn't hide Iranian support. There is no need to deny that we receive support from Iran. Syria supported us and facilitated arms supplies, a political core, moral support and field facilities since 1982." He went on to claim that Hezbollah would start attacking Jews and Israelis outside Israel." According to the United States and Israeli governments, Iran funds Hezbollah operations to the tune of $70 million a year and trains young recruits at Iranian military installations.

But terrorism is not limited to any one known group. Nor is it restricted to groups of familiar names dedicated to the path of fire and brimstone. Since the early 1990s, freelance terrorists have taken up residence inside the Great Satan -- the United States. Hence, in the United States, there are an unknown number of shadowy groups lurking in the land with agendas of hate and destruction and a newfound taste for exotic weapons.

On February 26, 1993, a bomb detonated beneath New York's World Trade Center, shattering the notion that terrorism was only limited to the Middle East or Europe. The attack was only a wakeup call, alerting Americans that deadly violence is no longer an abstraction on the evening news. Arrested on February 7, 1995, was a man named Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, who arrived in New York on September 1, 1992 on an Iraqi passport. Teamed up with other Islamic fundamentalists, they followed the teachings of Sheik Rahman, who was alleged to have issued a fatwa, a sanctioned order, to assassinate Egypt's Hosni Mubarak.

Apart from plotting to kill the Egyptian President, Time magazine reported that they planned to bomb the U.N. headquarters, U.S. military armories, a bridge and two tunnels linking Manhattan to New Jersey. Ever determined, Yousef kept his plans focused on the Twin Towers. On the designated date, Yousef and his companion placed their bomb in a van and drove it to the basement of the World Trade Center. The eventual explosion killed six and injured more than 1,000 people. Terrorism had finally arrived in America -- and the World Trade Center was only the beginning. Of course, the appeal of nuclear weapons to terrorists is obvious: if destabilizing society or drawing attention to one's cause is the goal, a mushroom cloud outranks truck bombs. Indeed, the Yousef's of the future will have more -- not fewer -- options and opportunities at hand.

Though the United States does not reprocess spent fuel of power reactors at home, because of both economic and non-proliferation reasons its government has not been prepared to enforce U.S. non-proliferation laws to restrain its European and Japanese allies' plutonium programs. Seventy-five per cent of the plutonium being extracted today in Europe and Japan came from U.S.-supplied nuclear fuel. Instead of making sure that U.S. exports of nuclear fuel do not end up as weapons-useable plutonium in world commerce, the political interests of the United States gives clear precedence to it allies over and above its obvious security interests. As a result U.S. origin plutonium is now beginning to enter world commerce in frightening amounts.

Ever since plutonium, a man-made element, was first produced in gram quantities during World War II, more than 1,200 metric tons of it have been produced in reactors. Of this amount, about 260 tons have been produced for weapons; all the rest, nearly three times as much, has been produced in civilian nuclear power reactors. With the end of the superpowers' nuclear arms race, the amount of military plutonium is expected to stay essentially constant and then decline as plutonium from retired warheads is disposed of. But the amount of civilian plutonium produced in power reactors will grow very rapidly from about 650 tons in 1990 to 2,100 tons in the year 2010 -- more than eight times the amount of weapons plutonium. Considering the fact that less than 8 kilograms (about 18 pounds) of plutonium is enough for one Nagasaki-type bomb, the proliferation risk of all this potential weapons material is enormous.

Beyond the proliferation and terrorism risks of plutonium, there are also the safety and environmental hazards of transporting plutonium and the waste by-products of reprocessing. Plutonium is extraordinarily toxic. Microgram quantities imbedded in the lungs after inhalation or in bone after ingestion can cause cancer. In 1987, Japan had to cancel plans to transport its plutonium by air from Europe after failing to develop a crash-worthy shipping container. In 1992, some 40 nations protested Japan's first large-scale shipment of plutonium by sea after it became known that international standards for the shipping container were below the fire, collision and deep-immersion conditions experienced in severe accidents.

The potential for the proliferation of plutonium around the world is enormous. Borders are porous. Deadly weapons and enriched uranium could reach any shore via the same route that hard drugs take. Drugs from Afghanistan and surrounding areas have reached Europe and the United States via air or sea routes. Drugs from the Golden Triangle (Burma, Thailand and Laos), for example, have been transported to the United States through Thai or Cambodian airports by couriers or stuffed inside goods and transported by air or sea. Other methods of transport include concealment in containers, car parts, picture frames or gift parcels -- the options are endless. Some could be concealed on cargo ships, thrown over-board near the American coast and retrieved by small boats.

Drugs from South America reach the United States by ship and are smuggled ashore in small boats. Also, some are smuggled in by yachts and small aircraft.10 Evidence of hard drugs in the streets of the US suggests that deadly weapons, too, could just as easily reach American shores in the same way that drugs do. US intelligence officials admit that a terrorist would have no more difficulty slipping a nuclear device into the US than a drug trafficker has bringing in bulk loads of cocaine.11 Since 1992, there have been a string of nuclear smuggling seizures by the West -- including the following:

• November 3, 1992  Flensburg  Plutonium  80kg

• November 26, 1992  Germany  Uranium  307kg

• January 19, 1993  Franco-Swiss border  Cesium 133  4kg

• March 7, 1993  Gydnia  Uranium 238  6kg

• April 1, 1993  Kalingrad  Cesium 137  no amount given

• April 30, 1993  Braniewo  Cesium 137  25kg

• October 6, 1993  Istanbul  Enriched Uranium  2.5kg

• November 27, 1993  Bursa  Uranium  4.5kg

• May, 1994  Lake Constance  Plutonium 239  6kg

• July 22, 1994  Location unspecified  Uranium  10kg

• August, 1994  Landstuhl  Enriched uranium 235  0.8kg

• August 10, 1994  Munich  Plutonium 239  100-300g
  
  Source: Sydney Morning Herald12

Until now, the spectacle of the US government being blackmailed by nuclear terrorists has been the fascination of books and movies. A team of former U.S. weapons designers have found that even terrorists would be capable of making an effective, first-generation nuclear weapon if they could obtain enough reactor-grade plutonium or highly enriched uranium. Nuclear proliferation and the closely connected threat of nuclear terrorism will become a principal danger of our time.

Finding a nuclear bomb in a city is "like looking for a needle in a haystack," one nuclear scientist admits. New York City has been identified by many experts as an appealing site for a terrorist attack. Firstly, it is the most centralized, densely populated metropolis in America and has an extremely vulnerable infrastructure.13 An atomic bomb, or even major radiation from radioactive materials in the city, would produce the most desired and effective outcome which terrorists seek. Secondly, it is the headquarters for many of the world's financial and banking institutions on which the world's commerce is based.

Among these headquarters is the much detested United Nations, which was responsible for the creation of the State of Israel in 1948; and in January 1991, the quickly assembled U.N. Force defeated Iraq -- an Arabic state. U.N. Secretary-General Boutros-Boutros-Ghali, an Egyptian regarded as a traitor by Islamic fundamentalists because he helped negotiate peace with Israel, is also a major target. Thirdly, New York has a major concentration of Jews in the city, on whose political and financial support the State of Israel depended greatly during the 48 years of its existence. Without that support, Israel would be left on her own to face Islamic forces that could possibly destroy this last barrier against the forward march of Islam.

"The destruction of any city in the world by nuclear terrorists would threaten all cities and nations," one nuclear scientist said. Though New York is an attractive target, other cities could well be on the list: Los Angeles, Chicago, New Orleans, Washington DC, London, Paris, Tel Aviv, Sydney. Of these Washington DC would be more vulnerable than others. Besides Congress and the White House being located there, the city and its nearby district is also the heart of all American overseas operations which include the FBI, the CIA and the Pentagon. Perhaps a statement by Louis Farrakhan, the US leader of the Nation of Islam, would give us a better understanding of the potential danger. Speaking in Teheran, he said: "You can quote me: God will destroy America at the hands of Muslims."

Fear of nuclear weapons falling into the hands of mad generals, warlords, terrorists and nations with fanatical foreign policies is now being realized among more and more people. Only after a big flash has occurred will the world come to realize that there have been various forms of "Manhattan Projects" in the netherworld of our time.

1  James O. Jackson, "Nightmare in a Vial of Dust," Time (Australia), August 1, 1994, page 36.
2  Anna Tomforde, "For Sale: Russia's Deadliest Plutonium," Sydney Morning Herald, July 19, 1994.
3  Tim McGirk, "Terror for Sale at the Nuclear Bazaar," Sydney Morning Herald, March 26, 1996.
4  Tim McGirk, "Terror for Sale at the Nuclear Bazaar," Sydney Morning Herald, March 26, 1996.
5  Samuel P. Huntington, "The Clash of Civilizations?" Foreign Affairs, Summer 1993, page 23.
6  William E. Burrows and Robert Windren, Critcal Mass: The Dangerous Race for Superweapons in a Fragmenting World, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994, page 66.
7  William E. Burrows and Robert Windren, Critical Mass: The Dangerous Race for Superweapons in a Fragmenting World, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994, page 342.
8  William E. Burrows and Robert Windren, Critical Mass: The Dangerous Race for Superweapons in a Fragmenting World, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994, page 325.
 

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