OpinionJournal - Baggage Claim: The Myth of Suitcase Nukes

That's right, sportsfans: nuclear devices that can fit inside a suitcase are indeed a myth--a tall tale for scaring little children.

Richard Miniter is my kind of journalist--a guy willing to pound the pavement, track people down, and ask them straight-out, "Did you really say such-a-thing to such-a-one?"--and likely get answers of "No" and "Who?" These are the techniques he brought to bear in his investigation of the claim that as many as a hundred suitcase-sized special nuclear devices were now missing, and that any one of them could still detonate and make a big flash, fire, and blast--not to mention radiation and fallout. He demonstrates conclusively that the situation was never as certain people--including the usual suspect, CBS' 60 Minutes--luridly described it, and in fact the situation is far less dire today than it originally was.

The bottom-line reasons are as follows:

1. The smallest such device that anyone has ever seen is at least the size of three steamer trunks and requires a good-sized squad to detonate it. That's because the required super-critical mass of enriched uranium needed to build any nuclear device is about 35 pounds. Moreover, this stuff is so radioactive that it would fry your bone marrow in about a minute--and because it is so radioacative, half of it would decay to harmless, or at least non-fissile elements (and ultimately to lead) in about half a year! So consequently, you have to transport it under heavy lead shielding--and that makes it all the easier to detect and all the harder to move about. Furthermore, you have to get that device in place before half a year is out--because beyond that, the fissile materials would decay to the point where even after you set off the explosion required to compress the fissiles into a tight ball, you still don't have that critical mass required to split atoms.

   A number of years ago, Actor/Producer Dick Van Dyke dramatized a nightmare scenario for his crime comedy-drama, Diagnosis: Murder. It began with a 747 crashing into a general-aviation airfield--with everyone on board already dead. It continued with fissile material being taken from the crash-investigation site, with two men trying to escape from a makeshift laboratory in an automobile that crashed into a tree--at thirty-five miles per hour--with both men dead by the time Lieutenant Steve Sloan of the LAPD caught up with it. (Dr. Mark Sloan, of course, diagnosed radiation poisoning.) It ended with a very slender girl, who couldn't have weighed more than 110 pounds, sitting on a park bench with a suitcase-sized device at her feet! I think about that now and I have to laugh. Dick Van Dyke should have known better. Not one thing about that scenario could ever have come to pass.

2. Both the USA and the USSR did build special nuclear devices, the smallest ever built. These are the ones the size of three steamer trunks. And they are all dismantled and accounted for.
3. As Miniter makes abundantly clear, you can't simply detonate a nuclear missile by punching in a code. It has to go up to the stratosphere and come back down before it so much as arms. That's to keep some idiot from detonating it in its silo. (Sorry, Stanley Chase. Your movie Colossus: The Forbin Project is all wet, too. No way could even an out-of-control computer simply detonated a nuclear warhead in situ.)
4. Several times in the past, men have tried to steal fissile material. They've always been caught before they could transfer it. And even the combined weight of all the thefts amounts to less than a third of an ounce of fissile material--and remember, you need thirty-five pounds of the stuff.

Bottom line: the suitcase nuke is a figment of several overheated imaginations.

That said, a portable nuclear device is theoretically possible. It would fit, not in a suitcase, but in a freight container--the kind you see on 18-wheeled "Big Rigs." Fortunately, our seaports will soon get new radiation screening devices sufficient to scan every single container that gets unloaded from every ship--and that's even assuming that Al-Qaeda has any nuclear weaponists on its payroll that aren't already assisting either General Pervez Musharraf or President Bush in their respective inquiries! Impossible? No--and we might have to get the Navy involved in surveying container ships at sea. We need to get cracking on this. But we probably have a lot more time than we at first supposed.