the crisis, the United States was on DEFCON 2, the last state of alert before out-and-out war. Extra bombers took to the skies. In a situation that must have seemed like a living nightmare, the military command prepared to send out the messages that would precipitate nuclear Armageddon. In the end, on October 28, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev took a step back from disaster and announced that the missiles would be withdrawn. (The next year, the United States removed some missiles from Turkey that were equally close to the Soviet Union, though this was far less publicized.)
Although nothing came as close as this again, it is sobering to note that the Soviets also set up a doomsday system in the 1970s, designed to cope with the event of an overwhelming attack on the USSR. The idea, much like the hypothetical cobalt bomb doomsday device, was that if the Soviet Union were attacked, retaliation would be so swift and complete that there would be nothing left to fight over. This retaliation would happen even if the conventional Soviet command and control structure was wiped out.
This Perimetr system used a network of computers to assess the situation during a nuclear attack. Should communication with the Kremlin be lost, the system was capable of autonomously issuing the orders to retaliate massively. There was no requirement for human intervention, beyond a confirmation from a relatively junior level. Frighteningly, as far as we are aware, this system, dependent as it is on ancient 1970s computer technology, is still live, still capable of delivering a fatal counterblow to wipe out the Western world.
Despite the end of the cold war, nuclear warfare remains a danger, particularly in tense regions like the India/Pakistan border, and with concerns about development of nuclear weapons in countries like Iran and North Korea, we now also face a more subtle nuclear threat: nuclear terrorism.
The idea that terrorists could bring about nuclear destruction is a horrifying one. There is little doubt that those responsible for the devastation of September 11 would go ahead with a nuclear attack if they were capable of doing so. There seem to be three possibilities for this: building a true nuclear bomb from scratch, obtaining an existing nuclear bomb on the black market, or producing a so-called dirty bomb.
The first requirement to build your own bomb is to get hold of the materials. Occasionally you will see a scare in the press that this might be achieved by the unlikely mechanism of rounding up smoke detectors from stores across the country. Most smoke detectors contain a source of the element americium. Element 95 in the periodic table, americium sits in the detector, beaming out radiation as it slowly transforms to neptunium with a half-life of 432 years. The alpha particles radiating from the americium source (it’s a better alpha source than radium) pass through a small compartment where they ionize the air, allowing a tiny electrical current to cross the chamber. If smoke particles get in the chamber, they absorb the alpha particles before they can create ions, stopping the current flowing and setting off the alarm.
It’s certainly true that americium can be used to produce a nuclear weapon. Assemble enough of that americium 241 and it will go critical. But before any terrorist groups try to corner the market in smoke detectors it’s worth pointing out that it would take around 180 billion of them to have sufficient americium 241 assembled to produce a nuclear device. And even then it wouldn’t be enough to put the detectors together in the same place; you would have to painstakingly extract each of those 180 billion specks of the element and mold them together, an effort that would take thousands of years.
At first sight, a terrorist group building a nuclear weapon from scratch seems fairly unlikely even with more conventional radioactive materials. The resources required to build a nuclear weapon have traditionally been
Although nothing came as close as this again, it is sobering to note that the Soviets also set up a doomsday system in the 1970s, designed to cope with the event of an overwhelming attack on the USSR. The idea, much like the hypothetical cobalt bomb doomsday device, was that if the Soviet Union were attacked, retaliation would be so swift and complete that there would be nothing left to fight over. This retaliation would happen even if the conventional Soviet command and control structure was wiped out.
This Perimetr system used a network of computers to assess the situation during a nuclear attack. Should communication with the Kremlin be lost, the system was capable of autonomously issuing the orders to retaliate massively. There was no requirement for human intervention, beyond a confirmation from a relatively junior level. Frighteningly, as far as we are aware, this system, dependent as it is on ancient 1970s computer technology, is still live, still capable of delivering a fatal counterblow to wipe out the Western world.
Despite the end of the cold war, nuclear warfare remains a danger, particularly in tense regions like the India/Pakistan border, and with concerns about development of nuclear weapons in countries like Iran and North Korea, we now also face a more subtle nuclear threat: nuclear terrorism.
The idea that terrorists could bring about nuclear destruction is a horrifying one. There is little doubt that those responsible for the devastation of September 11 would go ahead with a nuclear attack if they were capable of doing so. There seem to be three possibilities for this: building a true nuclear bomb from scratch, obtaining an existing nuclear bomb on the black market, or producing a so-called dirty bomb.
The first requirement to build your own bomb is to get hold of the materials. Occasionally you will see a scare in the press that this might be achieved by the unlikely mechanism of rounding up smoke detectors from stores across the country. Most smoke detectors contain a source of the element americium. Element 95 in the periodic table, americium sits in the detector, beaming out radiation as it slowly transforms to neptunium with a half-life of 432 years. The alpha particles radiating from the americium source (it’s a better alpha source than radium) pass through a small compartment where they ionize the air, allowing a tiny electrical current to cross the chamber. If smoke particles get in the chamber, they absorb the alpha particles before they can create ions, stopping the current flowing and setting off the alarm.
It’s certainly true that americium can be used to produce a nuclear weapon. Assemble enough of that americium 241 and it will go critical. But before any terrorist groups try to corner the market in smoke detectors it’s worth pointing out that it would take around 180 billion of them to have sufficient americium 241 assembled to produce a nuclear device. And even then it wouldn’t be enough to put the detectors together in the same place; you would have to painstakingly extract each of those 180 billion specks of the element and mold them together, an effort that would take thousands of years.
At first sight, a terrorist group building a nuclear weapon from scratch seems fairly unlikely even with more conventional radioactive materials. The resources required to build a nuclear weapon have traditionally been
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