The lack of suitcase nukes

AP/NY Times:

Members of Congress have warned about the dangers of suitcase nuclear weapons. Hollywood has made television shows and movies about them. Even the Federal Emergency Management Agency has alerted Americans to a threat -- information the White House includes on its Web site.

But government experts and intelligence officials say such a threat gets vastly more attention than it deserves. These officials said a true suitcase nuke would be highly complex to produce, require significant upkeep and cost a small fortune.

Counterproliferation authorities do not completely rule out the possibility that these portable devices once existed. But they do not think the threat remains.

''The suitcase nuke is an exciting topic that really lends itself to movies,'' said Vahid Majidi, the assistant director of the FBI's Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate. ''No one has been able to truly identify the existence of these devices.''

Majidi and other government officials say the real threat is from a terrorist who does not care about the size of his nuclear detonation and is willing to improvise, using a less deadly and sophisticated device assembled from stolen or black-market nuclear material.

Yet Hollywood has seized on the threat. For example, the Fox thriller ''24'' devoted its entire last season to Jack Bauer's hunt for suitcase nukes in Los Angeles.

Government officials have played up the threat, too.

Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., once said at a hearing that he thought the least likely threat was from an intercontinental ballistic missile. ''Perhaps the most likely threat is from a suitcase nuclear weapon in a rusty car on a dock in New York City,'' he said.

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What gave the story some traction is al Qaeda's use of human bombs as a weapons delivery system. But, that is also some evidence that they do not have any. If they had, they would have used them by now. The London bombings used home made explosives carried in back packs. That is pretty much where al Qaeda is right now. Al Qaeda's position is growing weaker every day as it loses in Iraq and Afghanistan. I don't expect the situation in Pakistan to swing in their direction either. As their situation grows more desperate it will become more clear they do not have the weapon.