The following is an archived copy of a message sent to a Discussion List run by the Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq.
Views expressed in this archived message are those of the author, not of the Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq.
[Main archive index/search] [List information] [Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq Homepage]
[ Converted text/html to text/plain ] You have been sent this message from Bert Gedin (gedinbert@hotmail.com) as a courtesy of WorldNetDaily.com (http://www.worldnetdaily.com[1]). Dear Felicity & All, This doesn't, directly, answer 'Looking for a quote'. But maybe a few clues? Greetings, Bert. To view the entire article, visit http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=26770[2] Saturday, March 9, 2002 ------------------------------------------------------------------ Searching for loose nukes By Gordon Prather ------------------------------------------------------------------ Posted: March 9, 2002 1:00 a.m. Eastern According to this week's Time magazine, "a mercurial agent code-named dragonfire" told his handlers last October that terrorists had somehow acquired a low-yield (10 kiloton) Russian nuke. Furthermore, "dragonfire" claimed that the terrorists planned to smuggle it into New York City and detonate it. Hillary Clinton has just found out about it, and she's furious. So she sat down and wrote President Bush: "Former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, officials from the New York Police Department and senior members of the FBI reportedly were not notified about the intelligence, even though the effects of such an explosion would be catastrophic for the entire New York metropolitan region." Sen. Clinton demanded to know, "Who made the decision not to inform any New York authorities about the report of a possible nuclear strike on New York City? On what basis was that decision made?" Well, the real question is why anyone in the White House bothered to take any action at all about such a specific, easily refuted claim. When the Russians were contacted and asked if one of their nukes had gone missing, their Gen. Igor Valynkin reportedly replied that anyone claiming that the Russian Defense Ministry had lost an intact warhead is "barking mad." In Russia, as in the United States, there is a civilian-military division of responsibility for nukes. Minatom – the Russian equivalent of our Department of Energy – designs, tests and produces nukes for the Russian Defense Ministry. The claim that the Russian Defense Ministry doesn't know whether or not one of their nukes is missing is akin to the Pentagon not knowing whether one of our nukes is missing. But the folks inside the Beltway that don't want the end of the Cold War to impede their march on Moscow would never take a Russian's word "at face value." They pointed to the 1997 testimony of former Soviet Gen. Alexander Lebed before the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Military R Lebed claimed that in the early 1990s – when he was security adviser to President Yeltsin – he had been asked to locate 132 Soviet small nuclear demolition weapons, each having a yield of 1 to 10 kilotons. Lebed testified that he was only able to locate 48 of those nukes. According to Lebed, the Russian "footlocker-size" demolition nukes were similar to ours. Lebed speculated that some of those "missing" nukes might have been "up for sale to rogue nations or terrorists." He said it was even conceivable that some of these "missing" demolition nukes might have been "pre-positioned" by the Soviets in secret underground "caches" in Europe and in the United States, for use by Soviet saboteurs in the event the Cold War got hot. Now there's a Russian whose words the folks inside the Beltway can take at face value. Alarmed, Committee Chairman Weldon immediately went to Russia, himself, to check out Lebed's story. Weldon was assured by Russian Defense Minister Sergeyev that no Soviet nukes were missing. Furthermore, Sergeyev pledged that by the year 2000, all Soviet demolition nukes – which were similar to ours, it turns out – would be dismantled, as ours already had been. Now comes mercurial agent "dragonfire" with his claim that the terrorists have got a Russian demolition nuke. What to do? Well, in order to cover the National Security Council's donkey, the Energy Department's Nuclear Emergency Search Team was directed to go to New York and start looking for a loose Russian nuke. How could NEST be expected to find such a needle in Manhattan? Well, in this case, the needle would be slightly – but characteristically – radioactive. The NEST method of detection varies, depending upon what they are looking for. For nukes, how they search is closely held information. But, to give you an idea, in order to be as small as a footlocker, the alleged Russian loose nuke would have to be sophisticated. It would contain several kilograms of plutonium. Although almost pure isotope Pu-239, there would be a percent or so of isotope Pu-241, which decays to americium, which emits a characteristic gamma-ray, which NEST could perhaps detect if it got close enough. NEST searched and searched but didn't find a Russian loose nuke in Manhattan. The FBI is ordinarily in charge of such domestic NEST operations, but since this appears to have basically been a cover-your-donkey search, the FBI was not even notified. And of course, no one notified Sen. Clinton. That's really why she's furious. No one kept such things from her when she was president. © 2002 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Physicist James Gordon Prather has served as a policy implementing official for national security-related technical matters in the Federal Energy Agency, the Energy Research and Development Administration, the Department of Energy, the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Department of the Army. Dr. Prather also served as legislative assistant for national security affairs to U.S. Sen. Henry Bellmon, R-Okla. -- ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee and member of the Senate Energy Committee and Appropriations Committee. Dr. Prather had earlier worked as a nuclear weapons physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and Sandia National Laboratory in New Mexico. ------------------------------------------------------------------ ===References:=== 1. http://www.worldnetdaily.com 2. http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=26770 _______________________________________________ Sent via the discussion list of the Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq. To unsubscribe, visit http://lists.casi.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/casi-discuss To contact the list manager, email casi-discuss-admin@lists.casi.org.uk All postings are archived on CASI's website: http://www.casi.org.uk