Word: bomb
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...almost 16 years, the country's strongman, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, has been supporting international terrorism and devising schemes to worry the West. Were a nuclear weapon or two to fall into his hands, his capacity for troublemaking would increase intolerably. In 1981 Gaddafi told TIME that the atom bomb was "a means of terrorizing humanity, and we are against the manufacture and acquisition of nuclear weapons." A few days later he reportedly told his top advisers that he planned to channel a substantial amount of Libya's financial resources into obtaining a nuclear weapon...
Though Libya is nowhere near achieving that goal, it has not been for lack of trying. Even before he signed the nonproliferation treaty in 1975, Gaddafi began hatching proposals. In 1970 he sent a top aide, Abdul Salam Jalloud, to Peking in an attempt to buy an atom bomb. China turned him down. Beginning in 1973 the colonel helped bankroll part of Pakistan's bombmaking effort, and even before he was rebuffed several years later by President Mohammed Zia ul- Haq, he had started to make overtures to Pakistan's archenemy, India. When New Delhi restricted the extent of nuclear...
Indeed, according to many experts in the field, a well-financed group could build one that could fit into a pickup truck or a station wagon. In fact, the U.S. military has developed a 58-lb. bomb powerful enough to blow up the Golden Gate Bridge. Part of the problem is that the principles of bomb building are well known. In fact, the basic elements of the technology can be found in reference works like the Encyclopedia Americana. The trick is to place two slugs of plutonium close together in a container similar to a gun barrel, then smash...
...from pouring large amounts into building a small nuclear device. Taylor says that if such a regime could get its hands on enough plutonium, it would require only a few thousand dollars to build a device with a yield of ten kilotons, three kilotons less than that of the bomb that leveled Hiroshima, that could fit into a medium-size car. "I'd give them a pretty good chance, say, one in three, of building one that would work the first time," he says...
However, a terrorist bomb would still be so large that it would probably have to be assembled in the U.S. Making a bomb that could fit into a suitcase, says Taylor, would probably be beyond the capabilities of military designers outside the U.S. and the Soviet Union. The smallest nuclear device developed by the U.S. (SADM). Deployed since 1964, it can be carried by one man and is designed to destroy dams, bridges and similar installations. According to William Arkin, a defense specialist with the Institute for Policy Studies, a private Washington-based research organization, the U.S. has about...