Word: plutonium
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...donation of $50 billion for Third World projects and the release of all black and Hispanic prisoners. It sounds like the stuff of spy thrillers. But, warns Theodore Taylor, a former Princeton University physicist who once designed compact nuclear weapons and now is a Washington consultant, the acquisition of plutonium bombs small enough to be smuggled into the U.S. is "a real threat...
...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 the two together with explosives. This triggers the chain reaction that results in a nuclear explosion. However, achieving this involves advanced skills, expensive hardware and sophisticated electronic devices. Also, recovering plutonium from spent reactor fuel is costly...
...neither money nor technical difficulty would necessarily discourage an erratic regime such as Libya's 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...
...Washington's most persistent fears is that a determined terrorist group might succeed in stealing plutonium and bomb components. A congressional subcommittee on energy disclosed in 1982 that the guard force at one of the country's weapons plants failed to respond to a mock raid on a plutonium vault until 16 minutes after the "attackers" had left...
FOOTNOTE: *Uranium 235 (U-235) and plutonium 239 (Pu-239) are the radioactive elements used in atom bombs. Uranium enrichment is the process by which the concentration of U-235 in natural uranium is increased, eventually to weapons-grade material. From 33 to 55 lbs. of U-235 at roughly 93% purity can be used in a Hiroshima-size bomb. Reprocessing is the chemical procedure for extracting Pu-239 from the spent uranium fuel of nuclear reactors, where the plutonium is produced as a waste product. A breeder reactor uses plutonium as fuel rather than uranium: by atomic fission, additional...