Atomic Terror
J. D. Pendry
I started this at 6:15 AM (that’s 0615 for you old troopers), Saturday
morning, August 6, 2005. At 8:15 AM Japanese time 60 years ago, the Enola Gay a B-29 Bomber, dropped a
single bomb dubbed “Little Boy” on the city of Hiroshima. Little Boy’s
explosive power was equivalent to 13 kilotons of TNT. More than 70 thousand died in the initial
blast. Many more died afterward from
their injuries and the nuclear fallout.
For 60 years, we’ve debated the decision. It was a war that we didn’t start, but meant
to win. When you consider all of the
arguments, at least when I do it because I don’t claim to speak for you, it
comes down to whether the Japanese lives lost were more valuable than the
American lives saved. The final judgment
on that question is yet to come, but the responsibility for the made decision
lies with those who started the war and not those who ended it.
8:15 passed without
incident. Why was I concerned? Some things I’ve read recently concerning the
nuclear terror threat showed that captured documents call al-Qaeda’s plans to
use nuclear weapons against us the American
Hiroshima. This source indicates
that al-Qaeda may possess more that 40 nuclear devices in the form of suitcase
nukes, mines, artillery shells and warheads some of which were already smuggled
into the US. It even went
on to say that during the cold war years, Russian special operations soldiers
smuggled into the US and pre-positioned some of these small nukes to detonate in the event
of war. Reading this article and several
versions of the same information in other articles raised questions for me that
needed answers. Questions such as, is it
possible to have a nuclear weapon that will fit in a suitcase? Is it possible that al-Qaeda got their paws
on some of them?
Those of you who are old
enough, know that the Soviet
Union led us into
space. With that in mind, it’d be naïve
to think that they were behind us in nuclear weapons technology. In 1961, the United States fielded the W54 warhead used in the Davy Crockett. It weighed 51 pounds with a yield of .01
kilotons (equivalent to 10 tons of TNT, or two to four times as powerful as the
ammonium nitrate bomb that destroyed the Alfred P. Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City). The Special Atomic
Demolition Munition (SADM) used a variant of this warhead. The SADM unit, first deployed in 1964,
weighed less than 163 pounds with a yield of .01 to 1 KT. If we could make them that small more than 40
years ago, what’s possible now? The
first computers would not fit into your house.
Now you can drop a thousand times more computing power into your shirt
pocket. If we could do it, the Soviets
could too. Man portable, backpack or
suitcase nuclear weapons are real. This Fox News article
gives a not to technical description of likely configurations.
Could the killers who wish
to remove infidels from the face of the earth have some of these? Good question? We’ve been talking about it since the 1990’s,
and you’d think there would be more interest shown by our major media sources. Unfortunately, they’re more concerned with
the evil schemes of Karl Rove than those of bin Laden. OK, back on track. I found the text of a PBS
Frontline interview (see, I don’t always rely on conservative sources)
about the subject of missing nuclear weapons from the old Soviet Union.
He [
Soviet General Alexander Lebed ] said one of his assignments was to account for 132
suitcase size nuclear weapons that the Soviet Union had manufactured during the
sixties, the seventies and the eighties, much like we manufactured in our
country, even though today we no longer have small atomic demolition munitions,
we've destroyed them all. ... He said he
could only find 48. We were
startled. We said, "General, what
do you mean, you can only find 48?"
He said, "That's all we could locate. We don't know what the status of the other
devices were, we just could not locate them." ... – Congressman Curt Weldman, discussing his 1998 trip
to Moscow in the above cited interview.
I can’t tell you what to
conclude. I believe the weapons exist
and I’m not convinced the Russians can account for them. But, do the terrorists have them? I’m not convinced that they don’t.
"What was disconcerting about the (suspect's)
information was that he knew details of the activation of the weapons and their
construction that are not in the public domain," the U.S. expert
analyst said. -
U.S. INVESTIGATING WHETHER NUKES IN COUNTRY, By RICHARD SALE - UPI Terrorism Correspondent, December 28,
2001
Can we take a short
detour? I know my readers are smart and
analytical. Do any of you believe there
is any chance that we don’t know
where bin Laden is? Even if we were
complete knot heads, by now, we could have determined every place that he
isn’t. He’s in Pakistan most likely and we probably know exactly where. We could probably take him out along with a
passel of Pakistanis. Why don’t we? If we do that, it might cause an overthrow of
the Pakistani government leading to the Islamofascists, for sure, having
nuclear weapons. So there we are –
hostage to atomic terror.
If I lived in a Muslim
country, I’d be very concerned about the possibility of a nuclear weapon
detonation in the United States or for that matter, any free Western country. Because, I think if it happened even Ted
Kennedy would get in line to pull the retaliatory nuclear trigger – the big
nuclear trigger. Because this is a war
we didn’t start, but mean to win.
I’ll be out in the back yard
digging my bunker.
Copyright
© JD Pendry
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Pendry is author of The Three Meter Zone
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