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Preparing for nuclear threat { March 19 2004 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/19/national/19NUKE.htmlhttp://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/19/national/19NUKE.html
March 19, 2004
Addressing the Unthinkable, U.S. Revives Study of Fallout
By WILLIAM J. BROAD
To cope with the possibility that terrorists might someday detonate a nuclear bomb on American soil, the federal government is reviving a scientific art that was lost after the cold war: fallout analysis.
The goal, officials and weapons experts both inside and outside the government say, is to figure out quickly who exploded such a bomb and where the nuclear material came from. That would clarify the options for striking back. Officials also hope that if terrorists know a bomb can be traced, they will be less likely to try to use one.
In a secretive effort that began five years ago but whose outlines are just now becoming known, the government's network of weapons laboratories is hiring new experts, calling in old-timers, dusting off data and holding drills to sharpen its ability to do what is euphemistically known as nuclear attribution or post-event forensics.
It is also building robots that would go into an affected area and take radioactive samples, as well as field stations that would dilute dangerous material for safe shipment to national laboratories.
"Certainly, there's a frightening aspect in all of this," said Charles B. Richardson, the project leader for nuclear identification research at the Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque. "But we're putting all these things together with the hope that they'll never have to be used."
Most experts say the risk of a terrorist nuclear attack is low but no longer unthinkable, given the spread of material and know-how around the globe.
Dr. Jay C. Davis, a nuclear scientist who in 1999 helped found the Pentagon's part of the governmentwide effort, said the precautions would "pay huge dividends after the event, both in terms of the ability to identify the bad actor and in terms of establishing public trust."
In a nuclear crisis, Dr. Davis added, the identification effort would be vital in "dealing with the desire for instant gratification through vengeance."
Vice President Dick Cheney was briefed on the program last fall, Dr. Davis said. The National Security Council coordinates the work among a dozen or so federal agencies.
The basic science relies on faint clues — tiny bits of radioactive fallout, often invisible to the eye, that under intense scrutiny can reveal distinctive signatures. Such wisps of evidence can help identify an exploded bomb's type and characteristics, including its country of origin.
Solving the nuclear whodunit could take much more information, including hard-won law enforcement clues and good intelligence on foreign nuclear arms and terrorist groups. For that reason, several federal agencies are involved in the program, among them the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
The program addresses true nuclear weapons as well as so-called dirty bombs, ordinary explosives that spew radioactive debris.
"It's a very hard job," said William Happer, a physicist at Princeton who led a panel that evaluated the identification work.
Mr. Happer said he was worried that a rush for retribution after a nuclear attack might cut short the time needed for careful analysis. "If we lose a city," he said, "we might not wait around that long."
The effort to fingerprint domestic nuclear blasts is part of a larger federal project to strengthen the nation's overall defenses against unconventional terrorist threats. Mostly, the goal is prevention. For instance, the government recently sent teams of scientists with hidden radiation detectors to check major American cities for signs that terrorists might be preparing to detonate radiological bombs.
In contrast, the identification program seeks to increase the government's knowledge and options should prevention fail. "We're trying to resurrect some of our capability," said Reid Worlton, a retired nuclear scientist from the Los Alamos weapons laboratory in New Mexico who has been called in to aid the fallout endeavor. "It sort of died. They're not doing radiochemistry on nuclear tests anymore, so it's hard to keep these people around."
The effort draws on work that began at the dawn of the atomic era. Scientists working on the Manhattan Project built an array of devices to monitor nuclear blasts in the New Mexico desert in July 1945 and at Hiroshima and Nagasaki a month later. The experience helped scientists learn what to look for.
The first hunt zeroed in on the Soviet Union. In the late 1940's, military weather planes used paper filters to gather dust particles around the periphery of Russia, and scientists in the United States who analyzed the data at first sounded dozens of false alarms, said Jeffrey T. Richelson, an intelligence expert in Washington.
Then, on Sept. 3, 1949, a weather plane flying from Japan to Alaska picked up a slew of atomic particles. "That was the real thing," Mr. Richelson said. Twenty days later, President Harry S. Truman announced that the Soviets had exploded their first nuclear device.
The ranks of fallout investigators swelled during the cold war as foreign nations conducted hundreds of atmospheric nuclear tests. By all accounts, the sleuths made many important discoveries about the nature and design of foreign nuclear arms.
In time, the ranks dwindled as more and more nations decided to move their test explosions underground, eliminating fallout. The last nuclear blast to pummel the earth's atmosphere was in 1980, and the last known underground test, conducted by Pakistan, was in 1998.
As the terrorist threat rose in the 1990's, the government began to consider the quandary that would arise if a nuclear weapon exploded on American soil. In 1999, Dr. Davis, then head of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency at the Pentagon, began an effort to address the identification problem by financing research at the nation's weapons laboratories, many of them run by the Energy Department.
The first money came in late 2000, Dr. Davis said, and the attacks of September 2001 "made it clear that a very organized event on a large scale was credible." That perception, he said, helped the effort expand.
The secretive work won rare public praise in a June 2002 report ("Making the Nation Safer") from the National Research Council of the National Academies, the country's leading scientific advisory group. Having the ability to find out who launched a domestic nuclear strike, the report said, could deter attackers and bolster threats of retaliation. The report urged that the program go into operation "as quickly as practical" and that the government publicly declare its existence.
Since then, weapons laboratories and other federal agencies have worked hard on the problem. "They're making progress but they've got a ways to go," said Mr. Worlton, the retired Los Alamos scientist.
In a drill this year, dozens of federal experts in fallout analysis met at the Sandia laboratories in Albuquerque to study a simulated terrorist nuclear blast. Mr. Worlton said they were broken into teams and given radiological data from two old American nuclear tests, whose identities remained hidden, and were instructed to try to name them. Some teams succeeded, he said.
Mr. Richardson of Sandia said the laboratory was developing a land robot that could roll up to 10 miles to sample fallout and return it to human operators for analysis. It could also radio back some results if it became stuck. Mr. Richardson said the robots, now in development, are to be ready in a couple of years.
Experts say a new aircraft for atmospheric sampling of nuclear fallout is also in development. The Air Force currently has one, the WC-135W Constant Phoenix, for such work. It was first deployed in 1965.
Weapons experts say getting samples fast is important because some radioactive debris can decay rapidly. If captured quickly, they can shed light on a weapon's design.
One way of trying to identify a bomb's origin positively, several experts say, is to match debris signatures with libraries of classified data about nuclear arms around the world, including old fallout signatures and more direct intelligence about bomb types, characteristics and construction materials.
"If you're talking about a stolen device, you might try to do that," Mr. Richardson said. "But if it's improvised, that's less likely to work. It might not look like things you've seen before."
A further complication is that even knowing who made a bomb may say little about who detonated it. In a 1991 Tom Clancy novel, "The Sum of All Fears," Islamic terrorists find and rebuild an Israeli nuclear weapon and set it off at the Super Bowl.
Federal experts say complex threat scenarios (for instance, an American warhead being stolen and detonated in an American city) mean that many types of intelligence might be needed for successful identification. Over all, it is unclear how much money the government is spending on the effort.
Private experts offered suggestions for improvement. Dr. Happer of Princeton, who heads a university board that helps oversee campus research, said the program might be cooperating too little with nuclear allies. "It's to our advantage," he said, "for all of us to share."
Dr. Davis, the former head of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, made several policy recommendations last April in an article for The Journal of Homeland Security. He said the F.B.I. should lead the program, presidentially appointed overseers should guide it, goals should be set for how long analyses should take and legal issues of prosecution should be examined.
In an interview, Dr. Davis said his suggestions had made little headway, partly because of the topic's grisly nature. "This is an ugly subject because your best effort is going to be barely adequate," he said. "That's not the kind of phrase people like to hear."
Mr. Richardson of Sandia said that the attribution effort had made good technical progress and had already some ability to identify an attacker.
"We're hoping for deterrence," he said. "We don't want anybody to think they can get away with it."
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
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