How easy is it to steal a nuclear bomb?

Josh Clark. Sitting across from me is the always likable Charles W. Chuck Bryant so not so Oh, It's treat Chuck. Everybody likes you. You're the most affable fella. I know. I used to think so you are. I believe you. Thanks. Yeah, Chuck's a little down today, So we're gonna talk about stealing nuclear bombs. Little pork me up Penal Bright in your day, wont it? Chuck? Of course you've seen the five Robert Zemecka's classic Back to the Few. Sure I knew you were going to bring that up. Well, you

know me pretty well. I even wrote down Back to the Future in here somewhere we're in sync my friend. Arguably that was that was Thomas F. Wilson's greatest role. Um, who was that the guy who played Biff? No, Actually, I was looking at him on internet movie database. Guy has been in a lot of stuff. Huh, Well he's Biff. He was also an Ecttion Jackson. He had a cameos deff.

It's like Frank Oz and the Blues Brothers. Um. Well, if you remember, as I'm sure you do, since you wrote down Back to the Future on your notes, Um, there was a kind of a subplot going on with Doc and his dealings with Middle Eastern terrorists. I didn't remember that. I thought this was a podcast on Jigawatts get it? Yeah? Um, so, okay, well then you do remember that Doc was he was selling some plutonium to these terrorists, right, or they wanted plutoni him from it.

And the reason of course that they wanted plutonium, he kept it for the dolorium by the way, of course. Okay, but the reason they wanted plutonium is because ostensibly they were going to manufacture a nuclear weapon, right, And that is not outside the realm of possibilities. Scarily enough, it's not Chuck. There was another movie too. They're back to the future too yet know was a movie called The Manhattan Project where a teenager steals enriched uranium to make

an atomic bomb for his science project. I remember that, John Liftgal, Yes, bad movie. I haven't seen it, though it wasn't bad, And if I remember correctly, everyone as you would say, that was right in my wheelhouse. I was ten at the time and thinking of making my own nuclear weapons. Well, right, it's at the same time as war games, which we'll get to in a minute. Oh we will, yes, right, oh yeah. Seeing the agenda that you have war games written down a well, this

one is rife with movie and TV references. So Chuck, let's talk about stealing a nuclear weapon. Um, how easy is it? Well, there's a first of all, we should go ahead and say it's probably impossible to steal a nuclear warhead. Okay, I'm not gonna go along with that. Really, yeah, it would be really, really difficult. It would not be difficult. Let's say you're Iran and uh it's and you're in contact with a bunch of kb KGB officers or maybe

some Soviet military generals. The coups just happened. There's no longer USS are maybe your friends with somebody in Kazakhstan. All of these people had access to strategic and tactical nuclear arms. Actually, there was a huge question over what was going to happen with the former Soviet unions twenty seven thousand tactical and strategic nuclear weapons when the when

the Soviet Union dissolved, what happened to him? Actually, there was a really good effort that was made by the former Soviet republics like Kazakhstan, UM and Ukraine and and all of these groups that actually we're already in fighting with Russia, UH and the Russian government to move all of these nukes into Russia. And I think they did

it with pretty amazing speed. There were U n resolutions, there were talks between UM, the U S and the U and in Russia and these former Soviet republics, and everybody got their nukes back into Russian borders in Russian control. To see that. I read a Reuter's article when I was researching this, and that is one of the scenarios they pose as one way it could happen is during transport.

That's when they're probably most vulnerable. Yeah, you would think so, intot but let's say you're in Iranian official, you got the you got the money, you got the means, And not to pick on Iran here, maybe we should go with Jamaica. I don't want to take off anyone in Iran, but let's say you know, you're a Jamaican official, You've got tons of cash, and um, you want a nuke.

There's a huge coup going on, there's the dissolution of a former superpower, and there's twenty seven thousand nukes out there. If you got the money to to purchase one and the means of getting it out of the country and back to Jamaica, my friend, you have a nuke. Yeah, I guess I was thinking in terms of these days, it's a lot more difficult than it would have been in so well, I think UH security has been tightened down somewhat. Do you think since ninety you're about to

shoot me down? Right? You know not? From what I could tell from reading up on this is that it's more likely that someone could steal the components of a nuclear weapon and resembol it themselves, rather than load you know, thirty ft bomb on the back of their truck and drive it through borders, right Chuck, Which makes people with the information in their heads of how to assemble a nuclear bomb from all these various parts or you know, more to the point, what parts you'd need to make

a nuclear bomb incredibly valuable. Absolutely. Have you heard of a q con? I have, but I know you're the man, the con man, nice one. Uh. Well, Khan actually is the father of Pakistani nuclear proliferation, which is a country's program that we're pretty worried about. Well, yeah, they well they have the bomb. India has the bomb. Uh. He also was under house arrest for five years from two thousand four until February two thou nine because he admitted

to being involved in nuclear pro proliferation. Illegal nuclear proliferation. I can't say that, uh, in other countries like Libya, Iran, he was basically selling his knowledge to the highest bidder for their own nuclear program. Doesn't surprise me. So, I mean, it may be hard to steal. Actually, it's incredibly hard to put together a nuclear bomb. It's very hard to

steal one. But if you really look at it, using maybe Akam's razor or something like that, it would actually probably be the easiest thing to do, would be to just go in and steal a nuclear bomb than stealing the parts. What's the easiest part to steal too when you want to assemble a nuclear bomb? Well, the easiest part would be the explosive mechanism, the T and T, which you need a lot of. You know, enrich uranium

doesn't do much on its own. You need to explode it, sure, as they say, and that would be the easiest part. Um you'd have to build a casing for it, which wouldn't be super easy, but it's at least something you can manufacture yourself. And the hardest thing would probably be to get the enriched super enriched uranium plutonium if you could find doc. Yeah, that that would be tough. Do you know why you would want plutonium or highly enriched uranium? What kind of bomb or why I would say to

go back to the future or to build a bomb? Yes, specifically a fission bomb. Okay, Now what's the difference? I know, you know the difference between FISSI and TU. You know that? Well, I'm a smart guy, because I don't know, and I hope one of us does, do would you like to know? Okay, So, a fission bomb is where you're taking a really heavy, dense material the nuclei are heavy, right, Uh, the atomic

weight is heavy. And what you're doing is you're stripping the nuclei of neutrons, okay, which in turn releases more neutrons and so on. Right, So you have a chain reaction, and once it's highly sustained, it's called supercritical mass. You've reached supercritical mass because neutron neutron is knocking neutrons from nuclei and so on and so on and so on, and it's happening really quickly and it raises this huge

amount of energy. And now going back at that point, No, and like you're saying you need t N T to start this chain reaction and um with a with a fusion bomb, you're actually doing the opposite. You take a very light substance like hydrogen, and you take a tremendous amount of heat and you know from a explosion of T N T and you smash the stuff together and that creates another very big explosions. So which one is more likely scenario for stealing one? I would imagine a

fission bomb because it's the easiest to make. But the problem is is getting highly enriched uranium or plutonium is very difficult, although you can find a lot of it in Russia and the US. Right, Yeah, there's a lot of it that's um un accounted for, which is kind of scary. Yeah, or left over? Did you read that thing about Robert Gates from two thousand and eight now he uh, He basically came out and accused Moscow of not knowing where a lot of their plutonium and highly

enriched uranium was. Well, I could see that because when the Soviet Union dissolved, there was a lot of chaos and disorganization going on and a lot of this excess nuclear material floating around, right, So there's no way that they could account for all of it. Well, he was saying, like, we have no problem with the tactical nukes or the strategic nukes. You want to know the difference between this two. Okay, So a strategic nuke, this is right up my alley.

A strategic nuke is say, like a long range intercontinental ballistic missile, right, um and uh. A tactical nuke would be maybe attached to a missile on a bomber. And the real distinction I read someone put it was a strategic nuke is meant to prevent war. A tactical nuke is meant to end a war, to win a war, right, so you have mutual destruction. Those are strategic nukes. If somebody goes in and drops the bomb in Hiroshima, that would be a tactical nuke. Right, Look at you, you're

a regular Philip Oppenheimert Robert Oppenheimer. By the way, for those of you who are paying attention, let's see father of the Adam Bomb, not Philip. He was the director of the Manhattan Project, right, And Philip was his brother who was from what I understand, didn't do much with his life. Philip was played by John Lithke. Okay, that's good. Uh, you want to talk about security a little bit? I do.

The US says whenever there's a large arsenal weapons they have barriers, guards, surveillance cameras, motion sensors, and of course background checks. Seemed like enough to you, No, because at Reuter's article I read was talking about. The other scenario I talked about, besides being a hijacked and transport, was that potentially a Taliban or al Qaeda member could gain

employment at a at a nuclear facility despite background checks. Sure, well, very few of them have like a member of Taliban, you know, two thousand two to present, and you would think that someone could get in there. But you also wouldn't think that someone could take lessons on how to fly a plane uh here in the United States and fly them into buildings. That didn't seem likely either. So it is likely or not likely, but possible. It is possible, agreed, um.

And there's also another real threat that's probably the most prominent. And I guess we should probably say here maybe a little too late. We don't mean to stir up any paranoia among anybody. It's just an interesting question. We meant to stir up paranoia about Florid, but not this one. Um. The probably the most realistic through it would be a dirty bomb, right yeah, which is made from what they

call nuclear junk, which is not highly enriched uranium and plutonium. Correct, it's a lesser quality, no, I think, Um, it's it's a nuclear bomb lacking a device to properly detonate it. It is so you don't have the material needed or the energy needed to create like a supercritical mass. But let's say you blew it up with a bunch of TNT that was less than critical or super critical um. You're still spreading radioactivity. Okay, I didn't know if you're

talking about depleted uranium. Did you hear about the Russian guy that was caught who the guy who poisoned Lucchenko or No? This is in two thousand two, and this is one of those deals where I couldn't find a lot following up. In two thousand two, a Russian man was busted smuggling twenty seven tons of enriched uranium at

a Siberian border checkpoint. I did a little follow up and they said it first, oh, no, this was just a regular shipment because we send um depleted uranium to UH to Kazakhstan so it can be made into nuclear fuel to be sent back to Russia. That's all it was. And then they came out with a second UH statement that said, oh, I'm sorry, it wasn't enriched exactly depleted uranium, and so it wasn't really a big deal. And I couldn't find anything else after that. Twenty seven tons, though,

that's scary. Well, this proves there's a black market for it. Oh, definitely. You know we're using a depleted uranium is tank piercing bullets or artillery, right, and apparently there's a real growing concern among Iraq veterans in Afghanistan veterans that they're around this and handling this this ammunition, right, like, what's going to happen? You know? And I radioactive and we're gonna be able to have kids. It's probably going to be

the next agent Orange is depleted depleted uranium shells. Yeah, but apparently they go right through a tank. Well, I would imagine. So, yeah, you want to talk about Los Alamos, Sure, go ahead, you go ahead. November two thousand six, Los Alamos National Laboratory there was a security breach and officials were worried that an employee past information concerning special access

controls that would detonate a bomb. So uh, it wasn't a whole device, but important and valuable information and secrets were being sold. Yeah these pals right, Yes, Okay, so pal I checked out there. It can be what what John Fuller, who wrote this fine article, mentions is that you know it takes two people to enter a code at the same time war games exactly. Go ahead. Well

what's that called. It's called permissive action link. Yes, and if you remember the very first scene of the movie Wargames, A young Michael Madison was actually one of the security guards. You can buckle dal little dog. That was excellent. Wow. Uh yeah, young Michael Madison was one of the two uh security personnel and the silo that was supposed to turn the key at the same time. So it's a two man operation. One person cannot set off the bomb.

So it's a pretty good measure. That's well, that's one. That's one type of pal. There's also um quantum encryption UM to create all sorts of different UM codes. And he basically, if you can't just press a button, any barrier between you and pressing that button, any step you have to take to launch a nuclear weapon is a permissive action link. So when you hear the fingers on the button, that's really two fingers on two buttons. And

it took at least several steps to get to that point. Thankfully, Um, there's another way you can get a bomb. And I realized, Chuck, I never um, I never finished a sentence. Earlier, I went off on a tangent about the difference between tactical and strategic right. Um, the the what Gates was talking about when he said that he was accusing Moscow of not knowing where all their stuff was. Um, there's a whole bunch of nuclear minds, nuclear artillery shells, basically nuclear junk.

Um that he suspects Mosque has no idea where it is. That's the stuff that would likely it make its way into a dirty bomb, which is why it's a bigger threat. I could see that for sure. I'm glad I got that off my chest. You know, one official we're talking about Pakistan earlier, one US officials said that if they can smuggle out the amount of heroin that they smuggle out, then they could smuggle out nuclear materials pretty much. Although I suspect that, Um, there is tested approval of heroin

smuggling in Afghanistan as far as the US goes. Yeah, I've read articles on it. US generals are just like, we're not even paying attention to that. There's nothing to do with what we're here for. Right, I could the d A's over there like pulling out their hair, right, Yeah, thanks a lot. Sure. Well. One thing I was going to mention too is if this weren't a concern, legitimate concern, then there probably wouldn't be an official name for this. Yeah,

by the US the Navy. Right, Yeah, the Navy um calls it a broken arrow, which is from the John Well not from the John Wu Move John Move. I think got it from the Navy. But that is the name for the seizure, theft, loss or loss of a nuclear weapon or component. So component is kind of the key component. Yeah, or if you steal the whole thing. If Jamaicas stole one or bought one, that would be bad. Right. I love your idea here. I want to see this like a Jamaican guy on a flatbed with a nuclear

bomb in the back of it. So, Chuck, there's another way you could get a nuclear weapon if you wanted to. You could travel to Tybee Island, Georgia. Yeah, there is a fifty one year old nuclear bomb, Thermo nuclear weapon somewhere off the coast of Tybee and not too far off of it. They could get right off of the coast. You have no idea where it is. Yeah, so close that they can't find it. Yeah, distressing. You know what

else is distressing? What? The Department of Defense recognizes that at least one serious nuclear accident has occurred every single year since the atomic age began. Distressing, I don't know what's more unsettling that once happened every year they qualified it with at least, right, you know, one or more. Yeah, should we talk about some of these accidents, Yeah, totally reported accidents. Yeah, there's been a bunch of them. There have. Uh,

this one's good. Um in n B forty seven bomber flying over Mars Bluff, South Carolina, accidentally dropped an atomic bomb which left a crater st wide and thirty five ft deep, And we've talked about that one. That was the one that, um, they abandoned searching for that nuke in off the coast of Savannah to go deal with

Oh is that what happened? Yeah? Okay, Yeah, So they were looking for this nuke for about a month, couldn't find it, and then one goes off for the the TNT went a bigger problem and they all evacuated over to South Carolina. Yeah, that's a good one. You want you got another one for me? Yeah, this one is kind of unsettling. In nineteen sixty, some guys were basically, I guess, docking an airplane that had nuclear weapons aboard

on the U S S. Takondo Roga. I guess they hit a wave and the airplane and its nukes rolled off into the Sea of Japan. Transport, dude, Luckily, it seems like all the accidents and and security threats to deal with transport. Yeah, or what about the transfer from

a submarine onto the USS halland yeah, go ahead. Well that's pretty much it, except for while they were while they were moving the nuke from the submarine to the USS halland uh, it started to fall seventeen feet and somebody very quickly pulled an emergency brake and it stopped right above the deck that was close a handbrake. Yes, I'd like to see that. Yeah. Did the guy literally like yank it up? Yeah? And I'll bet he was

treated two around that night. Yeah, but more than one. Uh. You know, there's a U. N agency that is entrusted with preempting this kind of thing, illegal proliferation, and they said in two thousand seven they said that the theft and loss of nuclear and radio material the radioactive materials remains a persistent problem that the I A E. A. Yeah, So they're every one is on record basically saying this,

this happens all the time. There are hundreds of cases in Russia of people stealing or trying to steal this stuff? What was it? J Philip Oppenheimer said when he saw the first nuclear bomb explode, I have become death destroy of world, world talk about Pandora's box, man, No kidding.

I've got some more stats if you're in need. There were a hundred and fifty incidents of such such action of of loss or theft in two thousand six alone, And Josh, the majority of these involved sealed radioactive sources, and in seventy three per cent of these cases, the lost or stolen materials have not been recovered. That's fantastic. So basically what you're finding, what you're saying here is that there is a lot of unaccounted for nuclear material

on the world market. Right. Well, there's no international treaty for this. I found out. Oh yeah, yeah, they're there. Um their treaties. There's the Physical Protection of Nuclear Material Treaty of nineteen, but it's all for domestic use, storage, and transport. There's no international uh work going on here. Well, the problem is in the post nine eleven world as well, Chuck.

I mean, we're not fighting people who honor treaties like we're still looking at nuclear um nuclear non proliferation through the paradigm of the Cold War, which is long over. You know, it used to be we had, like I said earlier, mutual a sure destruction where the USSR in the US had so many nukes that they could wipe out the world within seconds of one another launching, and it kept anybody from doing anything about exactly. There's no

that that doesn't exist anymore. There's no polarization, and we have to rethink this, especially if there's no accountability or not enough accountability. It's almost less safe now than during the arms race. And how do you get something how do you take something out of existence when it when, when it's already been created. I don't know, can it happen? I it would take I don't think it can happen.

I think it could happen, but you'd have to be really dedicated, and you would also have to be pretty cool blooded because guy's like a q con would have to get shot in the back of the head, and not just a q com but all of our guys to basically anybody who knows how to make a nuclear bomb would have to be executed. So thanks for joining us. If you want to know more, about nuclear anything. We've got a bunch of it on the site. That's how

stuff works dot com. We are a handy search bar for your convenience, so you don't have to troll from the channel the channel page by page. Uh. And since I said that and Jerry's eyes are crossed because she's so bored, I think that means it's time for the listener mail. Josh, I'm just gonna call this an eerie Pennsylvania email. Get get it. This from Sarah. She's a student there at Collegiate High School. I guess Collegiate Academy.

And you're stupid? Are stupid? People Happier? Podcast? You talked a lot about the subjectiveness of happiness, as well as all the references you made to your super Stuff Guide to the Economy, now on sale and iTunes. It reminded me of a project my AP macro economics class conducted at the end of last year. Most nations measure their economic success and increments of GDP and the like, but the nation of Bhutan created a similar scale called gross

National Happiness. I've written on that. Really, Yeah, okay, I believe you. Basically, it's an extensive survey that they did and she and her classmates decided to for a project to do the same thing at her high school to find out what the happiness scale was at a collegiate academy. So she wrote in and told me this, and I was like, that's cool. I was like, but you didn't tell me any of the results or anything, so how about it? So she emailed me back and said, all right,

here we go. Twelve statements in four categories is what they were rating, as well as male and female and grade level to define the gross collegiate happiness scale. Each was rated on a scale of one zero to five, with one being the least agreeable to our statement I

guess zero. I predicted that we would have achieved an overall happiness index of about two five, but surprisingly we scored significantly higher, and our happiness scale is at three point five eight out of five, which is pretty good on an economic scale, and including outliers is pretty great. She says. The most agreeable statement and positive quality that

made students feel happy. It was a statement I feel accepted at collegiate academy, which received an average of four point two nine, and the principle was satisfied with it. Although you could tell she wanted a perfect five point. Oh, she obviously hasn't studied economics or statistics recently. So that was from Sarah and Erie Pennsylvania. Why Sarah is headed to Yale as well? Yeah, Sarah's ary bright student and sounds like her classmates are pretty happy there collegiate academy. Yeah,

it's good for them. Yeah, the gross national up and it's pretty cool. Yeah, Bhutan is very serious about it. The king abdicated his throne to establish a democracy because it was they determined that democracy made for happier people. Yeah, that's pretty cool. Yeah, Well, thanks a lot, Sarah. Well, if you're Yale bound like Sarah, or don't know where you're headed yet, you can send us an email like us detailing anything you like. Do we have anything we

want to ask for Chuck? Uh No, we've been getting good feedback lately. Thanks, thanks for that, So if you want to just send us an email, I guess is what we're trying to say, right, you can send that to stuff podcast at how stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff works dot com. Want more house stuff Works, check out our blogs on the house stuff works dot

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