WashPost

Panel Finds Terrorists More Likely to Possess Radioactive 'Dirty Bombs' Than Nuclear Weapons

By Michael Dobbs and Peter Behr Washington Post Staff Writers Friday, November 16, 2001; Page A18

With Osama bin Laden on the run in Afghanistan and the Taliban regime in full retreat, one of the most pressing questions for experts studying bin Laden's terrorist career is whether the Saudi-born dissident has some final cataclysm to unleash on America as an ultimate act of revenge.

Probably not, say U.S. officials and most independent analysts, who are skeptical of claims by bin Laden that he has nuclear weapons or other sophisticated devices capable of causing much greater numbers of casualties than on Sept. 11. They caution, however, that his supporters have dabbled in chemical experiments and shown an interest in acquiring nuclear materials that could be used in conjunction with conventional explosives for a "dirty bomb."

In fact, the nation has more to fear from an attack by terrorists armed with dirty bombs containing radioactive materials packed around an explosive core than from nuclear weapons, a committee of leading radiation scientists has concluded in a report being sent to Congress today. The National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements said that contamination from such an attack would likely extend to several city blocks and that radiation would be "catastrophic but manageable."

The council's findings, which were the result of a three-year study, are in line with informal assessments by government counterterrorism officials and many independent experts. But there is a dissenting view, expressed most forcefully by Graham Allison of Harvard University, who said it is quite "probable" that bin Laden's al Qaeda network has acquired sufficient quantities of fissile material to create a crude nuclear device.

"I find it well within the realm of the probable that they have fissile material from Russia, which they could fashion into a device that they could put into a minivan," said Allison, who served as assistant secretary of defense in the Clinton administration. Another scenario, he said, was to smuggle a nuclear device into the United States through one of the millions of containers that enter the country every year.

In public statements over the last few years, bin Laden has described the acquisition of weapons of mass destruction as "a religious duty" for Muslims waging jihad, or holy war, against the West. "If I have indeed acquired these weapons, then I thank God for enabling me to do so," he told Time magazine in December 1998, shortly after issuing a statement calling for America's destruction under the title "The Nuclear Bomb of Islam."

In his most recent interview, with a Pakistani journalist in a mountain hideout near Kabul this month, bin Laden, 44, said his supporters possessed chemical and nuclear weapons as "a deterrent" against the use of such weapons by the United States. But he refused to say how he had acquired his arsenal.

The Taliban's supreme religious leader, Mohammad Omar, was similarly vague yesterday when he was asked a question about bin Laden's possession of weapons of mass destruction in a rare interview with the British Broadcasting Corp. conducted over satellite phone. "The real matter is the extinction of America and, God willing, it will fall to the ground," predicting that this would happen within "a short period of time."

U.S. officials yesterday dismissed such threats as largely bluff, while not doubting that bin Laden is ruthless enough to use weapons of mass destruction against the United States should he ever acquire them.

"What these statements do is merely to reinforce the need to wipe these guys out," said a U.S. official involved in counterterrorism efforts. "When you have got a group that is clearly going after weapons of mass destruction, you have to assume that they will succeed at some point."

The official described the likelihood of bin Laden possessing a full-scale nuclear weapon as "not credible," given the huge difficulties in acquiring sufficient quantities of plutonium or highly enriched uranium needed to initiate a chain reaction. He said that a crude radiological bomb was much more likely, noting that there are 10,000 sites in the world where nuclear materials of one kind or another are stored.

Regardless of the amount of radiation released, any significant attack with a radioactive weapon would cause "chaos," according to the new report to Congress. Public panic caused by the fear of invisible radiation would be a key weapon for terrorists, the report states.

"It's a great psychological warfare weapon," said council member and Texas A&M University professor Ian Scott Hamilton. "It's great for spreading fear."

Council President Charles R. Meinhold said rescue workers would not necessarily be put at risk by radiation from a "dirty bomb," which might be less than levels acceptable for nuclear plant workers. He said the report's most important finding was that government agencies and medical facilities needed more training and equipment to cope with such attacks.

There is evidence that bin Laden has been trying to acquire nuclear materials since at least 1994. Testifying earlier this year in a trial of al Qaeda members accused of bombing U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998, former bin Laden associate Jamal al-Fadal said he had tried to acquire uranium from a Sudanese source in late 1993 or early 1994. He did not know whether the acquisition attempts continued after he left the organization.

U.S. officials have also expressed concern at reports that bin Laden supporters have experimented with various poisonous substances at terrorist training camps in Afghanistan. Ahmed Ressam, a former member of the al Qaeda terrorist network arrested by U.S. border guards in December 1999, has said his training at the Khalden camp included instruction in how to place cyanide gas near the air intake vents of a building.

In one experiment, Ressam told a New York court in July, an instructor put a dog in a box and poured in some cyanide and sulfuric acid. It took the dog about four minutes to die. "We wanted to know what is the effect of the gas," said Ressam, who is now cooperating with American prosecutors.

Reporters entering Kabul this week in the wake of the headlong Taliban retreat have found some evidence that al Qaeda dabbled in chemical experiments and studied widely known techniques for making nuclear devices. In a front-page report in the Times of London, the paper's correspondent in Kabul, Anthony Lloyd, said he found instructions on how to manufacture the deadly poison ricin in the cellar of an abandoned house used by al Qaeda members.

"A strong dose will be able to kill an adult and a dose equal to seven seeds will kill a child," the instructions said. It was not clear whether al Qaeda members had tried to produce ricin, which was used by the Bulgarian secret police to kill a dissident writer, Georgi Markov, in London in 1978.

Stephen Cohen, a South Asia expert at the Brookings Institution, said he would like to see much more evidence before concluding that bin Laden has weapons of mass destruction. "People who claim he has such devices are very skimpy about the evidence," he said. "If he had them, he would probably have used them by now. The goal of his movement is not to bargain and negotiate, but to punish."

-- Anonymous, November 15, 2001