Suitcase Nukes: Is The Truth is Hidden in Caves?

Posted on February 24, 2004 in Paranoids Terrorism

It’s politics Tuesday.

It’s no surprise that the fringes of the Right are all aglow over the rumor that Al Qaeda has twenty suitcase nukes The story hit the murmuring wires of the extremist media on February 8, prompting an immediate denial from former Ukrainian defense minister Olexandr Kuzmuk. A pair of analysts who considered the question in 1997 found themselves mired in a perplexing wallow of claims and counterclaims:

The claims that the Soviet Union never built ADMs ring hollow, but neither is there any solid evidence indicating the loss or diversion of such weapons. This does not mean that the threat of diversion does not exist, though. The social, political, and economic stresses that wrack Russia provide strong incentives for military “insiders” to steal nuclear weapons. While organizing such a theft would be extremely difficult, the consequences of a successful theft would be disastrous. Increasing security at nuclear weapons facilities, and especially at civilian nuclear facilities with weapons-grade fissile material, must therefore be at the forefront of the US-Russian security agenda. Increased work in this regard may help to ensure that stories of weapons or fissile material diversion remain fiction, and do not become fact.

As ripe a story as this is for debunking, Snopes.com has remained silent amidst the post-911 paranoia. The question remains in my mind whether the threat of suitcase nukes exists and whether the launch of the story in the wake of Bush’s disastrous State of the Union address is more propaganda. Consider this extract from a 2002 story on the subject:

In addition to the suitcase nukes, [FBI consultant Paul L.] Williams reports that al-Qaida has also obtained chemical weapons from North Korea and Iraq. Williams says the FBI confirmed to him that Saddam Hussein provided bin Laden with a “gift” of anthrax spores.

Williams says al-Qaida also includes in its arsenal plague viruses, including ebola and salmonella, from the former Soviet Union and Iraq, samples of botulism biotoxin from the Czech Republic, and sarin from Iraq and North Korea.

Read this in the context of recent revelations about the lies that fueled the war and the very good question whether “Al Qaeda” exists:

the name al-Qaeda entered the popular imagination only after US officials used it to describe those who attacked the embassies in Africa. ‘In the immediate aftermath of the double bombings, President Clinton merely described a “network of radical groups affiliated with and funded by Usama (sic) bin Laden”‘, writes Burke. ‘Clinton talks of “the bin Laden network”, not of “al-Qaeda”. In fact, it is only during the FBI-led investigation into those bombings that the term first starts to be used to describe a traditionally structured terrorist organisation’ (4). According to some experts, it was this naming of al-Qaeda by US officials that kickstarted the public’s misunderstanding of Islamic terror groups. Dolnik points out that, while US officials talked up a structured group, this so-called al-Qaeda did not even have ‘any sort of insignia – a phenomenon quite rare in the realm of terrorism’.

It seems to me that suitcase nukes are another product of a disinformation campaign promulgated by the Office of Homeland Security in the name of keeping us afraid, very afraid of a griffon or a dragon or a manticore which lurks in the deserts of our concrete-paved hope-deprived souls.

Consider what we are asked to believe: that a man carrying fissionable uranium or plutonium, wearing no protection, is going to get his payload past U.S. Customs and walk into the center of an American city feeling none of the effects of radiation sickness. (If you see a vomiting man whose hair is falling out carrying a suitcase, run.) We are asked to imagine a cabal of sub-nuclear scientists — the equivalent of grease monkies and survivalists playing with explosives in the wilds of Idaho — clustered around the devices in the caves of Afghanistan or Pakistan wearing no protection and, perhaps, tickling the dragon’s tail with a screwdriver just to see if they could get the device to glow blue and warm them in the cold bowels of the earth.

The suitcase nukes story appears to be a cold act of desparation by the Bush Administration to save its collective ending from defeat at the polls in November. Or could there be a darker purpose? A paranoid could see the possibility that the Bush Administration itself might effect an incident similar to the CIA-engineered bombing depicted in The Quiet American. A tactical nuclear bomb destroys any evidence left in the immediate vicinity. Who has better access to American cities than the American Government? You must, of course, think Bush and his henchman so callous and desparate as to resort to unbridled state terrorism. You must believe that throughout the chain of command leading to the deployment of such a device against San Francisco (how convenient!) or Chicago or some other center of liberalism there exists no one person who will march down to The New York Times and blow her or his cover to reveal the hidden claw about to snag and hold American public opinion that the greatest threat to our security and our liberty exists outside the United States.

You have to believe in a conspiracy so vast, so disciplined, and so against human compassion that it is capable of sub-Hiroshima atrocity. Recent killing talk by conservatives — the “eliminationalist trend discussed in a recent article by Orcinus — suggests to me another option: that those spreading these rumors hope that mass hysteria will make real opposition to the Residency cringe in fear and not speak out. So far, the U.S. Government has not come out and said that Al Qaeda has suitcase nukes. The revelations come from unnamed intelligence sources whose fingers have led us into the Iraq Quagmire where we found no weapons of mass destruction. Where is the Bush Administration hoping to take us with this unproved allegations, claims never explicitly made but only hinted at by explanatory articles at the Department of Homeland Security Site?

They want us to think of Fear as our friend, even as it drains our energies and the resources the Government can better use to ease the lives of the average citizen.

Some lies are shouted from the rostrum of the Senate Chamber. Others are whispered; allowed to evolve and reproduce themselves like pixels in Life.

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I have yet to see, but will not be surprised by a Leftist version of the story which claims that the nukes do exist and were given to Bin Laden by the United States in the 1980s.

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What would happen if John Kerry were elected president? When he got to the root of it, Kerry might well discover that the story was pure concoction.

The American experience with past investigations into the behavior of the CIA suggests, however, that he would not blow the top off the story. I suspect that histronics from the Right would strike up the Kazoo orchestra and play the tune of necessary secrecy so loud that no person who listened to radio or television news could sleep. A Senate Committee might grumble that the urban legend could neither be proved or denied, just as those who defend our invasion of Iraq now claim that we can “never know if there were WMDs there”. No matter how thoroughly we search, how minutely we photograph the planet from space, how exhaustively we sweep the earth with Geiger counters, there will always be one more cave where 20 suitcase nukes might be awaiting their deployment to an American city — presumably travelling by Federal Express.