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From Paul L. Williams' book "The Al Qaeda Connection" :
The beginning of the end took place on Sept. 27, 1991, when President George H. W. Bush Announced that the United States would unilaterally withdraw all nuclear weapons from its forces around the world with the proviso that Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev would do likewise. Gorbachev readily agreed. The press and the people of both nations were pleased. The agreement represented a grand display of perestroika -- positive proof that the cold war was over and a new day of mutual trust (if not brotherhood) had dawned. The process of the withdrawal of the nukes was greatly facilitated by the enactment of the Nunn-Lugtar Soviet Threat Reduction Act on December 12, 1991. This act provided Russia with millions in funding to transport its nukes to various sites throughout the fourteen newly created republics of what was once the Soviet Union. This, too, seemed like a sensible measure that would make the world a safer place.
Yet the movement of the twenty-two thousand nuclear weapons occurred when everything in Russia was falling apart. With the closing of the communal plants and industries, more than 30 percent of the workforce became unemployed. Inflation soared over 2,000 percent, fueling crime and corruption. An average of eighty-four murders took place a day, many of which were contract killings. A hit could now be arranged with members of eight Mafia families within Moscow for less than $200. Millions of Russians now stood in lines for hours in order to redeem governement-issued coupons. There was one line for red beets and cabbages; another for eggs and bread; and yet another for vodka and cigarettes. Butcher shops sold blue chickens that had died of malnutrition and pies made from rancid beef and horse meat. The savvy customers soon learned not to purchase the pies that were surrounded by dead flies. In the wink of an eye, the second most powerful nation on earth had become transformed into a third world country.
Undfer the new capitalism, male life expectancy fell to fifty-eight years --- fifteen to seventeen years less than that of males in eastern Europe and the United States. By 1996 the suicide rate had doubled. Along with poverty, inflation, unemployment, and depression, Russians experienced a sharp drop in the birth rate. From 1991 to 2001, the population declined at a rate of 1.2 million a year.
Nowhere was the misery more apparent than within the military, which by 1996 had shrunk to a feeble force of 1.7 million soldiers. Because of chronic food shortages, many soldiers resorted to begging. More than ten Russian soldiers died each day from noncombat causes, including suicide and malnutrition. An estimated 110,000 loacked proper housing and became sheltered in hovels. No one in the military, not even a high-ranking general, was receiving a regular pay check. Russian army and navy officers began to sell almost every item at their disposal. In 1993 there were 6,430 reports of stolen weapons from army arsenals, ranging from assault rifles to tanks.
It is incredible to assume that the twenty-two thousand nuclear weapons were moved from strategic sites to arsenals throughout Russia without a single loss. When President George H. W. Bush announced his plans for a nuclear withdrawal, the then secretary of defense Dick Cheney said that the recovery of 90 percent of the nukes in Russia would represent "excellent performance." Such an "excellent performance" would mean that 220 weapons would have been lost, stolen, or otherwise unaccounted for. But what person in his right mind could expect such an outcome from the poorly housed, malnourished, disillusioned, and unpaid Russian troups of 1991? The temptation for gain would have been too great for an Orthodox saint to suppress when a kilo of chrominum-50 would sell for $25,000, cesium-137 for $1 million, and lithium for $10 million. Prospective buyers included agents from North Korea, Pakistan, Libya, and a well-financed group of Muslim terrorists called al Qaeda.
In the first three years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the black market in nuclear weapons and materials began to boom. Germany reported more than seven hundred attempted nuclear sales. These illegal sales were luckily stopped by the police, but that was not true of every case of smuggling. Other incidents have been more alarming. In January 1992 an Egyptian newspaper reported that Iran bought three Soviet nuclear warheads from Kazakhstan for $150 million. This report was later confirmed by Russian intelligence. In November 1993 two nuclear warheads, sufficient to kill millions in New York and Los Angeles, were stolen by two employees from the Zlatoust-36 Instrument Building Plant, a weapons assembly facility, in Chelyabinsk. Fortunately, the weapons were later recovered in a nearby residential garage, and the two employees were placed under arrest. Later that same month, Russian navy Captian Alexei Tikhomirov broke into a nuclear storage facility at the Sevmorput shipyard near Murmansk and robbed three pieces of a reactor core containing 3.4 kilograms of highly enriched uranium. At the time of Tikhomirov's arrest, the chief Russian prosecutor noted that "potatoes were guarded better" that the nuclear materials at Murmansk.
The Chechen Mafia, the most powerful criminal organization in Russia, now became the most dominant force in the trafficking of nuclear supplies and materials from Russia to rogue nation and terrorist groups. In March 1993 the Chechens seciured an unknown quantity of highly enriched uranium from Kazakhstan. More than six kilograms were transported from Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, to Istanbul, Turkey. Six months later, Interpol officials collared four Turkish businessmen and four agents of Iran's secret service and confiscated 2.5 kilos of the uranium. The remaining kilos had slipped through the proverbial cracks. In September 1993 the Chechen rebels stunned the world by the display of SS-20 missiles during a military parade in Grozny. The missiles, stolen from some Soviet arsenal, possessed a range of 9,500 kilometers and the capability to launch a nuclear warhead.
At the same time, the Chechen rebels began using radioactive isotopes, which had become available at rock-bottom prices, to commit acts of murder. The first victim was Vladimir Kaplun, the owner of a meat packing plant in Moscow. The Chechens planted gamma ray-emitting pellets in Kaplun's office. The businessman was dead within a matter of weeks. At least half a dozen similar cases were reported in the next three weeks.
In November 1994 Dzokhar Dudayev, the leader of the Chechen rebels, petitioned the Uniter Nations to dispatch troops to protect the weapons of mass destruction within the Chechen arsenal. Dudayev's request was taken as an attempt at grandstanding. The UN officials, along with the international press, scoffed at the notion that a group of Muslim dissidents from the backwater Russian province of Chechnya could possess, let alone maintain, nuclear weapons. This forced the Chechens to make a vivid display that would prove to the world that they possessed nuclear capability. On November 23, 1995, Chechen commander Shamil Basayev directed a television crew to a radiological bomb that had been planted in Izmailovsky Park near Moscow. The bomb was made of cesium-137 and, if detonated, would have killed hundreds in a matter of minutes and contaminated thousands more. The incident represented the first case of a dirty nuke to be shown as a weapon of terror.
Shortly after this incident, Dudayev notified the US State Department that he possessed tactical nuclear suitcase bombs. The Chechen leader said that he was willing to sell these weapons to rogue states of terrorist agencies, such as al Qaeda, if the United States failed to recognize Chechnya's independence from Russia. Dudayev's claim was supported by officials from the National Intelligence Council, an unbrella organization for the US analytical community. The officials informed a congressional committee that weapon-grade and weapons-usable nuclear material, including SADMs (small atomic demolition munitions), had been stolen from Soviet stockpiles. "Of these thefts," the officials said, "we assess that undetected smuggling has occurred, although we do not know the extent or the magnitude.
In January 1996 the Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of Internation Studies received information from a "senior advisor to Boris Yeltsin" that an unspecified number of small nuclear bombs had been manufactured for the KGB and had never appeared on a list of the Soviet nuclear inventory.
In May 1997, during a closed door session with a US congressional delegation, former Russian Security Council secretary Alexander Lebed said that more than eighty-four SADMs had disappeared from Russian arsenals and could be in the hands of Muslim extremists. General Lebed said that he was able to confirm the production of 132 small nukes but could only account for 48. When asked the whereabouts of the missing nukes, Lebed replied: "I have no idea." He went on to say that he had no idea how many small nukes had been produced by the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Lebed also said that some of these small nukes, with explosive yield of one kiloton of TNT, had been refined so that they could be carried by one person in a case measuring sity by forty by twenty centimeters (twenty-four by sixteen by eight inches) and represented "ideal weapons for nuclear terror."
General Lebed repeated these charges in an interview with the CBS newsmagazine 60 minutes that was aired on September 7, 1997. In the interview, he added that the SADMs were designed to be used in sabotage operations behind enemy lines and lacked the electronic combination locks that had been built into other Soviet nuclear weapons. The following is a sample of the exchange between CBS correspondent Steve Kroft and General Lebed over the matter of the missing nukes:
Kroft: Are you confidant that all of the weapons aqre secure and acoounted for?
Lebed: Not at all. Not at all.
Kroft: How easy would it be to steal one?
Lebed: It's suitcase-sized.
Kroft: You could put it in a suitcase and carry it off?
Lebed: It is made in the size of a suitcase. It is a suitcase, actually. You could carry it. You could put it in another suitcase if you want to.
Kroft: But it's already a suitcase.
Lebed: Yes.
Kroft: I could walk down the streets of Moscow or Washington or New York, and people would think I'm carrying a suitaces?
Lebed: Yes, indeed.
Kroft: How easy would it be to detonate?
Lebed: It would take twnety, thirty minutes to prepare.
Kroft: But you don't need secret codes from the Kremlin or anything like that?
Lebed: No.
Kroft: You are saying there are a significant number that are missing and unaccounted for?
Lebed: Yes, there is. More than one hundred.
Kroft: Where are they?
Lebed: Somewhere in Georgia, somewhere in Ukraine, somewhere in the Baltic countries. Perhaps some are even outside those countries. One person is capable of triggering this nuclear weapon -- one person.
Kroft: So you are saying these weapons are no longer under the control of the Russian military?
Lebed: I'm saying that more than one hundred weapons are not under the control of the armed forces of Russia. I don't know their location. I don't know whether they have been destroyed or whether they are stored or whether they've been sold or stolen. I don't know.
More to come, if you like. It's a great story that is forming up.
The beginning of the end took place on Sept. 27, 1991, when President George H. W. Bush Announced that the United States would unilaterally withdraw all nuclear weapons from its forces around the world with the proviso that Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev would do likewise. Gorbachev readily agreed. The press and the people of both nations were pleased. The agreement represented a grand display of perestroika -- positive proof that the cold war was over and a new day of mutual trust (if not brotherhood) had dawned. The process of the withdrawal of the nukes was greatly facilitated by the enactment of the Nunn-Lugtar Soviet Threat Reduction Act on December 12, 1991. This act provided Russia with millions in funding to transport its nukes to various sites throughout the fourteen newly created republics of what was once the Soviet Union. This, too, seemed like a sensible measure that would make the world a safer place.
Yet the movement of the twenty-two thousand nuclear weapons occurred when everything in Russia was falling apart. With the closing of the communal plants and industries, more than 30 percent of the workforce became unemployed. Inflation soared over 2,000 percent, fueling crime and corruption. An average of eighty-four murders took place a day, many of which were contract killings. A hit could now be arranged with members of eight Mafia families within Moscow for less than $200. Millions of Russians now stood in lines for hours in order to redeem governement-issued coupons. There was one line for red beets and cabbages; another for eggs and bread; and yet another for vodka and cigarettes. Butcher shops sold blue chickens that had died of malnutrition and pies made from rancid beef and horse meat. The savvy customers soon learned not to purchase the pies that were surrounded by dead flies. In the wink of an eye, the second most powerful nation on earth had become transformed into a third world country.
Undfer the new capitalism, male life expectancy fell to fifty-eight years --- fifteen to seventeen years less than that of males in eastern Europe and the United States. By 1996 the suicide rate had doubled. Along with poverty, inflation, unemployment, and depression, Russians experienced a sharp drop in the birth rate. From 1991 to 2001, the population declined at a rate of 1.2 million a year.
Nowhere was the misery more apparent than within the military, which by 1996 had shrunk to a feeble force of 1.7 million soldiers. Because of chronic food shortages, many soldiers resorted to begging. More than ten Russian soldiers died each day from noncombat causes, including suicide and malnutrition. An estimated 110,000 loacked proper housing and became sheltered in hovels. No one in the military, not even a high-ranking general, was receiving a regular pay check. Russian army and navy officers began to sell almost every item at their disposal. In 1993 there were 6,430 reports of stolen weapons from army arsenals, ranging from assault rifles to tanks.
It is incredible to assume that the twenty-two thousand nuclear weapons were moved from strategic sites to arsenals throughout Russia without a single loss. When President George H. W. Bush announced his plans for a nuclear withdrawal, the then secretary of defense Dick Cheney said that the recovery of 90 percent of the nukes in Russia would represent "excellent performance." Such an "excellent performance" would mean that 220 weapons would have been lost, stolen, or otherwise unaccounted for. But what person in his right mind could expect such an outcome from the poorly housed, malnourished, disillusioned, and unpaid Russian troups of 1991? The temptation for gain would have been too great for an Orthodox saint to suppress when a kilo of chrominum-50 would sell for $25,000, cesium-137 for $1 million, and lithium for $10 million. Prospective buyers included agents from North Korea, Pakistan, Libya, and a well-financed group of Muslim terrorists called al Qaeda.
In the first three years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the black market in nuclear weapons and materials began to boom. Germany reported more than seven hundred attempted nuclear sales. These illegal sales were luckily stopped by the police, but that was not true of every case of smuggling. Other incidents have been more alarming. In January 1992 an Egyptian newspaper reported that Iran bought three Soviet nuclear warheads from Kazakhstan for $150 million. This report was later confirmed by Russian intelligence. In November 1993 two nuclear warheads, sufficient to kill millions in New York and Los Angeles, were stolen by two employees from the Zlatoust-36 Instrument Building Plant, a weapons assembly facility, in Chelyabinsk. Fortunately, the weapons were later recovered in a nearby residential garage, and the two employees were placed under arrest. Later that same month, Russian navy Captian Alexei Tikhomirov broke into a nuclear storage facility at the Sevmorput shipyard near Murmansk and robbed three pieces of a reactor core containing 3.4 kilograms of highly enriched uranium. At the time of Tikhomirov's arrest, the chief Russian prosecutor noted that "potatoes were guarded better" that the nuclear materials at Murmansk.
The Chechen Mafia, the most powerful criminal organization in Russia, now became the most dominant force in the trafficking of nuclear supplies and materials from Russia to rogue nation and terrorist groups. In March 1993 the Chechens seciured an unknown quantity of highly enriched uranium from Kazakhstan. More than six kilograms were transported from Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, to Istanbul, Turkey. Six months later, Interpol officials collared four Turkish businessmen and four agents of Iran's secret service and confiscated 2.5 kilos of the uranium. The remaining kilos had slipped through the proverbial cracks. In September 1993 the Chechen rebels stunned the world by the display of SS-20 missiles during a military parade in Grozny. The missiles, stolen from some Soviet arsenal, possessed a range of 9,500 kilometers and the capability to launch a nuclear warhead.
At the same time, the Chechen rebels began using radioactive isotopes, which had become available at rock-bottom prices, to commit acts of murder. The first victim was Vladimir Kaplun, the owner of a meat packing plant in Moscow. The Chechens planted gamma ray-emitting pellets in Kaplun's office. The businessman was dead within a matter of weeks. At least half a dozen similar cases were reported in the next three weeks.
In November 1994 Dzokhar Dudayev, the leader of the Chechen rebels, petitioned the Uniter Nations to dispatch troops to protect the weapons of mass destruction within the Chechen arsenal. Dudayev's request was taken as an attempt at grandstanding. The UN officials, along with the international press, scoffed at the notion that a group of Muslim dissidents from the backwater Russian province of Chechnya could possess, let alone maintain, nuclear weapons. This forced the Chechens to make a vivid display that would prove to the world that they possessed nuclear capability. On November 23, 1995, Chechen commander Shamil Basayev directed a television crew to a radiological bomb that had been planted in Izmailovsky Park near Moscow. The bomb was made of cesium-137 and, if detonated, would have killed hundreds in a matter of minutes and contaminated thousands more. The incident represented the first case of a dirty nuke to be shown as a weapon of terror.
Shortly after this incident, Dudayev notified the US State Department that he possessed tactical nuclear suitcase bombs. The Chechen leader said that he was willing to sell these weapons to rogue states of terrorist agencies, such as al Qaeda, if the United States failed to recognize Chechnya's independence from Russia. Dudayev's claim was supported by officials from the National Intelligence Council, an unbrella organization for the US analytical community. The officials informed a congressional committee that weapon-grade and weapons-usable nuclear material, including SADMs (small atomic demolition munitions), had been stolen from Soviet stockpiles. "Of these thefts," the officials said, "we assess that undetected smuggling has occurred, although we do not know the extent or the magnitude.
In January 1996 the Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of Internation Studies received information from a "senior advisor to Boris Yeltsin" that an unspecified number of small nuclear bombs had been manufactured for the KGB and had never appeared on a list of the Soviet nuclear inventory.
In May 1997, during a closed door session with a US congressional delegation, former Russian Security Council secretary Alexander Lebed said that more than eighty-four SADMs had disappeared from Russian arsenals and could be in the hands of Muslim extremists. General Lebed said that he was able to confirm the production of 132 small nukes but could only account for 48. When asked the whereabouts of the missing nukes, Lebed replied: "I have no idea." He went on to say that he had no idea how many small nukes had been produced by the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Lebed also said that some of these small nukes, with explosive yield of one kiloton of TNT, had been refined so that they could be carried by one person in a case measuring sity by forty by twenty centimeters (twenty-four by sixteen by eight inches) and represented "ideal weapons for nuclear terror."
General Lebed repeated these charges in an interview with the CBS newsmagazine 60 minutes that was aired on September 7, 1997. In the interview, he added that the SADMs were designed to be used in sabotage operations behind enemy lines and lacked the electronic combination locks that had been built into other Soviet nuclear weapons. The following is a sample of the exchange between CBS correspondent Steve Kroft and General Lebed over the matter of the missing nukes:
Kroft: Are you confidant that all of the weapons aqre secure and acoounted for?
Lebed: Not at all. Not at all.
Kroft: How easy would it be to steal one?
Lebed: It's suitcase-sized.
Kroft: You could put it in a suitcase and carry it off?
Lebed: It is made in the size of a suitcase. It is a suitcase, actually. You could carry it. You could put it in another suitcase if you want to.
Kroft: But it's already a suitcase.
Lebed: Yes.
Kroft: I could walk down the streets of Moscow or Washington or New York, and people would think I'm carrying a suitaces?
Lebed: Yes, indeed.
Kroft: How easy would it be to detonate?
Lebed: It would take twnety, thirty minutes to prepare.
Kroft: But you don't need secret codes from the Kremlin or anything like that?
Lebed: No.
Kroft: You are saying there are a significant number that are missing and unaccounted for?
Lebed: Yes, there is. More than one hundred.
Kroft: Where are they?
Lebed: Somewhere in Georgia, somewhere in Ukraine, somewhere in the Baltic countries. Perhaps some are even outside those countries. One person is capable of triggering this nuclear weapon -- one person.
Kroft: So you are saying these weapons are no longer under the control of the Russian military?
Lebed: I'm saying that more than one hundred weapons are not under the control of the armed forces of Russia. I don't know their location. I don't know whether they have been destroyed or whether they are stored or whether they've been sold or stolen. I don't know.
More to come, if you like. It's a great story that is forming up.
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Re: Al Qaeda's Nuclear Inventory
Thu, May 7, 2009 - 5:29 PMNot all of the small Soviet nukes were designed to be carried around in an attache case or a small suitcase by a single military operative or Soviet spy. Some were nuclear mines that were for use by engineering troops and deployed along the Soviet border, particularly the border with China. These nuclear mines were intended to create obstacles in the path of advancing armies by altering the landscape and producing high levels of radioactive contamination. At the end of the cold war, there were more than seven hundred of these mines in the Soviet stockpile. By 1997 Russian officials said that most, but not all, had been withdrwn to central storage facilities and eliminated. Each device weighed less than two hundred pounds and produced an explosive yield of one to five kilotons.
Small nukes in the Soviet arsenal also included 120- to 150- pound atomic artillery shells for 152- and 155- millimeter howitzers. One on display at the public museum of Chelabinsk-70, Russia's nuclear design center, measures eighteen inches in length and six inches in diameter. It represents the world's smallest nuclear weapon.
There were also backpack nukes, such as the Red Army's RA-155 and the Red Navy's RA-115-01 (for use underwater). These weighed less than seventy pounds and could be detonated within ten minutes. They were designed to destroy bridges, tunnels, airfields, communications facilities, and oil refineries.
Some of the tactical nukes could fit nicely within the trunk of a car. Others would have to be transported in crates by truck or van. The smallest, with an explosive yield of .5 kilotons, could be used to obliterate a small town or village. The largest, with yields in excess of 15 kilotons, could be used to wipe out major metropolitan areas, such as New York and Los Angeles. In total, twnety-two thousand of these nukes had been manufactured by the Soviet army and became part of the standard equipment for Soviet forces stationed in Russia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia.
The controversy over Lebed's testimony came to center on his statement that small tactical nukes had been designed to be carried about in a suitcase with stadard measurements. Russian prime minister Viktor Chernomyrdin dismissed this assertion as an "absolute absurdity" and said that all of his country's nukes had been accounted for and remained under strict control. Rossiyskaya gazeta, Russia's official newspaper, went even further by stating that Lebed's charge represented the fantasy of a "diseased imagination."
But Lebed's testimony received corroboration from Vladimir Denisov a former head of the Russian Security Counsil. Denisov, told a US congressional committee that tactical nukes meant to fit within a suitcase had been manufactured by the Soviet Union and that his office had received reports that several of the nukes had been missing and might have fallen into the hands of the Chechen separatists.
Further corroboration came from Aleksey Yablokov, Environmental Advisor to Russian president Boris Yeltsin. In a letter published in the Moscow newspaper Novaya gazeta on September 22, 1997, Yablokov said that more than seven hundred nuclear suitcase bombs had been produced exclusively for the KGB. For this reason, he explained, the nuclear suitcase did not appear on the official inventory of Russia's nuclear weapons. He said that the present whereabouts of these weapons remained anyone's guess. He added that the small nukes would have required two major overhauls since the time they had been manufactured and it remained uncertain of such overhauls had been conducted.
On October 6, 1997, Yeltsin signed a set of amendments to the Russian Federation Law on State Secrets that effectively classified all information about the nuclear suitcase bombs and military nuclear facilities in an effort to contain fears about the missing nukes.
In the wake of these developments came news that the United States had developed and deployed weapons similar to those described by General Lebed throughout the cold war. One such weapon, based on the W-54 warhead, could fit neatly within the suitcase described by Lebed. It was only 27 inches long with a diameter of 11.2 inches and weighed less than sixty pounds. This weapon was crafted to fit in a backpack and be parachuted behind enemy lines for use by Navy SEALS. For this reason, it was commonly called a "rucksack bomb."
The United States also manufactured thousands of "Davy Crockett" warheads that were deployed to strategic locations within the NATO alliance. These weapons, the "babies of American nukes," weighed less than fifty pounds and could be fired from 120- or 155- millimeter recoilless rifles. They produced an explosive yield of .25 kilotons, the equivalent of one hundred thousand sticks of dynamite. The existence of these weapons provided substantiation for Lebed's claim, since there was no nuke in the United States arsenal that had not been replicated by the Soviets.
Most experts, including Carey Sublette of the Nuclear Weapon Archive, believe that the Russian nukes in question are 155-millimeter nuclear artillery shells that have been shortened by omitting the nonessential canonical ogive and fuse to fit within suitcases and even attache cases. To produce an explosive yield of 10 kilotons (enough to wipe out the five boroughs of New York City and much of Long Island), the weapons would have been fusion boosted by thin beryllium reflectors. Such devices would be based on a design approach called linear implosion. Linear implosion occurs when an elongated (oval-shaped) lower-density subcritical mass is compressed and deformed into a critical, higher-density spherical configuration by embedding it in a cylinder of explosives that are ignited at both ends. As the detonation progresses from both directions toward the middle, the fissile mass is squeezed into a supercritical mass.
In 2004 there were 4,000 tactical nuclear weapons, including the shells described above, in Russia; 3,300 in the United States; 400 in China; 200 in Israel; 60 to 80 in France; 60 in India, and 15 to 48 in Pakistan.
While the controversy raged, the Clinton administration opted to ignore the claims of Chechen leader Dzokhar Dudayev's that he possessed tactical nukes and was willing to sell them to the highest bidder. The administration refused to meet with him, let alone meet his demands for recognition of Chechnya's independence. Moreover, it even neglected to respond to the reports that the Chechen separatitst had sold twenty nuclear suitcase bombs to Osama bin Laden for $30 million in cash and two tonss of choice Number Four heroin with a street value in excess of $700 million. Regarding this last issue, Rep. Curt Weldon said: "I am convinced back then our government didn't take the aggressive steps they should have taken to track down the stories. All during the 1990s they just brushed them aside.
News of the sale of the nukes to bin Laden appeared on August 16, 1998, in the London Times and several weeks later in such publications as the Jerusalem Report, Al-Watan Al-Arabi, Muslim Magazine, and Al-Majallah (London's Saudi weekly). For those within the intelligence community, the reports were hardly surprising. The Chechen rebels had close ties with al Qaeda. The two groups of radical Muslims had fought side by side in Azerbaijan from 1993 to 1994 to aid the Azeri mujahadeen in their struggle against Christian Armenia for control of the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh enclave. When the war for independence broke out in Chechnya, at the end of the Azerbaijan-Armenia conflict, three hundred Afghan Arabs joined the six thousand Chechen guerillas to ward off the invading Russian troops. In 1996 bin Laden established training camps for Chechen forces in Afghanistan, sent Amir Kattab and nine other al Qaeda commanders to oversee Chechen military operations, and provided a contribution in excess of $25 million as aid for the war effort. In exchange for such assistance, the Chechens would have been pleased to sell the twenty suitcase nukes to the great emir. Indeed, they would have been hard pressed to find a more suitable buyer. -
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Re: Al Qaeda's Nuclear Inventory
Fri, May 8, 2009 - 10:49 AMBecause the Clinton administration opted to turn a deaf ear to accounts of the sale of the suitcase nukes to bin Laden, members of the national media came to assume that the reports must lack substance. Terri Whitcraft, an Emmy Award-winning producer at ABC, decided that the topic of nuclear terrorism was not a worthy subject for a news documentary because the "visible proof" of this transaction could not be produced. The network opted instead to air a report on UFOs, hosted by Peter Jennings.
Yet the report had been substantiated by US, British, Russian, Israeli, Pakistani, and Saudi intelligence. It was even upheld by the United Nations. In 2004 Hans Blix, former Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), told his colleagues at this world body that the accounts regarding the sale of twenty nuclear suitcase bombs to al Qaeda were accurate. Dr. Blix reportedly made this announcement after meeting with Russian officials who had investigated the theft of the weapons and after speaking to Chechen leaders who had witnessed the transaction.
The accuracy of the story was also supported by the international press, including such news outlets as BBC, the London Times, Al-Watan Al-Arabi, and Al-Majallah. The celebrated Pakistani journalist Hamid Mir maintained not only that the story of the sale of the suitcase nukes was true but also that he had visited laboratories in Afghanistan, where al Qaeda scientists and technicians worked to maintain and upgrade the weapons.
In 1998 Yossef Bodansky, Chairman of the Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare in Washington, DC, told a congressional committee: "There is no longer much doubt that bin Laden has succeeded in his quest for nuclear bombs. The Russians believe he has a handful, the Saudi intelligence services are very conservative, perhaps they are friendly to the United States, believe he has in the neighborhood of twenty. As far as the acquisition and obtaining [of such weapons], there's the multiple sources of that, dealing with the actual purchase of the suitcase bombs. He [bin Laden] has a collection of individuals knowledgeable in activating the bombs and he is looking for and recruiting former Soviet Special Forces in learning how to operate the bombs behind enemy lines." -
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Re: Al Qaeda's Nuclear Inventory
Sun, May 10, 2009 - 9:21 PMAsked about the immediacy of the threat, Bodansky said: "We don't have any indication that they are going to use it [the arsenal of suitcase bombs] tomorrow or any other day. But they have the capacity; they have the legitimate authorization; they have the logic for using it. So, one does not go into the tremendous amount of expenditures, effort, investment in human beings, and in human resources, to have something that will be kept in storage for a rainy day."
In 1998 Shaykh Hisham Kabbani, chairman of the Islamic Supreme Council on America, testified before a committee of the US Department od State that Osama bin Laden had purchased the suitcase nukes from the Chechens; that many of these weapons had arrived in the United States; and that more than five thousand al Qaeda operatives were being trained for the American Hiroshima. In the wake of September 11, 2001, Kabbani restated these claims to members of the press.
Sources close to Tom Ridge, former director of Homeland Security, maintain that he shares Kabbani's belief that al Qaeda not only has secured small nukes from the Chechens but has managed to smuggle them into the country.
Further confirmation concerning the nuclear suitcases came with an alarm. On October 11, 2001, George Tenet, then director of the CIA, met with President Bush to convey the news that at least two suitcase nukes had reached al Qaeda operatives within the United States. Each suitcase weighed between fifty and eight kilograms (aprroximately 110 to 176 pounds) and contained enough fissionable plutonium and uranium to produce an explosive yield in excess of two kilotons. One suitcase bore the serial number 9999 and the Russian manufacturing date of 1988. The design of the weapons, Tenet told the president, is simple. The plutonium and uranium are kept in separate compartments that are linked to a triggering mechanism that can be activated by a clock or a call from a cell phone.
The news sent the president "through the roof", prompting him to order his national security team to give nuclear terrorism priority over every other threat to America. It further caused the preisdent to activate nuclear contingency plans -- for the installation of underground bunkers away from major metropolitan areas so that a cadre of federal managers could proceed with the business of government if and when the nuclear attacks occured.
To reiterate the seriousness of the situation and the reality of the treat, Mr. Tenet said: "The threat environment we face is as bad as it was before September 11. It is serious. The have reconstituted. They are coming after us."
Confirmation also came straight from the horse's mouth. To inform the world of his possession of the weapons, bin Laden issued the following statement called "The Nuclear Bomb of Islam": "It is the duty of Muslims to prepare as much force as possible to terrorize the enemies of God." In a December 1999 interview with journalists from Time magazine, bin Laden let it be known in an oblique way that he possessed nuclear weapons. This can be discerned from the following exchange:
TIME: The U.S. says you are trying to acquire chemical and nuclear weapons. How would you use there?
Bin Laden: Acquiring weapons for the defense of Muslims is a religious duty. If I have indeed acquired these weapons, then I thank God for enabling me to do so. And if I seek to acquire these weapons, I am carrying out a duty. It would be a sin for Muslims not to try to possess the weapons that would prevent the infidels from inflicting harm on Muslims.
Several weeks later, when asked by John Miller of ABC News if he was seeking to obtain chemical and nuclear weapons, bin Laden said: "If I seek to acquire such weapons, this is a religious duty. How weuse them is up to us."
Moreover, as noted earlier, bin Laden let it be known during his interview with Hamid Mir in November 2001 that he possessed the nukes and was prepared to use them. He said: "I wish to declare that if America used chemical weapons or nuclear weapons against us, then we may retort with chemical and nuclear weapons. We have the weapons as deterrent." When Mir asked the terrorist leader where he had obtained such weapons, bin Laden said: " Go on to the next question." As the interview continued, bin Laden told Mir that it had been relatively easy for al Qaeda to obtain the nukes. "It is not difficult, not if you have contacts in Russia with other militant groups. They are available for $10 million and $20 million." At this stage in the exchange, Ayman al- Zawahiri, bin Laden's chief strategist, interjected: "If you go to BBC reports, you will find that thirty nuclear weapons are missing from Russia's arsenal." Al-Zawahiri smiled and added: "We have links with Russia's underworld channels."
Bin Laden made more additions to his nuclear arsenal. In 1998 he purchased twenty nuclear warheads from Kazakhstan, Turkmentistan, Russia, and the Ukraine. At the al Qaeda laboratories, scientists removed the active uranium and plutonium so that they could be processed and placed within backpack-sized nukes for easier transportation and less chance of detection.
This account, too, had been ignored by the national media even when empirical confirmation was provided by a disturbing incident. In October 2001 the Mossad arrested al al Qaeda operative as he attempted to enter Israel through Palestinian territories at a border checkpoint in Pamallah. Concerning the arrest, and Israeli official said: "There was only one individual involved. He was from Pakistan." First reports of the incident in the international press spoke of the detection of radioacative material in the backpack, causing journalists to assume that the terrorist must have ben carrying a radiological bomb. But, after reinterviewing the sources, United Press International and other reliable news sources came to the conclusion that the device was a tactical nuclear weapon. Israeli intelligence refuse to issue an official comment but did confirm that the device was a complete weapon that required no assembly and could have been detonated by the operative. CIA officials later concluded that the backpack represented a plutonium-implosion bomb and not a "dirty nuke." The proof positive had been provided. But, in the heyday of news carnivals about Michael Jackson, Martha Stewart, and the "runaway bride," few were paying attention. -
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Re: Al Qaeda's Nuclear Inventory
Sun, May 10, 2009 - 9:21 PMCivilizations die all the time in this universe. -
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Re: Al Qaeda's Nuclear Inventory
Wed, October 14, 2009 - 4:32 AMNuclear weapons are not the source of the problem. Basic unbridled corruption incites these activities and concerns. In an ethical world where all governments strive for the most ethical solutions, is there a need for military weapons of mass destruction?
eliminate-all-corruption.pbworks.com
To stop corruption a highly skilled and funded team of specialists needs to continually monitor for and stifle the seeds of corruption; which eventually requires only occasional maintenance. But initially, the weed patch needs considerable tending.
The link provides access to a complete system for ethically eliminating all corruption.
eliminate-all-corruption.pbworks.com
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