Was North Korea’s Blast a Suitcase Nuke? Not Likely.

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by Richard Miniter

North Korea’s surprisingly small blast – estimated at less than one kiloton – has produced three reactions across the web. It was dud (or misfire), a fake (perhaps using a synchronized detonation of some 800 tons of TNT) or the world’s first suitcase-sized nuclear explosion.

While one of the first two seems most likely, the third possibility is the most frightening. The specter of the nuclear suitcase bomb is particularly potent because it fuses two kinds of terror: the horrible images of Hiroshima and the suicide bomber, the unseen shark amid the swimmers. The fear of a suitcase nuke, like the bomb itself, packs a powerful punch in a smallpackage.

There are plenty of good reasons to worry. North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il is erratic and ha ties to terrorists and drug lords. (Indeed, illegal drugs are a major component of North Korea’s miniscule $10 billion GDP.) Those drug smuggling routes could be used to ship so-called nuclear suitcases to terrorists. And let’s not forget, another dictatorship led by an erratic messianic leader eager for atomic weapons. We know that North Korea and Iran have shared missile and bomb technology and that Iran seems to be having problems with overheating centrifuges that may be slowing its uranium enrichment efforts. They could use a suitcase nuke right about now.

So should we worry about North Korean suitcase nukes?

On balance, I think we have little to fear from a suitcase-sized atomic device. Indeed, the evidence shows that this class of weapon no longer exists and would be difficult to re-engineer. We are being haunted by an Internet myth.

Every version of the nuclear suitcase bomb scare relies on one or more strands of evidence, two from different Russians and one from a former assistant secretary of defense. The scare started, in its current form, with Russian general Alexander Lebed, who told a U.S. congressional delegation visiting Moscow in 1997—and, later that year, CBS’s series 60 Minutes—that a number of Soviet-era nuclear suitcase bombs were missing.

Lebed’s claims were amplified when Stanislav Lunev, the highest-ranking Soviet military intelligence officer ever to defect to the United States, told a congressional panel that same year that Soviet special forces might have smuggled a number of portable nuclear bombs onto the U.S. mainland to be detonated if the Cold War ever got hot. The scare grew again when Graham Allison, a Harvard professor who served as an assistant secretary of defense under President Clinton, wrote a book called Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe. In that slim volume, Allison worries about stolen warheads, self-made bombs, and suitcase nukes. Published in 2004, the work has been widely cited by the press and across the blogosphere.

Let’s walk back the cat, as they say in intelligence circles. The foundation of all main nuclear suitcase stories is a string of interviews given by General Lebed in 1997. Lebed told a visiting congressional delegation in June 1997 that the Kremlin was concerned that its arsenal of one hundred suitcase-sized nuclear bombs would find their way to Chechen rebels or other Islamic terrorists. He said that he had tried to account for all one hundred but could find only forty-eight. That meant fifty-two were missing. He said the bombs would fit “in a 60-by-40-by-20 centimeter case” and would be “an ideal weapon for nuclear terror. The warhead is activated by one personand easy to transport.” It would later emerge that none of these statements were true.

Later that year, the Russian general sat down with Steve Kroft, an anchor for 60 Minutes. The exchange could hardly have been more alarming.

Kroft: Are you confident that all of these weapons are secure and accounted for?
General Alexander Lebed: (through a translator) 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 form of a suitcase. It is a suitcase, actually. You can carry it. You can put it into another suitcase if you want to.
Kroft: But it’s already in 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 suitcase?
Lebed: Yes, indeed.
Kroft: How easy is it to detonate?
Lebed: It would take twenty, 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 that 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 of them are even outside those countries. One person is capable of actuating this nuclear weapon—one person.
Kroft: So you’re saying these weapons are no longer under the control
of the Russian military.
Lebed: I’m saying that more than one hundred weapons out of the supposed number of 250 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.

Nearly everything Lebed told visiting congressmen and 60 Minutes was later contradicted, sometimes by Lebed himself. In subsequent news accounts, he said forty-one bombs were missing, at other times he pegged the number at fifty-two or sixty-two, eighty-four or even one hundred. When asked about this disparity, he told the Washington Post that he “did not have time to find out how many such weapons there were.” If this sounds breezy or cavalier, that is because it is.

Indeed, General Lebed never seemed to have made a serious investigation at all. A Russian official later pointed out that Lebed never visited the facility that houses all of Russia’s nuclear weapons or met with its staff. And Lebed—who died in a plane crash in 2002—had a history
of telling tall tales.

As for the small size of the weapons and the notion that they can be detonated by one person, those claims also been authoritatively dismissed. The only U.S. government official to publicly admit seeing a suitcase-sized nuclear device is Rose Gottemoeller. As a Defense Department official, she visited Russia and the Ukraine to monitor compliance with disarmament treaties in the early 1990s. The Soviet-era weapon “actually required three footlockers and a team of several people to detonate,” she said. “It was not something you could toss in your shoulder bag and carry on a plane or bus.” Later, in an e-mail sent to me from Moscow, she wearily wondered why the suitcase nuke story would never die.

Lebed’s onetime deputy, Vladimir Denisov, said he headed a special investigation in July 1996—almost a year before Lebed made his charges—and found that no army field units had portable nuclear weapons of any kind. All portable nuclear devices—which are much bigger than a suitcase—were stored at a central facility under heavy guard. Lieutenant General Igor Valynkin, chief of the Russian Defense Ministry’s 12th Main Directorate, which oversees all nuclear weapons, denied that any weapons were missing. “Nuclear suitcases … were never produced and are not produced,” he said. While he acknowledged that they were technically possible to make, he said the weapon would have “a life span of only several months” and would therefore be too costly to maintain.

Valynkin is referring to the fact that radioactive weapons require a lot of shielding. To fit the radioactive material and the appropriate shielding into a suitcase would mean that a very small amount of material would have to be used. Radioactive material decays at a steady, certain rate, expressed as “half-life,” or the length of time it takes for half of the material to decay into harmless elements. The half-life of the most likely materials in the infinitesimal weights necessary to fit in a suitcase is a few months. There are other technical problems: as the radioactive mass decays, it changes shape (a problem called “spalling”) which makes it harder to detonate. And the triggers last only six months before heat renders them inoperable. So as a matter of physics and engineering, the nuclear suitcase is an impractical weapon. It would have to be rebuilt with new radioactive elements every few months.

Valynkin’s answer was later expanded by Viktor Yesin, the former chief of staff of Russia’s Strategic Missile Forces. Yesin was asked by Alexander Golts, a reporter at the Russian newspaper Ezhenedelny Zhurnal: “The nuclear suitcases—are they myth or reality?”

Here is what Yesin said: Let’s start by noting that “nuclear suitcase” is a term coined by journalists. Journalistic parlance, if you wish. The matter concerns special compact nuclear devices of knapsack type. Igor Valynkin, commander of the 12th Main Directorate of the Defense Ministry responsible for nuclear ordnance storage, was absolutely honest when he was saying in an interview with Nezavisimaya Gazeta in 1997 that “there have never been any nuclear suitcases, grips, handbags, or other carryalls.” As for special compact nuclear devices, the Americans were the first to assemble them. They were called Special Atomic Demolition Munitions (SADM). As of 1964, the U.S. Army and Marine Corps had two models of SADM at their disposal—M-129 and M-159. Each SADM measured 87 x 65 x 67 centimeters [34 x 26 x 26 inches]. A container with the backpack weighed 70 kilograms [154 lbs.]. There were about 300 SADMs in all. The foreign media reported that all these devices were dismantled and disposed of within the framework of the unilateral disarmament initiatives declared by the first President Bush in late 1991 and early 1992. The Soviet Union initiated production of special compact nuclear devices in 1967. These munitions were called special
mines. There were fewer models of them in the Soviet Union than in the United States. All of these munitions were to be dismantled before 2000 in accordance with the Russian and American commitments concerning reduction of tactical nuclear weapons dated 1991. [When the Soviet Union collapsed, Yeltsin reiterated the commitment in January 1992.] Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov said at the conference on the Nuclear Weapons Nonproliferation Treaty in April 2000 that Russia had practically completed dismantling
“nuclear mines.” It means that Russia kept the promise Yeltsin once made to the international community.14

Yesin added that all “portable” nuclear weapons were strictly controlled by the KGB in the Soviet era and were held in a single facility on Russian soil, where they were regularly counted before they were dismantled. The special mines that the press calls “nuclear suitcases” are no more. American officials, including Gottemoeller, insist that there is no evidence that any are missing, stolen, or sold. American experts charged with monitoring the destruction of these weapons have repeatedly testified to Congress that no special mines are unaccounted for.

What about the Russian army units trained to use the special mines? Is it possible that a few such weapons remain in their hands? According to Yesin, “they always used simulators and dummy weapons. Needless to say, the latter looked like the real thing—the same size and weight, the same control panel. Instead of nuclear materials, however, they contained sand.”

Despite Lebed’s many changing accounts, his reputation for exaggeration, and the denial of nearly every Russian official with knowledge of Russian nuclear weapons, his tale lives on in breathless newspaper articles and web posts. Perhaps the most amusing was an article in the SundayExpress (London) claiming that al Qaeda bought twenty “nuclear suitcases for 25 million pounds” (roughly $45 million) from “Boris” and “Alexy.” What, not Natasha? Still, Graham Allison puts his faith in Lebed’s story. How does Allison account for the high-level rebuttals? He makes two brief arguments. “Moscow’s assurance that ‘all nuclear weapons are accounted for’ is wishful thinking, since at least four nuclear submarines with nuclear warheads sank and were never recovered by the Soviet Union.”17 (One was recovered by the U.S. in 1974.) This is true, but beside the point; the subs were carrying nuclear missiles, not nuclear suitcases.
Allison’s more pointed rebuttal is:

The Russian government reacted to Lebed’s claim in classic Soviet style, combing wholesale denial with efforts to discredit the messenger. In the days and months that followed, official government spokesmen claimed that (1) no such weapons ever existed; (2) any weapons of this sort had been destroyed; (3) all Russian weapons were secure and properly accounted for; and (4) it was inconceivable that the Russian government could lose a nuclear weapon. Assertions to the contrary, or even questions about the matter, were dismissed as anti-Russian propaganda or efforts at personal aggrandizement.18

Allison is unfairly summarizing the official Russian view. There is no contradiction between points (1) and (2) because (1) refers to suitcase nukes, a journalist term for a weapon that never existed. The portable nuclear devices—the special mines that filled three footlockers and weighed hundreds of pounds—were destroyed as required by U.S.–Russia treaties.

We don’t have to take Russia’s word for this; the disposal and destruction of these weapons were supervised by expert American officials like Gottemoeller. So point (2) checks out. As for points (3) and (4), Russia’s claims have been independently verified by U.S. officials. If Allison has specific evidence of misplaced nuclear suitcases, he doesn’t provide it in either the hardcover or paperback editions of his book or in his speeches to the Council on Foreign Relations or elsewhere.

What about the testimony of Soviet defector Colonel Stanislav Lunev? Certainly his tale is cloaked in high drama. Lunev entered the congressional hearing room in a black ski mask and testified behind a tall screen. He described a portable nuclear device that was “the size of a golf
club bag” and testified that “one of my main directives was to find drop sites for mass destruction weapons” that would be smuggled into the U.S. using drug routes and detonated by special teams. Lunev did not testify that he saw those weapons, only that, as a TASS reporter working in Washington, D.C. (his cover as a military intelligence officer), his job was
to scout for “drop sites.”

I tracked Lunev down in suburban Maryland, where he is battling lymphatic cancer. Over the phone, he sounds like a bear of a man, with a charming Russian accent. He calls me “Riche,” as in “Riche, you must switch off all recording devices.” When I say I have no such devices, only
a bad line, he agrees to call back. When he does, I ask him if he has ever seen a portable nuclear device. “No,” he says.

Then he asks if I have ever heard of Albuquerque, New Mexico. There is a museum there, he explains, that displays America’s portable nuclear device, the SADM. “The Soviet model probably looks similar,” he says, adding that he is not an expert in such things. So Lunev’s account proves nothing.

Finally, there is Graham Allison’s book. It is a serious and valuable work, with many practical suggestions for arresting the spread of nuclear technology. Still, Allison’s concerns about a nuclear suitcase-sized device rest on three shaky pillars: that Lebed was right about the missing suitcase nukes, that Stanislev Lunev’s account is persuasive, and that Russian nuclear security is lax.

As we have seen, General Lebed’s changing story is highly questionable and the nuclear mines have long since been dismantled. Allison himself concedes that nuclear suitcases might not be operative. Speaking at a Council on Foreign Relations conference in September 2004, Allison said that the weapons General Lebed referred to are now at least seven years old and that “many of these would be beyond warranty,” requiring extensive refurbishing to function at full power.20
Allison does not refer to Lunev by name, possibly because he does not know it. Lunev is not named in his congressional testimony and discovering his identity requires a bit of sleuthing. Allison does not cite Lunev’s book or even acknowledge talking to him. (Lunev, a friendly and direct fellow, has never heard of Allison.)

As for Allison’s contention that the Russians do not keep their nuclear weapons as secure as we do, he is quite right. But the Russians probably do well enough. Allison cites a number of cases in which nuclear material— though not bombs—was stolen from Russian reactors. Yet in each of the cases he cites, the thieves were caught before they could transfer the material. And the small amounts stolen could not have been, even if combined, converted into a single bomb. And there is no evidence that any of the Soviet Union’s “special mines” have gone missing.

For now, suitcase-sized nuclear bombs remain in the realm of James Bond movies. Given the limitations of physics and engineering, no nation seems to have invested the time and money to make them. Both U.S. and the USSR built nuclear mines (as well as artillery shells), which were small but hardly portable—and all were dismantled by treaty by 2000. Alexander Lebed’s claims and those of defector Stanislev Lunev were not based on direct observation. The one U.S. official who saw a small nuclear device said it was the size of three footlockers—hardly a suitcase. For now, the desire to obliterate cities is portable—inside the heads of believers— while, thankfully, the nuclear devices to bring that about are not.