US couple 'tried to pass nuclear secrets to Venezuela'

The US has charged a pair of former nuclear contractors with attempting to leak nuclear secrets to Venezuela. The husband and wife team were arrested on Friday in New Mexico and accused of passing nuclear information to an FBI agent posing as a Venezuelan spy. US citizens Pedro and Marjorie Mascheroni were contractors at Los Alamos National Laboratory, a centre of US nuclear research. The US justice department did not accuse Venezuela of wrongdoing. "The conduct alleged in this indictment is serious and should serve as a warning to anyone who would consider compromising our nation's nuclear secrets for profit," Assistant Attorney General David Kris said in a statement.

Mr Mascheroni, a 75-year-old native of Argentina, worked as a scientist at Los Alamos from 1979 until 1988, when he was fired after criticising US nuclear research funding priorities, according to court documents. Mrs Mascheroni was a technical writer and editor from 1981 to 2010, the justice department said. The pair had access to nuclear secrets, including material on the design and manufacture of nuclear weapons.

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Dirty bomb attack 'pretty likely' despite nuclear deal

A landmark summit of world leaders in Washington has agreed to secure vulnerable nuclear materials around the globe within four years. The pledge came in a final communique issued after summit host US president Barack Obama warned that nuclear material the "size of an apple" would be enough to kill thousands of people if it fell into the hands of terrorists. Tilman Ruff, Associate Professor at Melbourne University and chair of the International Campaign to Demolish Nuclear Weapons, says the possibility of terrorists getting hold of radioactive material and attaching it to a conventional explosive is highly likely. "Detonating it in a major city is the simplest and most likely form of nuclear terrorism. I think ... it's pretty likely that somewhere we'll see such an episode."

"These materials are still unfortunately widely available in thousands of locations. [But] the possibility of terrorists building a nuclear weapon will no doubt be diminished by the kind of work that this summit has accelerated." Professor Ruff says the damage such an attack could cause would be severe. "It wouldn't be a nuclear explosion, so it might kill immediately hundreds or thousands of people in a crowded city, rather than tens or hundreds of thousands even a relatively small nuclear weapon would," he said. "But it would contaminate potentially several square kilometres, for example, of a major city centre.

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New Nuclear Threat Tops Summit's Agenda

President Obama spent last week at home and in Prague concentrating on nuclear strategy, and nearly 50 world leaders will gather in Washington this week for a nuclear summit. The focus of these events shows that the global nuclear threat has shifted — from fears of an attack by a nuclear-armed superpower, to concerns about a nuclear-armed terrorist. In Prague on Thursday, Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev signed an arms reduction treaty in an effort to resolve a problem that emerged in the last century. "The United States and Russia are prepared to once again take leadership in moving in the direction of reducing reliance on nuclear weapons," Obama said.

"I think it is much more difficult to deal with a nuclear terrorist than with a nuclear-armed state," says Frank Miller, who oversaw U.S. nuclear weapons policy at the Pentagon. The knowledge that everyone would lose in traditional nuclear war has historically prevented countries from firing on each other, Miller says. That calculus doesn't apply with suicide bombers. "At the very minimum, they're probably not living in their own country. They're living on somebody else's soil. And how are you going to attack that host country's soil with nuclear weapons? It doesn't compute."

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Al Qaeda's Pursuit of Weapons of Mass Destruction

In 1998, al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden declared that acquiring and using weapons of mass destruction (WMD) was his Islamic duty -- an integral part of his jihad. Systemically, over the course of decades, he dispatched his top lieutenants to attempt to purchase or develop nuclear and biochemical WMD. He has never given up the goal; indeed, in a 2007 video, he repeated his promise to use massive weapons to upend the global status quo, destroy the capitalist hegemony, and help create an Islamic caliphate.

Since the mid-1990s, al Qaeda's WMD procurement efforts have been managed at the most senior levels, under rules of strict compartmentalization from lower levels of the organization, and with central control over possible targets and the timing of prospective attacks. The modus operandi has been top-down -- more similar to the 9/11 attacks than to more recent bottom-up efforts, like the attempted bombing of Flight 253. For instance, al Qaeda deputy chief Ayman al-Zawahiri personally shepherded the group's ultimately unsuccessful efforts to set off an anthrax attack in the United States.

Al Qaeda concentrated its efforts on nuclear devices in the run-up to the September 11, 2001 attacks. Based on the timing and nature of its WMD-related activity in the 1990s, al Qaeda hoped to use such weapons in the United States during an intensified campaign following the 9/11 attacks. There is no indication that the fundamental objectives that lie behind its WMD intent have changed over time.

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Nuclear attack: Terrorists vs U.S.

Confidential discussions with leaders throughout the Homeland Security Network of agencies reveal that the prevention of an atomic attack is not thorough in the United States. In fact, they indicate that nontraditional infiltration and detonation avenues are barely known and those that are known are barely covered. The entire East Coast of the United States is at risk of a nuclear attack, ranging through New York, D.C., Atlanta, and Orlando. With the Secretary of Homeland Security declaring that America is safe from any such attack one is left with asking, “How national security professionals think that it could happen?”

A briefing before national security professionals has revealed a particularly spooky scenario. One that is sure to run chills up the spine of anyone who learns of it and how unprepared the United States remains. It is an attack scenario that could occur at any moment and without any warning whatsoever. Naturally, those who know of it within the government are highly reluctant to allow themselves to be named.

Let’s go into an imaginary world for a moment. Imagine that a nuclear warhead built in Tehran, Iran and developed jointly by Iran, North Korea, and Russia becomes a multi-megaton reality. With the United States and its allies out of Iraq, Iran has an established transport pipe-line to Syria, a close political and religious ally. Imagine that a Gulfstream or Hawker long-range executive jet is modified internally to carry the warhead on a one way trip to the United States.

The aircraft departs Tehran, with its cargo, and lands at a Syrian Air Base located near Damascus for re-fueling and final checks of its deadly cargo. From Damascus, Syria the aircraft flies to an airport inside Bosnia. There, sympathetic officials who have been well compensated pencil-whip a non-existent customs inspection and allow refueling. It is then off again.

The aircraft flies normally across Europe, over Greenland, and over Iceland as it moves towards the final destination. Again, it continues to fly without its cargo being detected as U.S. airspace begins to get nearer. According to anonymous sources, there are no aircraft in the skies with super sensitive detectors in U.S. airspace searching for radiological signatures. It is an assumption that has not been directly inferred but hasn’t been squashed or corrected by the DHS, either. People just assume that U.S. technology exists to detect this rather simply approach by enemy force. The reality is that such an approach would happen without hindrance or detection. That is what makes this scenario so worrisome to national security experts, military strategists, and the public in general

When the aircraft enters American Airspace it continues on to whatever city airport, most likely an international airport, it has listed on its flight plan. As it approaches the airport, the co-pilot walks to the back of the plane and performs the final arming processes following the controlled decompression of the cabin. Decompressing the cabin allows a barometric pressure sensitive detonator to have a more accurate reading of altitude. It will detonate the bomb at a given altitude which is detected by air pressure. Altitude is key in maximizing the effect of a nuclear explosion.

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Toward an Intelligence-based Nuclear Cooperation Regime

Russian-American collaboration against the spread of nuclear weapons needs to extend beyond conventional threat reduction programs underway in Russia and elsewhere for the past 15 years, to include the difficult and relatively uncharted area of sharing proliferation-relevant information, some of which may be sensitive. Our intelligence services, which now devote vast resources to spying on each other, could join forces by sharing information on states and terrorist groups intent on developing nuclear weapons, including their clandestine procurement attempts. This process could include sharing and comparing open-source information, information on the probable source of nuclear materials seized in transit, or clandestinely acquired information on groups and individuals involved in nuclear trafficking.

Intelligence cooperation is vitally important, because the current nonproliferation regime is essentially reactive and containment-oriented. It is not well equipped to deal with the smuggling activities and nuclear procurement conspiracies of nation-states and terrorists. The nonproliferation treaty (NPT) and associated conventions and agreements obligate states in various ways, but of course do not bind sub-state actors or non-state entities. Besides, signatory states have been known to cheat, either maintaining covert weapons programs or helping those who do. Also, the ability of states to keep their nuclear houses in order has proved problematic in the past, especially in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse.

"Toward an Intelligence-based Nuclear Cooperation Regime", Foreign Policy Research Institute, July 2009.

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