Osama s Revenge: What the Media and the Government Haven t Told You

£11.21

Sensational, But Thought Provoking - Williams thesis is that Al Qaeda used the enormous profits of its heroin and opium operations to purchase several suitcase nuclear weapons from Russian criminals. The suitcase nukes, which are hard to maintain, have supposedly been made ready for use by rogue Russian and Pakistani scientists. Worse yet, claims Williams, these weapons have already been deployed to Al Qaeda terrorist cells in several major cities in the United States, ready for an American Hiroshima that will kill upwards of 4 million Americans and devastate the world s economy. Williams claims are sensational, and they must be taken with a large grain of salt. His chapter notes show that Williams relied on newspaper articles, internet sources and rumor rather than privileged access to military intelligence. And the proposition that nuclear weapons are in the hands of Islamists begs a couple of key questions: why haven t they been used against the Russians, who have many mortal enemies in Chechnya? For that matter. why haven t they already been detonated in America, Europe, Iraq or Afghanistan? Williams hints at some possible answers. Perhaps Al Qaeda has the weapons, but they are unreliable and difficult to maintain. Perhas bin Laden is just waiting for the right anniversary date--say, an October 7 (the start of the war in Afghanistan), or a January 15 (the start of the First Gulf War), or even a November 27 (the anniversary of Pope Urban s call for crusade in 1095). Above all, Williams argues, bin Laden and al Qaeda are patient--the fact that a nuclear weapon hasn t gone off yet is no comfort that al Qaeda isn t working hard to make it happen. Another possibility is that al Qaeda understands that the nuclear destruction of one or more American cities could very easily lead to a savage retaliation by the United States. Even bin Laden may be unwilling to pick the ultimate fight with an adversary that is equipped with a large arsenal of thermonuclear warheads, coupled with an historic tendency to make a desert and call it peace. In the face of an American Hiroshima, doubtless followed by news reports of celebrations in the Islamic world, I suspect that the American public and its leaders would be very hard to restrain. Still, the threat is so dangerous that it has to be taken seriously. Imagine a single nuclear weapon exploding in Long Beach, California, which handles a huge proportion of the imports coming into the United States--apart from the tragic and enormous loss of life, the world economy (not just America s) would be plunged into a depression overnight. For a more plausible but equally disturbing take on the nuclear threat, read Graham Allison s Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe. Allison s argument is that the real nuclear threat comes from unprotected stockpiles of enriched uranium 235 in the former Soviet Union. The Bush Administration has drastically cut the funding for programs that were intended to secure these stockpiles, and Allison makes a very cogent argument that the war in Iraq has distracted the United States from the critical task of keeping Russian uranium out of the hands of terrorists. If a nuclear weapon does explode in the US, it may very well be a U-235 fission device (like the bomb dropped on Hiroshima) delivered by containership to a major port (Long Beach, New Orleans, Houston, Boston, or New York). Remember, U-235 weapons are so well understood and reliable that the one dropped on Hiroshima was not even tested--it was the much trickier plutonium implosion bomb that was the subject of the famous July 1945 test at Alamagordo. In 1945, the problem with a U-235 bomb was that it took an entire year to make enough enriched uranium for just one bomb--the Russians have solved that problem for al Qaeda and have left tons of material in scores of poorly proected sites.