Weapons of Mass Sensationalism

The last time that a "Weapon of Mass Destruction" was used on any significantly effective scale was August 9th of 1945, when a little Japanese town mostly ceased to exist. It is a little know fact that that instance was not the most destructive bombing of the Home Islands that year. Neither was the bombing of Hiroshima a few days earlier. The most telling bombing was of Tokyo over March 9-10, when over 100,000 thousand people were killed by America's creative use of incendiary weapons against a city where the primary building materials were wood and paper. But there's no denying that the nukes were more dramatic, and were an excellent use of a terror weapon.

Imagine being the ruling military junta of Japan. It's August 10, 1945. Hiroshima was a bustling city four days ago. Nagasaki was a bustling city yesterday. It's been a while since you even pretended to be able to stop the B-29s from dropping shit on you. How long will the Americans be able to continue obliterating entire cities at 3-day intervals? Do you wait until the 12th, just to see what happens? Incidentally, they didn't. They decided to tender unconditional surrender THAT DAY, although it took a few weeks to overcome a minor coup d'etat and work out the various formalities.

We have seen minor uses of chemical weapons since then - sometimes every against military targets - and there has always been widespread paranoia about biological warfare, notwithstanding the lack of any effective track record. The simple fact is that weapons of mass destruction are either very hard to make, very hard to use, or both.

Lets go alphabetically, shall we? The formation of extremely virulent biological weapons is actual directly contrary to evolution. Germs are organisms, and thus naturally predisposed towards evolution which results in them living longer. A germ that instantly kills the host would never last; a host needs to live long enough to carry the germ to another host. The pressures of natural selection dictate that, over time, germs reach symbiosis with hosts, rather than becoming more and more deadly to the host. E. coli, for example, is a germ that most people fear. Never mind the fact that every human on the planet has E. coli resident in their digestive tract, where the bugs provide good service to humanity in turning food into energy. It has been co-existing with humanity for so long that - a few quirks aside - we actually help each other survive.

Any effort to create a supervirus goes against this trend, and this - to be blunt - is the reason that pandemics happen so rarely. Pandemics are no better for the germs than they are for the host, as the death of the host leaves the germs no place to live. This is a tough hurdle to overcome, since nature already has cornered the market on the most effective ways for germs to damage people, but not so badly that the germs are left without a home. Google "AIDS" and "influenza."

So biological threats, either natural or man-made, are not the great looming spectre that the media and governments try to portray them as. If you have good personal hygiene and enough sense to thing thoughts like "Gee, I'm not feeling very well. I should probably take it easy until my body fights it off," you're evolved enough to get through most biological problems.

Chemical warfare is not much greater a threat. There are certainly substances that are amazingly lethal, and a chemistry grad-student can make them in a home lab. But even organophosphates (nerve agents like Tabun, Sarin or VX) have a certain minimum dose that must be reached, and all have clear symptoms before you reach deadly levels. Also, there's only so much of the chemical to be delivered agent in any given delivery system (be the delivery system a bomb or a spray can or whatever). Thus, there is a built-in dilemma: to kill people, you have to concentrate your finite amount of poison against the targets, to heighten the chance of each target receiving a lethal dose. But to kill A LOT of people, you have to spread your finite amount of poison as broadly as you can. The compromise that is reached is that weapon designers try to fill an area with enough agent to give a lethal dose to a normal person, within space of the period that the weapon designer expects such normal person to linger in the area being targeted. People tend to move quickly along streets and sidewalks, so you need a very high concentration of chemical agent to area in order to affect them during the short time they're within the area. For the most part, chemical attacks only work in confined places, where people spend time standing around in the same spot, and (ideally) where they are unable to move into clean areas to get to fresh air. Subway trains and stations, for example.

But almost always, the time period required to receive a lethal dose is measured in minutes and seconds, rather than simply in seconds. (Adjusted for health, of course; takes less to kill an ailing sexagenarian than a 22 year old triathlete.) In general, if you're smart enough to think thoughts like "Gee, the air around here is a bit strange and making me nauseous; I should probably go find some fresh air," you're evolved enough to survive most chemical attacks.

Interestingly, the chemical agent that will cause the most damage from very short-term exposure is not a high-tech organophosphate nerve gas, but is mustard agents much like those being used back in 1918. 10 seconds of a less-than lethal-dose sarin gas will leave you cranky, irritable, and having bad dreams, from the lingering effect of miss-behaving neural connections. But 10 seconds of a less than lethal dose of mustard gas might leave you with open chemical burns, massively damaged eyes and mucus membranes, and severe respiration problems from chemical burns inside your lungs. Nasty shit, in many ways worse than anything developed since. But its not something that's going to wipe out a city. Chemical weapons just don't work that way.

Which brings us to nukes, the holy grail of the WMD topic. Lets put aside for now the idea of a nuclear military strike, and focus instead on a terrorist strike, perhaps inside the United States. Accept at the outset that such an event is extremely unlikely to EVER happen, both because of the nature of the weapon, and efforts to prevent such events from happening.

First, the weapon. As said previously, nukes are REALLY not all that complicated. You build a sphere (or cylinder) of low-grade, non-fissile uranium, containing a mixture of deuterium and tritium, and cored with a sphere (or tube) of fissile uranium. Then, right next to that sphere or tube, you put an atomic bomb. Which is really just a sphere of plutonium or high-grade (fissile) uranium inside another sphere of high-grade conventional explosives (C4 will work in a pinch). When you set of the conventional explosives of the atomic bomb, it squeezes down the plutonium or fissile uranium into a volume so small that randomly released subatomic particles of the compressed material cannot help but strike the nuclei of nearby heavy atoms, creating a chain reaction, which turns into an atomic explosion: Nuclear fission, a la Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Under the heat and pressure and bombardment of subatomic particles from the nearby fission blast, the deuterium and tritium in the other (secondary) assembly will undergo nuclear FUSION, sparked by the high-grade uranium core of the deuterium/tritium assembly (which responds instantaneously to the bombardment of sub-atomic particles the moment the fission blast goes off). The result is a miniature sun, which induces further fission into the normally non-fissile uranium casing of the deuterium/tritium assembly (which induced fission actually accounts for about half of the explosive yield). The results that are truly spectacular. So spectacular, in fact, that you don't want to observe them from a distance measured in anything less than round miles.

Like I said, there aren't even any moving parts! Yet in the last 50 years, only a handful of countries have been able to build these things.

The reason is the materials. Deuterium and tritium ("heavy water") are not so rare in the industrial world. But you need to have the right stuff. You also need a lot more heavy water than just the bomb components, since you'll use quite a bit processing your uranium, which is the real pain in the ass part of the process. Plutonium is exceedingly rare, dangerous, and difficult to work with, so most non-American bombs are made from uranium.

"Weapon grade" uranium is uranium that is at least 85% U235, although your uranium is usable in a bomb (becomes fissile) at about 20% U235. The problem is that less than 1% of naturally-occurring uranium is U235, the remainder being a different, slightly heavier isotope, U238. To get 65 or so kilos of fissile uranium for your bomb, you should expect to process over a ton of pure uranium. Since you're almost certainly going to have to start with some form of uranium other than the pure stuff, odds are you're going to have to separate the choice atoms you need from uranium ore: several hundred tons of mostly useless, slightly radioactive dirt. When you're done getting the U235, you'll also have U238 to build the components of your secondary casing, so don't worry about that. In fact, you'll have enough U238 left over for other things too, like improving the armor on your tanks and the lethality of your bullets, both of which applications are served well by the great mass of uranium.

So. You've got your mountain of uranium ore. Now you need a bunch of centrifuges. These are just machines with containers on the end of spinning arms. You fill the containers with material, and then start them spinning. Inside the containers, heavy particles get forced by centrifugal force away from the center of the spin. Because uranium is heavier than pretty much anything else that might be in your ore, it gets forced to the outside, and lighter materials settle towards the center of the spin. Keep spinning your ore and harvesting the outer layers, and eventually it's not ore anymore, it's uranium.

But then you have to start over again, because you need more than just uranium, you need U235. So you repeat the process, this time skimming off not the heavy stuff furthest from the center of the spin, but the light stuff closest to the spin axis. Because the U238 atoms are just over 1% heavier than U235 atoms, the spinning will tend to force the U238 to the outside of the spinning centrifuge, and any U235 atoms (remember, it's less than 1% of all uranium) will settle towards the center. Do this in a thousand or so centrifuges, repeating the process over and over again on the material from the center areas of other centrifuges, and you will eventually you will have enough U235 to build your bomb.

But once you've got the materials, you're home free. At least until you want to set your bomb off, but we'll get to that later.

Even considering that this is a huge oversimplification of the process, I hope you see what's involved in obtaining nukes, and understand why the Manhattan project was, up to that time, the most expensive research project ever undertaken by mankind. And I hope you also appreciate how difficult and expensive it is to build nuclear weapons, notwithstanding how simple the design is. People who have nukes rightfully value them far too highly to be giving them away, because every time you want another one, you have to come up with more materials. Another three thousand centrifuges spinning for three thousand hours. Sorry. Not for sale.

Even backed by Saudi Princes and oil money, Pakistan (for example) LITERALLY could not be offered enough money to give one over. They might sell a few centrifuges, or their excess ore, and perhaps even their unrefined uranium, but an actual Bomb? No way.

There are also the additional political reasons. Besides world reaction if word ever got out that terrorists had one of your bombs (it's not like there are a lot of people making them, after all), and besides the risk of one of your own billion-dollar weapons being turned against you, there is the political value you yield by losing a nuke. As said in the prior post, nuclear weapons are the ONLY reason that Pakistan is taken seriously, as comparted to places like Sudan, Liberia, or Venezuela. They are guarded accordingly, and I doubt sale is even contemplated. A man does not sell his bullets when he only has a handfull of them in the face of a hostile world.

Nuclear weapons, for both political reasons and for economic reasons, are, in fact, priceless, they cannot realistically be bought from the nations that build them. Further, people who are not allowed to have them but who are trying to get them can be prevented from building them, either by denying them access to the ore and other exotic materials, or by periodically blowing up some or all of the thousands of centrifuges needed for the process, thereby sending the nuclear aspirant back to square one.

Now, I've written quite a lot, and I'm going to go drink beer. Which means that the second part of the lesson (why - in addition to the problems of getting a nuke - human efforts make a terrorist nuclear attack pretty much fiction) will have to wait until next time. I hope this was interesting nonetheless.