Nuclear Danger or Embarrassing Boo-Boo?

Nuclear Danger or Embarrassing Boo-Boo?
Tuesday, June 13, 2000

By Michael Y. Park

The loss of two hard drives containing classified data on U.S. and Russian nuclear weapons does not pose a great danger to world safety since the information was geared toward defusing warheads, not creating them, experts say.

"If some terrorist group might feel a simple bomb is all they need, they don't need to steal these disks," said Charles Ferguson, director of the Nuclear Policy Project of the Federation of American Scientists. "My sense is that they would need to know a lot more than what was stored on those disks."

While the principles involved in making a simple atomic bomb are relatively well-known, what more often keeps terrorist groups and certain nations from making their own nuclear weapons are the radioactive materials required.

News of the theft could actually be comforting to other nations, according to Sir Laurence Martin, the Arleigh A. Burke chair in strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

"If you're going to lose highly classified information, this is probably as good a kind to lose as any," he said. "It's not the kind of information that would lead to situations where other countries would accuse the U.S. of unsafe or undesirable practices. On the contrary, it shows the kind of preparation the U.S. would have made should one of its weapons be dropped in the wrong place, or be involved in some crash — there would be experts on the spot who could make them safe."

Martin said the information on the drives would not be in great demand, perhaps fetching "a few bucks" on the international espionage market.

"Like in a spy novel, these laptop computers may have been targets of opportunity for some agent," he said. "But if I were a leader in Baghdad or Tehran trying to figure out how to make my own nuclear weapon, these drives would not be on my shopping list."

Ferguson said the worst-case scenario would be far-fetched even by spy-movie standards.

"It could be like a James Bond The World Is Not Enough movie, where you have someone go in and somehow get past the armed guards, get access to one of these weapons and perhaps the information on the disk could be enough to disarm the explosives needed to make the bomb go off — all to then safely break the bomb open and grab the fissile material inside," Ferguson said.

Of course, Ferguson noted, it might be easier to steal nuclear materials from hundreds of sites throughout the world, rather than prying it out of a live nuclear warhead.