Jihadi Du Jour: Al-Qaida able to build Nuke inside the US

WND has an article today about a report published in Foriegn Policy magazine called, "The Bomb in the Backyard".

WASHINGTON – Terrorists could assemble a small group of fewer than 20 to construct a Hiroshima-size nuclear bomb, purchase the fissionable uranium needed and transport it to the U.S. city of their choice for less than $10 million, says a new report published in the November-December issue of Foreign Policy.

"The Bomb in the Backyard" was the result of the investigative work of Peter D. Zimmerman and Jeffrey G. Lewis. Zimmerman is professor of science and security in the Department of War Studies at King's College in London and previously served as chief scientist of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee and chief scientist of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. Lewis is executive director of the Managing the Atom Project at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.

"To put it in strictly commercial terms, terrorists would likely find a nuclear attack cost effective," they write in the article. "The simple appeal of nuclear terrorism can be illustrated with a hypothetical situation. A failed nuclear detonation, one that produced only a few tens of tons in yield, could kill 10,000 people in just a few hours if the device exploded in a crowded financial center. Not only would 10,000 persons represent the ipward limit of a conventional terrorist attack, but that figure would exceed the combined casualties in all of al-Qaida's attacks over the entire history of the organization."

And that's the "worst-case" scenario for the terrorists, the authors point out. If "successful," the nuclear detonation would kill 10 times more people – 100,000.

Without giving away any information about the assembling of such a device that cannot already be found easily on the Internet, Zimmerman and Lewis construct a scenario for building a nuclear bomb within the U.S. for a budget of less than $10 million – finding it can done with a small team of about 19, the same number of people involved in the Sept. 11 attacks.

"It is certainly possible that a terrorist group might not want to risk detection within U.S. borders and would prefer to make the bomb overseas," they write. "But, for purposes of this hypothetical situation, we chose a scenario that would be far less uncertain for the terrorists by eliminating the risks of moving the bomb across a border."

The article also notes that in November of 2004 Adnan el-Shukrijumah allegedly hijacked a Piper PA Pawnee cropduster from Ejido Queretaro near Mexicali to transport a nuclear weapon and nuclear equipment into the U.S., according to Paul Williams, a former FBI consultant and author of "The Dunces of Doomsday."

"He is an American and a friend of Muhammad Atta, who led 9/11 attacks five years ago," said Dawood. "We call him 'Jaffer al Tayyar' (Jafer the Pilot); he is very brave and intelligent. (President) Bush is aware that brother Adnan has smuggled deadly materials inside America from the Mexican border. Bush is silent about him, because he doesn’t want to panic his people. Sheikh Osama bin Laden has completed his cycle of warnings. You know, he is man of his words, he is not a politician; he always does what he says. If he said it many times that Americans will see new attacks, they will definitely see new attacks. He is a real mujahid. Americans will not win this war, which they have started against Muslims. Americans are the biggest supporters of the biggest terrorist in the world, which is Israel."

Hypothetical situation...maybe to build a bomb in the US. But the state of the US border and the nerve and determination of our enemies does seem to make it a believable scenario.

Labels: Adnan G. El Shukrijumah, American Hiroshima, National Security, Nuclear Terrorism, Nuclear Threat