How To Steal Explosives And Build A Fission Bomb

Josh Marshall writes about how intept war planning let the Iraqi insurgency get hundreds of tons of super high-quality explosives that they've used to kill our troops and radically undermine our efforts to build Iraqi security forces. The explosives in question were, before the war, under guard by the IAEA because these are the sort of explosives you use in building nuclear weapons. As I understand it, these sorts of high-grade explosives are not strictly necessary for the construction of a nuclear weapon. I'm not a nuclear engineer (in case you hadn't guessed) by my understanding is that a gun-triggered fission device doesn't require this sort of thing. The high-explosives are in case you're trying to build an implosion-trigged fission device. The latter bomb design is more efficient -- i.e., you get a bigger explosion per unit of highly-enriched uranium. On the other hand, the gun-triggered devices present less-daunting engineering problems along several dimensions, so there's reason to believe this is the kind of thing a terrorist outfit would try to build anyway.

As a side note, it's worth keeping in mind that when we talk about nuclear proliferation scenarios, especially with regards to terrorists, we're primarily talking about modest-sized fission devices of the sort that are in the Pakistani arsenal and are easier to build in general. It sounds silly to say that, but these bombs aren't nearly as destructive as what most people think of when they hear "nuclear bomb." America's collective consciousness of nuclear weapons derives from Cold War scenarios involving the exchange of very large, ICBM-launched, fusion devices which are far more destructive.