What would it cost a terrorist group to stage a nuclear attack on a city?
Peter Zimmerman (Department of War Studies at King's Collect London) and Jeffrey Lewis (John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard) add it up in the Nov/Dec issue of Foreign Policy (The Bomb in the Backyard - subscription required).
Zimmerman and Lewis assume an attack mounted against a U.S. city from within the U.S. (to avoid the security issues raised by bringing the bomb across the U.S. border). That is a somewhat different scenario from this: Suppose terrorists set off a nuclear bomb in a container in the Port of Long Beach? (Ben Muse, August 20, 2006).
The bomb would be "a crude but well-known design concept, widely available on the Internet, that is similar to the device that the United States used when it bombed Hiroshima." The finished bomb would be less than nine feet long.
It would take about a year, and a relatively remote site (say an old ranch in Texas, or perhaps Wyoming). It could be done with 19 persons (the size of the team that carried out the 9-11 terror attacks). Total cost is somewhere between $4.4 million and $6.4 million. The costs break out this way:
- Senior physicist and post-doc level assistants to design the device over three to six months ($200,000)
- Metallurgy and casting ($270,000)
- Precision machining and construction ($230,000)
- Gun design, assembly, and testing ($230,000)
- Electronics, Arming, Fusing, and Firing ($150,000)
- Purchase and infrastructure improvements to the ranch ($200,000)
- Fissile material ($3,000,000 to $5,000,000)
- Transporting the bomb to the attack site ($153,000)
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