OVERVIEW

The first question we must explore is whether a successful theft of nuclear materials from the nuclear power industry would pose a genuine threat. Could some of the materials used as nuclear fuel in the power industry be used in weapons? Are these materials present in the industry in forms and quantities that are practical for the illicit manufacture of bombs? If a thief succeeds in making a nuclear weapon from these materials, how much damage might he cause?

Every educated person already knows the single most essential fact about how to make nuclear explosives: they work. Before the first atomic bomb exploded in the Trinity test near Alamogordo, New Mexico, in 1945, no one knew for certain that it would work. There was a possibility that the kind of fission chain reaction which had been sustained in the Chicago pile could not be accelerated to produce a large explosion. Indeed, some of the Los Alamos weapon design group strongly suspected that Trinity would not explode. A "pool" of yield estimates made before the test ranged from little more than the yield of the high explosive used to trigger the nuclear explosion to several tens of kilotons. (A kiloton is a unit of energy equal to the energy released by the explosion of one thousand tons of TNT. A megaton corresponds to the energy released by exploding one million tons of TNT.) The actual yield, close to twenty kilotons, was significantly greater than most of the estimates made before the test.

The certainty that an idea will work in principle is a large step toward finding ways to carry it out. During the twenty-eight years since the Trinity test much has happened to make it easier to design and fabricate a nuclear explosive, and to provide a high degree of confidence that the design will be successful. The first fission explosives built in the USSR, the United