Is An Al Qaeda Armed With Nuclear Weapons The Stuff Of Fiction?

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Technologically adept espionage thrillers, particularly these that concentrate on credible threats from Al Qaeda, can often grab you and never ever allow you to go. The anxiousness they generate is existential and visceral. They bring back undesirable memories of 9/11. And they reinforce our worry that bad factors from time to time really do happen in our flawed globe. Most terrifying of all are novels that mix these two points that we hope will never ever come collectively in actual life: Al Qaeda terrorists and atomic bombs.

The fundamental premise of a current, timely novel can be a simple a single: to avenge the death of Osama Bin Laden in May 2011, Ayman al-Zawahiri, the designated successor Maximum Leader of AQ, orders his minions to look for, discover, and purchase a "suitcase nuke" inside the enormous and amorphous black armaments markets of your former USSR. Armed with this bomb, Al-Zawahiri will then extrapolate exponentially AQ's power to complete bad items around the globe.

There are several different credible scenarios that may be ozusedguns put forward for the bomb's acquisition, but these that are most compelling of all would rely actual details whenever doable. The Russians produced an "RA" series of portable tactical nuclear armaments developed for use against NATO in areas just like the Fulda Gap. Anybody who does a "wiki" search of RA transportable nuclear devices will quickly see that these bombs exist in reality and had been not part of the imaginings of any novelist.

You can find such bombs in the world, and a few of them haven't been mothballed.

Certainly one of several most worrisome difficulties related to Al Qaeda currently, more than a decade after the 9/11 tragedy in New York, is that the terror consortium will attempt for any spectacular encore, and that the bad guys will do so by going to excellent lengths to acquire a nuclear weapon. How would they do that? Exactly where would they go? Just how much would it expense? These would be the crucial queries any espionage novel coping with this subject would have to answer.

There was a time where the former Soviet Union plus the United states, in particular, maintained arsenals of nuclear weapons that were orders of magnitude larger than they may be these days. As lately as the Gorbachev/FirstBush era, the USSR promised to repatriate to Moscow some 30,000 nuclear weapons spread throughout the USSR client states, nations that soon became independent after the fall in the Berlin Wall.

Thirty thousand bombs is actually a great deal of bombs. If only one particular per cent of these nukes went "missing" as the old Soviet Union was becoming unglued and high-ranking military men -- generals as well as lowly colonels -- had been stockpiling Kalashnikovs, SAMs, and other alternatives to their evaporating pensions and 401(k) plans, that 1 per cent would amount to some 300 nuclear weapons potentially now available on the market for sale to the highest bidder. Some may perhaps currently be within the incorrect hands.

Does any one truly believe that totally 99 per cent of these 30,000 bombs have been safely dismantled? Certainly the quantity that have been "lost" is far higher than a single per cent. That suggests that there may be much more than 500 "loose nukes" floating about the arms bazaars of central Asia. What would such a prize expense? 5 million dollars? Ten million? Twenty million? What if it had been thirty million? Does any one doubt a international Al Qaeda organization could raise thirty million dollars? A great deal of Al Qaeda's funding has dried up, but just how much dollars the organization could nevertheless raise can be a query worth pondering.