Nuclear bomb materials frighteningly available
MercuryNews.comWASHINGTON - The number of experts who believe that terrorists could obtain the apparatus for a nuclear bomb is impressive and growing.
The Sept. 11 Commission described in 2004 the relative ease with which terrorists could conceal the needed weapons-grade plutonium or highly enriched uranium, which it said would be ``about the size of a grapefruit or an orange.''
Since 2001, law enforcement officials have developed training exercises on how terrorists might smuggle eight components for an improvised 10-kiloton bomb into the United States and then detonate it near the White House.
Experts in and out of the government worry that the most likely source of nuclear material is Russia and the former Soviet bloc nations, where stocks of weapons-grade plutonium and uranium are stored at loosely guarded sites.
And some people are trying to get their hands on them.
The International Atomic Energy Agency reports 976 incidents of illicit trafficking of nuclear and radioactive materials since 1993 -- with 149 of them last year alone. In 2006, a man in the former Soviet republic of Georgia was arrested for allegedly trying to sell highly enriched uranium to terrorists.
I believe we are at a point where it's not if, but when some type of nuclear device is detonated inside the United States. With the combination of lack security of nuclear material in foreign countries and our ridiculously open border, it's just a matter of time before it happens.
