NEWSLETTER

TEXT AND PICTURES BY JON FOX


The emblem for the FBI’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate features a screaming bald eagle soaring somewhere in the stratosphere, high above the earth where there probably, technically, isn’t much air to soar on. In the background, draped across space, is a huge American flag. The eagle, its talons poised somewhere above, let’s say, Michigan and Montana, is clutching symbols that represent every kind of WMD.

There’s the interlocking ellipses of the atom symbol, the propeller of the radiation warning sign, the universal biohazard symbol, and a bright red beaker that presumably means “chemical weapons.”

In June, the FBI hoisted that banner high over Miami when it threw the first ever Global Initiative to Combat Nuclear Terrorism Law Enforcement Conference. It had been roughly a year since presidents George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin announced the Global Initiative to Combat Nuclear Terrorism on the sidelines of the G-8 summit in St. Petersburg, Russia. In trumpeting their bilateral partnership, they hoped to spur a greater degree of international cooperation to prevent a nonstate actor (that’s a fancy word for terrorist) from perpetrating a rogue nuclear attack, which everyone pretty much agrees would rank up there as one of the worst things to ever happen.

The Global Initiative began as just Russia and the United States, but since then more than 50 nations have signed on. Just how much multilateral cooperation is really going on is still slightly opaque, though. At the most basic level, they’ve all agreed, in principle, that nuclear terrorism sucks and should be prevented. That’s certainly a good foundation, but what’s the next step in preventing an atomic attack on freedom?

It’s obvious. A government-funded trip to sunny South Florida where the good times never stop. Hence my first sighting of the aforementioned screaming eagle, which was on the cover of the conference program I got when I arrived in Miami to report on the week-long law enforcement event.

As business trips go, it was one of the more bizarre ones I’ve been on—and my employer has sent me to Moscow and Staten Island. It was a solid week of talks about improvised nuclear weapons and dirty bombs turning New York City into an abandoned radioactive wasteland. But then there were also the police-escorted party buses to South Beach and a trip to the Orange Bowl where an FBI SWAT team fake killed fake terrorists with real paintball guns. They then defused a fake bomb with something that looked remarkably like Johnny Five from Short Circuit. I watched the whole thing from the stadium stands while drinking government-issue water. Then everyone partied some more.

But let’s begin at the beginning… After getting my press badge early Monday morning, less than an hour after my 6 AM flight from Washington touched down, I stumbled into an enormous, darkened conference room in Miami. There was rousing, epic music playing and about 400 police officers, FBI agents, U.S. government officials, and foreign defense ministry representatives listening to a golden-tongued MC talking about how seriously fucked up nuclear terrorism is. Then he shot it straight over to center stage for a full-blown opera version of the national anthem belted out by a guy in a police uniform. It was sort of like Team America but without puppets.

After a video link to a sister nuclear terrorism conference in Kazakhstan, a speech from the director of the FBI, and some comments from a member of the Russian FSB (which used to be the KGB), a nuclear scientist working with the Homeland Security Department took the stage and said that terrorists would probably be totally happy with a nuclear device going off with the equivalent force of 100 tons of dynamite—less than 1/100th the power of the bomb we blew up over Hiroshima. It would still wreak some incredible destruction, he promised.

But that’s assuming the terrorists could scrape together the fissile material—the uranium or plutonium that remains impossible for a terrorist group to produce on its own. Once they get that, building a bomb is within the realm of possibility.

“It’s not trivial but, as the intelligence community has said, it’s not an insurmountable task,” he said.

Then they opened it up to questions.

There were hundreds of officials, and no one raised their hands. Was this room full of experts and dignitaries really not going to come up with a couple of queries? He asked one last time if there were any questions, and finally I stood up. (Oh by the way, I was the only reporter in the cordoned-off press area. These things aren’t exactly widely covered.)

I asked just how likely the Homeland Security Department thinks it is that a terrorist group would pack a nuclear bomb inside a shipping container and send it stateside. While members of Congress continue to call for 100-percent radiation scanning of shipping containers, some in the domestic-security sector are beginning to suggest that it would be an unlikely way to deliver a nuclear bomb.

“Giving up a nuclear device, putting it in a container and letting it float around the world for a couple of weeks is probably folly,” the head of the Domestic Nuclear Detection Office said earlier this year while discussing the threat.


TO BE CONTINUED:
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