GNF & Science Posted by Oaktown Girl, 13 May 2007 11:14 pm

N Moderation

By James Killus

There are reasons to suspect that science and engineering took a very different path over there: their limited understanding of nuclear weapons—they seem to think that nukes are roughly as easy to build as bottle rockets—suggests that nuclear fission may never have been developed on their timeline. – Twilight Zone by Gregory Cochran, on evidence that members of the Bush Administration are from a parallel universe.

Just how hard is it to build a nuke? And what is the smallest amount of plutonium needed to build one?

The smallest nuclear weapon ever designed was the Davy Crockett, aka the W54 warhead, weighing 51 pounds with a variable yield supposedly from 10 to 250 tons of TNT equivalent. It was the last weapon ever atmospheric-tested by the U.S. and in its two tests, (Little Feller I and II) it yielded 22 and 18 tons of explosive power. At those yields, however, the explosive power was pretty much unimportant compared to the radiation the blast produced, lethal to 50% of unshielded personnel at 400 meters, 100% lethal at 300 meters.

There’s not a lot of unclassified information about the actual design of the W54, but some conjectures can be made about it just from the nature of the nuclear chemistry involved. A “bare critical” mass of plutonium, for example, weighs roughly 10 kg, but a neutron reflector reduces this by maybe a factor of two. A uranium reflector/tamper can also increase yield because some fast fission will take place in the reflector itself (at the cost of a time delay in the return of the neutrons to the explosive core). Beryllium also multiplies neutrons, undergoing “light fission” on exposure to high-energy particles of any kind, including neutrons, to produce, well, more neutrons. This is also at the expense of slowing the neutrons and thus retarding the rapid increase in neutron population that make a bomb go ka-boom.

But slowing neutrons is called “moderation” and slower neutrons tend to react more easily with nuclei (have a higher capture cross section) than fast neutrons. This is a consequence of quantum mechanics, where fast particles have a more certain position than do slow ones. Think of the slow neutrons as being more “fuzzy,” virtually bigger, if you will. So if there is a nearby nucleus that is “sticky” for neutrons, a slow neutron is more likely to glom onto it.

That is pretty much the principle of nuclear reactors, where neutrons are slowed down to better react with the fissile elements in the reactor. A mass that is sub-critical for fast neutrons can be more than critical for slow neutrons.

The result is that, with a thick beryllium reflector, the critical mass of normal plutonium can be reduced to less than 20% of its “bare” critical number. The thickness of the reflector in the Davy Crockett was probably dictated by the limit that is reached when adding more reflector increases the overall mass of the design rather than reducing it.

The variable yield of the W54 looks like a signature of a variable fusion boost, but I’ve seen statements to the effect that D-T fusion doesn’t get going until you reach the 100 ton range, so the W54 may have had multiple fission core compositions. Still, the upper limit of the W54 is within the fusion boosting range, so a design modification could possibly have boosted its potential yield to a full kiloton.

A reasonable question arises, is the implied 2 kg core the minimum amount of plutonium (or U233, which has a bare critical mass of about 16 kg) that can be used to make a nuclear weapon, even one of such a low yield as the W54?

Advanced implosion techniques can produce such high core densities that the critical mass for plutonium can be reduced to as little as 1 kilogram, but the tradeoff is a much more complicated design. Besides, if we’re talking terrorists or a small belligerent state with limited technical resources, we’re much more concerned with basement bomb makers, aren’t we? What’s the least amount of bomb grade stuff necessary to be dangerous?

In one sense, the answer is…none. Nuclear reactors can be made from materials that are not considered bomb grade material. There was a nuclear accident in Japan a few years ago that occurred when workers added water (a moderator) to some highly enriched uranium and accidentally produced a critical excursion. The HEU was only 20% U-235, which is considered far below bomb grade, and there was only 35 kilograms of material involved. Nevertheless, the radiation release killed several workers and put an entire town into panic mode.

Ordinary reactor fuel, on the order of 7% U-235 could also serve as a terror weapon, especially if it were moderated by heavy water, which, unlike light water, does not absorb neutrons very effectively. However, hundreds of kilograms of such fuel would be needed.

Suppose, however, that a hypothetical bad guy had some amount of plutonium, just not enough to build a “conventional” nuclear bomb. How much would he need to cause some havoc?

Based on various published figures, plus some conjectures from reactor design principles, I guesstimate that a “prompt critical” device could be built from as little as 50 grams of plutonium, though you’d also need on the order to several hundred kilograms of natural uranium for a reflector/tamper, and a substantial amount of heavy water. Both of those components, however, are relatively easy to procure, although you might need a cover story to get them (maybe a potter with a hobby of trying to build a cold fusion device). In any event, the tamper/casing of the bomb could be produced from materials that one can obtain within the United States; no smuggling would be required. The explosive yield of such a device could be anywhere from a few pounds of TNT up to something approaching the Davy Crockett. In all cases the local radiation would be lethal to some distance, with significant fission product contamination. A full Davy Crockett yield could almost certainly bring down a building or two; the Oklahoma City bomb was about 2 tons in yield, 10% of the Davy Crockett.

Obtaining plutonium, of course, is a difficult matter, but it’s sobering to realize how much MOX (mixed oxide) fuel is around and about, not to mention the fact that waste nuclear fuel rods become less dangerous with each passing year. We’ve already gone through almost two half lives of the most dangerous intermediate isotopes (cesium and strontium). The rule of thumb is that ten half-lives is sufficient for a radiation source to become safe. That reduces the radiation by a factor of 1000. For intermediate fission products, that is about 300 years; 240 now that we’ve passed the first two half-lives, and the spent fuel is now only ¼ as reactive as it was in 1950.

Some fuel rods have been or will be buried in what is called “geological storage” or, as I like to call them, future plutonium mines.

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Responses to “N Moderation”

  1. on 14 May 2007 at 7:30 am 1. JP Stormcrow said …

    James,
    I think you need to fill in a step in getting to the future plutonium mines designation for me. Is it that since time makes the spent fuel rods “less dangerous”, yet they still contain small amounts of plutonium - therefore people are willing/able to handle/process them- which they won’t when they are “hot”

    Otherwise I am not sure how the MOX fuuel is connected to plutonium.

    And in a way this discussion of the region where the smallest nuclear explosions overlap large conventional explosion technology has some similarity to some of our Nagasaki-related discussions. How “special” does it become due to the nuclear aspect. It adds the lingering radiation part, and it can (sort of per your post) reduce the volume of delivery materials (if not the complexity.) I think some of the “specialness” is that a small nuclear blast would indicate “entry-level” capability and a potential huge upside (though as you show, the agent may not actually be on that track.) while the large conventional explosion is a “mature” expression of the technology.

    Really kind of a horrifying topic in general.

  2. on 14 May 2007 at 7:42 am 2. christian h. said …

    James, thanks for another great post. From the point of view of nuclear terror, the positive seems to be that to build a nuclear device with small amounts of Plutonium or enriched Uranium, it needs to be either sophisticated, or large (this is what I gather from this post.)

  3. on 14 May 2007 at 7:49 am 3. spyder said …

    Just one minor technical note: US modern (because of course we are not supposed to be building new nuclear weapons in the post-modern era) nuclear weapons do require the development and efficient use of tritium; a highly unstable gas component of fusion weaponry. Therefore, i am surmising that you are specifically referring to the rudimentary development of fission weapons, atomic reaction based possible “bombs?”

    Somewhere in my basement (and damn it all, i just don’t want to dig around in there) i have my father’s notes on most of these configurations (i’m sorry those red stamped words are all smudged and i can’t read them; “Top” something or other??) when he was assigned the task by our overlords to work on developing nuclear rocket propulsion systems. Oddly, the plans are still floating around in the NASA realms for future use when we “build rockets” for deep space travel on the moon and Mars. But the earth-bound problem, and rejection of their development, was framed around the probablilities of launch and orbit-altitude failures that would certainly mean the sort of blasts to which you refer.

    Keeping in mind that the sorts of folks most interested in developing something similar to a terrorist nuclear weapon, would not feel that the sacrifices of those in the process of procuring and working with the materials are wasteful, and thus it seems reasonable that some would proceed down this path, even with hot spent fuel mining. Across the planet, the impoverished are asked by the neo-feudal lords of capital to sustain the sacrifices for the radioactively inclined: recycling x-ray machines, mining uranium, processing spent wastes, building and decommissioning reactors, etc. We have, in a way, provided them with tools and some knowhow, while toxically damaging them. And this doesn’t even take into account the tons upon tons of DU spewn over Iraq.

  4. on 14 May 2007 at 10:52 am 4. James Killus said …

    JP, spent fuel rods don’t contain “small amounts of plutonium.” They contain rather large amounts of plutonium, about 1% of the fuel weight. A typical boiling water reactor fuel rod contains about 3 Kg of 3% enriched uranium to begin with, and finishes its life with somewhere around 30 gms of “reactor grade” plutonium. By my estimate, you only need a 2-3 of those to construct a “nuclear pipe bomb” (NPB).

    The situation for “mixed oxide fuels” (MOX) is even worse, as these contain about 7% reactor grade Pu, and have had all the high level radioactive removed, so you don’t need to wait the 300 years. A single MOX rod is sufficient for an NPB.

    If you’re willing to go as high as a kilogram of Pu, an NPB can be both unsophisticated and small, to answer Christian’s point. There have been nuclear accidents that achieved a small supercriticality when such an amount of Pu happened to get accidentally put into a “critical” configuration (in one case, all that was necessary was for a flask to get shaken). To turn that into an NPB would involve a design where the energy release itself produced a higher criticality (this is technically called a “positive void coefficient” as I recall). Again, you’re talking about basically substituting a nuclear reaction for a chemical reaction in a pipe bomb, with the proviso that the only limit to the explosive power is what it takes to rupture the pipe and expand the device beyond criticality.

    Spyder, yes, I’m talking about crude weapons, probably below the energy density necessary to achieve “fusion boosting” which uses a deuterium-tritium mixture to enhance fusion in the fission primary to a thermonuclear device. Tritium is “unstable” in the sense that it has only a 12.5 year half-life, so it goes away pretty quickly. Very small amounts of tritium aren’t that hard to procure; it’s used in luminous paints, for example. For larger amounts, you need a large neutron source, like an accelerator or a nuclear reactor.

    As for the “terror” aspect, people are wiggy about nukes; even “dirty bomb” scenarios are the stuff of the pop culture id. But the real impact would be if you got the whole thing on television, so that people could once more drive themselves insane by watching the event over and over and over again.

  5. on 14 May 2007 at 11:25 am 5. spyder said …

    For larger amounts, you need a large neutron source, like an accelerator or a nuclear reactor,

    as well as some of the high-end pesky “certifuges and tubes.” I find it interesting that the there are two TV shows, Heroes and Jericho that are built around surviving GNFs. Just what is behind letting people dwell on the chaotic ramifications, and altogether too obvious solutions, to such catastrophic events???? Are we really back to “On the Beach” and “Red Dawn?”

  6. on 14 May 2007 at 11:39 am 6. Oaktown Girl said …

    Are we really back to “On the Beach” and “Red Dawn?”

    And of course the TV show “24″ is all about “suitcase nukes”, another thing that makes this post so relevant. Well, more specifically, it’s about suitcase nukes, the scary Arab menace (with a dash of Crazy Russian thrown in to deflect accusations of racism), and torture as an effective means of gathering critical information. The torture part caused some consternation in the military communities, which Think Progress documented.

  7. on 14 May 2007 at 12:07 pm 7. James Killus said …

    Spyder,

    I don’t think there is much isotope separation (if that is what your “centrifuges and tubes” reference was about) necessary for tritium production. Its primary source is neutron bombardment of lithium, specfically Li-6, so if you begin with a non-hydrated lithium compound, relatively pure T can be obtained through ordinary chemistry.

    There is one exception to this: the heavy water used in natural uranium reactors like the CANDU system. In those systems, there is a slow production of tritium that actually needs to be stripped out from the heavy water periodically; otherwise it begins to alter the moderating characteristics of the heavy water.

    Canada provides this service (actually demands that its customers allow them to perform it) of CANDU customers, with the result that Canada is the only “non-nuclear” country in the world with a nuclear-power sized source of tritium. They also do spent fuel storage, which means they also have their own sources of plutonium. Good thing they’re “friendly,” (though I do remember the scene in The President’s Analyst where the Pudlians turn out to be covert agents of the Canadian Secret Service, out to “change the course of ‘istory”).

    So heavy water reactors have been called the “most proliferation prone technology on the planet” and India basically swiped the CANDU design for their nuclear program.

    Oh, one last bit of nerdery. The reason why centrifuge technology has become the method of choice for uranium isotope separation is that the separation effect for centrifuges depends on the difference in molecular weight, rather than the proportion of weights, which is the more usual case. Tritium separation is done via cryogenic distillation of liquid hydrogen, which is a much easier technology. You can also do it via staged electrolysis which is dead simple, if somewhat power hungry. I’ve also seen mention of systems using palladium filtering, but those tend to be a tad expensive in construction.

  8. on 14 May 2007 at 2:02 pm 8. spyder said …

    Oh, one last bit of nerdery.

    Well okay a bit more. Am i not correct that the tritium and deuterium require concentration and storage under higher pressures?? Again a significant power outlay, but not beyond the scope of these matters. Thus the relative easy of the staged electrolysis method is offset by the cost of storage and pressurization??? Still, all in all, we are not talking about science fiction scenarios, but rather whether there is sufficient will and financing on the part of those that so wish to have these sorts of weapons in their possession.

    Of course, one of the problems for the US and Israel is the increasing wealth of Iran given the pressure to keep oil prices at sustained high levels. Iranian militants and funders of the nutty, could find themselves sufficiently endowed with amassed funds (Euros and Yuan) to outright purchase existing weapons from former Soviet stockpiles (including possible Russian dark market sources). If nothing else they could certainly gain access to the design and engineering of them through acquisition of warheads that have been decommissioned but not destroyed. I wonder how many million it would take to purchase one of them????

  9. on 14 May 2007 at 3:03 pm 9. James Killus said …

    Spyder,

    Deuterium is usually stored in the form of heavy water. Tritium is usually kept adsorbed onto some appropriate metal, such as palladium, titanium, or even uranium. It’s also often kept as a hydride of lithium.

    The amount of tritium used for fusion boosting of a nuclear bomb, however, is quite small, on the order of a gram. If kept as a gas under standard pressure, a gram of tritium is 1/6 of a mole, or a bit over six liters. And while tritium is quite radioactive, I think recall that its beta energy is low, so a small metal cylinder at relatively low pressure carries all that you’d need for a big boom.

    In the electrolytic separation of isotopes, which is common for heavy water production (I don’t really know if it has ever been used for tritium), the heavy isotope tends to remain concentrated in the remaining water, so heavy water is a byproduct of hydrogen production from water; the hydrogen is usually used in some industrial process. If you were going to make an electrolytic process purely for isotope separation, you’d probably then return the hydrogen to a fuel cell to recover the energy content. That would probably give some additional separation potential, since I’m sure there’s a differential efficiency for different isotopes at the fuel cell/recombination stage, but I’m not sure how great that effect is.

    Anyway, it’s pretty obvious why cryogenic distillation is the preferred technique.

    As for the “loose nukes” scenario, I assume there are reasons why none of those have shown up. My guess is that there are actually a few people in some country’s covert ops organization that knows what they are doing, and that they are flooding the market with bogus devices and scams like “red mercury.” The result is that smart terrorists stay away, and the dumb ones get snookered.

    All that changes if Pakistan falls apart. The Russians hate Islamists; some of the Pakistani government is Islamist.

  10. on 14 May 2007 at 9:14 pm 10. spyder said …

    Thank you James, i am getting a much better picture of this whole scenario. I did notice that the US military supply of tritium comes from the Watts Bar - TVA reactor, a public energy producer. Your knowledge is most appreciated in the classic sense that being informed helps to alleviate fears and misperceptions. Thank you.

  11. on 14 May 2007 at 10:35 pm 11. JP Stormcrow said …

    JP, spent fuel rods don’t contain “small amounts of plutonium.” They contain rather large amounts of plutonium

    that being informed helps to alleviate fears and misperceptions

    Well, I certainly had the misperception part down pat on this one - but not sure James correction did much to alleviate any fears on this particular point. (However, a question from trying to read up on this - To what degree does the presence of significant Pu-240 complicate its reuse for explosive needs in any meaningful way? Does it take much sophistication to overcome this?)

    Some fuel rods have been or will be buried in what is called “geological storage” or, as I like to call them, future plutonium mines.

    If nothing else of mankind survives on earth, we will at least be “remembered” for millions of years as having moved around and concentrated particular metals (and maybe hydrocarbon products - do some plastics last >1 million years?)

    But it apppears that for most of the plutonium isotopes left over in fuel rods it is a “mere” thousands to tens of thousands of year issue. (I assume that we do not make Pu-244 w/millions of years to decay.)

  12. on 15 May 2007 at 7:52 am 12. spyder said …

    Well, i am less anxious of nuclear proliferation than i have been with regard to more common explosive materials. I grew up around explosives and rocket propellants, and the relative ease with which (especially in those days) one could acquire (and with sophisticated but not at all impractical equipment) and manufacture a variety of explosives that could do great harm. I have been amazed actually (with the same suprising optimism James points out when he wrote: there are actually a few people in some country’s covert ops organization that knows what they are doing) that we haven’t had more Oklahomas or huge railyard devastations.

    The US ships immense quantities of explosive and nuclear materials on our interstates and our railbeds. Hell we ship spent fuel rods around the nation and overseas, as well as containers of spent x-ray charges and other so-called low level wastes. But we also ship propane, ammonium nitrate, chlorine gas, various acids, and millions of gallons of hydrocarbon based products, up and down and across the nation on trains each and every day. Railroads and Transportation departments store explosives in their various service yards, large quantities of ANFO are stored at mining operations, timber companies possess stockpiles of dynamite and TNT, and other smaller operations have access to plastiques. As much as we can say we are a nation of guns, we are also a nation of explosives.

    And given the lesson provided by James, while the science and technology is available, even large nations with available funds have a difficult time making nuclear weapons. By that same token, i have friends who are avalanche control techs who use dynamite daily in the winter. I used to live next door to the explosives guy for that regions Union Pacific RR. Given the right set of circumstances and incentives, even i could put together some very interesting and potent boomers (and very harmful); afterall, we used to be able to “blow shit up” at Burning Man back in the day. That said, i am still not quite so anxious about it all.

    I do give credence to JP’s angst however, in terms of the massive mess we have made of the Earth for millenia to come. When the IPCC researchers mention that global climate changing gasses currently in out atmosphere will continue to have effects for a thousand more years (another 150 just for the CFC’s in the Ozone layer), the thought that Pu remains highly dangerous for 24,000, and that DU will be around for a near eternity is not at all hopeful. And that doesn’t begin to measure the spent fuels and reactors that produce energy or power our naval fleets.

    Okay, now i am making myself depressed. There is only one safe solution—GNF and start the whole thing over. All hail Gojira!! Long live the WAAGNFNP!!

  13. on 15 May 2007 at 11:21 am 13. James Killus said …

    JP, the issue with Pu-240 is that it has a high rate of “spontaneous fission,” which produces neutrons and can lead to “pre-detonation,” the beginning of the chain reaction before the bomb core has reached its full degree of supercriticality. (Making the bomb supercritical is called “insertion,” a holdover from the original Hiroshima design, where one chunk of U235 is “inserted” into another, bringing the whole thing to a much greater than critical mass, i.e. supercriticality; current bomb designs use “implosion” which squeezes the bomb core to supercriticality, but the term “insertion” is still used).

    A pre-detonation produces a “fizzle” explosion, one with a much lower yield. Typical estimates of a fizzle yield are on the order of 0.1 kiloton, less than 1% of typical bomb yields, but that’s still equivalent to 100 tons of TNT, about 50 time larger than the Oklahoma City blast, and not anything you want to be around.

    “Fusion boosting” essentially eliminates the pre-detonation problem. Fusing a mole of tritium produces a mole of very fast neutrons, which alone would cause the fissioning of about 5 kiloton’s worth of U or Pu. But the real effect is to “supercharge” the fission chain reaction so that it outruns the “explosive disassembly” (such cool, cool jargon) of the fission device. The 1998 Shakti I test by India used fusion boosting and achieved a yield probably in the neighborhood of 40 kilotons, twice the Nagasaki yield.

    For nuclear pipe bombs, pre-detonation is irrelevant, since we’re not talking about a conventional fast fission chain reaction device, but rather a crudely weaponized nuclear reactor. There have been no real tests of such devices that were deliberately designed, so I have to go on estimates bridging the smallest bomb designs and certain sorts of nuclear accidents. My assumption here is that, while I may be smarter than any given terrorist, and maybe even many nuclear scientists, I’m definitely not smarter than all of them put together, so someone will eventually try some of this out. Indeed, they may have already.

    The best web source material I’ve found for the science of nuclear weapons is Carey Sublette’s Nuclear Weapons FAQ, which can be found here:

    http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/

    The picture on the first page is from the Ivy Mike test, the first true thermonuclear test using the Teller-Ulam design. It clocked in around 10 megatons, as I recall, 500 times the Nagasaki blast. We put that on the cover of one issue of the Rensselear Engineer when I was editing it. That dimple that you see in the sky above the fireball is the stratosphere.

  14. on 15 May 2007 at 11:31 am 14. James Killus said …

    I will also second Spyder’s belief that conventional explosives and industrial chemicals are far more dangerous than most people realize, and we are lucky indeed that right wing paranoia is just that, paranoia. The vast majority of people live much of their lives in their imaginations, and do not act out their violent fantasies in any systematic or coordinated way.

    There are, in fact, several novels that I’ve begun and dropped, at least partly because I didn’t want to give anyone any ideas (the other part being that I’m often very lazy in the marketing of things, or at least too easily distracted by the shiny thing in the other room). I don’t want to lay out how to turn a skyscraper onto a large bomb, nor how to replicate Bhopal or Lake Nyos in the suburbs.

    At least not unless the money is really, really good.

  15. on 19 May 2007 at 3:17 pm 15. christian h. said …

    Times Review of a book trying to answer the question “how easy is it to get a nuke?”

  16. on 19 May 2007 at 9:33 pm 16. Oaktown Girl said …

    James - I’ve been hearing on the non-corporate news about chemical bombs being used increasingly in Iraq. “Chlorine”, I think it is. Of course the US is in no position to shake its finger since apparently we’ve used white phosphorous among other weapons that violate every treaty and agreement we’ve ever signed.

  17. on 22 May 2007 at 12:54 pm 17. James Killus said …

    Sorry to be late in re-checking this thread. I didn’t notice when the post number changed.

    Oaktown Girl, chlorine is basically a “poison gas of opportunity” as it were, because it’s used in a lot of places. I think I’ve heard that the Iraq chlorine is usually stolen bottles from water treatment plants.

    Chlorine isn’t very effective as a gas warfare agent, and gas agents aren’t very effective generally, being at the mercy of weather and such. Chlorine also suffers from the problem that it breaks down very rapidly in sunlight, and while the result (usually hydrogen chloride) isn’t wonderful, it’s not nearly as toxic as chlorine itself. Moreover, ammonia sources, such as animal waste, neutralize the HCl pretty quickly to ammonium chloride, which is “mostly harmless” and is the ingredient in a lot of smoke bombs.

    In short, I wouldn’t want to be around a IED using chlorine, but then I wouldn’t want to be around an IED, period.

    Christian h, if there was a link in your post, it’s gone; otherwise, the specificity isn’t great enough to let me know which one of such books you’re referring to.

  18. on 22 May 2007 at 1:21 pm 18. christian h. said …

    Link fixed, for now.

  19. on 23 May 2007 at 11:19 am 19. James Killus said …

    I thought it might be The Atomic Bazaar. I haven’t read the entire book, but I read much of the material as it came out in The Atlantic.

    This may just be me being snooty, but I always get suspicious at phrases like “Langewiesche explains with his usual fluent grasp of technical detail.” Would the reviewer know a technical lapse, so long as it was “fluent?” One wonders.

    The fact that the sentence continues with “what’s needed are two small but immensely heavy brick-shaped or hemispherical pieces of highly enriched uranium (H.E.U.)” makes me even more suspicious. Maybe HEU is stored as hemispherical pieces, but I’d like to know why. There is actually a disinformation bomb design that uses two HEU hemispherical shapes, but it wouldn’t work very well. I see from a little googling that there are plenty of literature references to “hemispherical shells” of uranium, but those are either for various testing purposed, or refer to the natural uranium tamper. The “shells” are hollow in any case.

    It also takes more than “a machine shop, a nuclear scientist, several technicians and up to four months of work” plus HEU to build a bomb. For one thing, the “machine shop” has to be equipped to work with pyrophoric material.

    Then there’s the truly comedic sentence “But none of these obstacles are, in themselves, insurmountable and, in the nearly lawless parts of the world described by Langewiesche, luck comes easily to anyone with millions in his pocket.” Uh, actually, in lawless parts of the world, death comes easily to anyone with millions in his pocket. With that much cash, you need a small army to be anything approaching safe.

    So, terrorists with bombs, booga booga. I will note this: terrorists and any other dispersed and decentralized organizations possess the only known defense against nuclear weapons: non-locality (Hah! A sentence with two colons!). Which, of course, is why the We Are All Giant Nuclear Fireball Now Party will survive the coming nuclear apocalypse.