How to Get a Nuclear Bomb

Wirepullers: che senso hanno gli accordi tra superpotenze sullo smantellamento dei propri arsenali nucleari (molto di facciata ma di poca sostanza), se piccoli paesi sull'orlo della bancarotta fanno di tutto per costruirsi la bomba atomica? Come già detto su queste pagine, questa puo essere una strategia per stimolare "aiuti" provenienti da occidente in cambio della rinuncia al programma atomico o, ancora di più, un metodo per evitare che la democrazia venga "stimolata" come sta succedendo in Afghanistan e Iraq, cioè con le bombe. La fine della guerra fredda non ha portato alla contestuale fine dell'equilibrio atomico, ha semplicemente delocalizzato la minaccia. Corea del Nord, Iran, Birmania...la lista potrebbe allungarsi. Lo speciale di William Langewiesche su come ci si procura gli strumenti per costruire una bomba atomica. L'articolo è del 2006, ma di estrema attualità. (2)

...If you wanted a bomb, you would need this very thing the CIA has lost—a feel for the street. I flew to Ekaterinburg, a Russian city on the Siberian side of the Urals, two time zones east of Moscow. Ekaterinburg is where the czar and his family were liquidated, where the American U‑2 pilot Gary Powers was shot down, and where Boris Yeltsin got his start. It has a single-line metro, a small downtown, and a few large hotels. Within a few hours’ drive, a visitor can arrive at the perimeter walls and fences of five of Russia’s ten closed nuclear cities. They are primarily production sites, and between them they contain all manner of nuclear goods, including warheads in various stages of assembly, and several hundred tons of excellent fissile material. So sensitive are the nuclear cities and other defense sites in the vicinity that the entire region was closed to outsiders during Soviet times. Since the Soviet Union was itself largely closed and compartmentalized, the nuclear cities stood within concentric layers of defenses like fortresses within fortresses, like nested Russian dolls. Still more pervasive defenses existed in the residents’ minds. They were expected to inform on their neighbors, as they themselves expected to be informed on, and to rely on all the nested gulags to keep everyone in line.

Describing those years in heavily accented English, a Russian plant manager said to me, “All nuclear material was secret. State secret! Anyone stealing nuclear material in Soviet Union was committing state crime. He became state criminal! So there was fear. Real fear. If something got lost somewhere—maybe a piece of paper, or materials, or there was mismatch in balance of plutonium—a person understood that he would be exiled forever.” Hesitating over the right words, he said, “But then when this … change took place, of course people felt more … freedom, I would say.”
He was using the word freedom for the American ear, and making a familiar argument for the extension of foreign aid. The closed cities and nuclear facilities around Ekaterinburg have received a large portion of the U.S. dollars spent on Russian security upgrades, yet they are the subject of continued wariness by the NNSA, and are of still greater concern to independent critics in the United States, who insist that they remain acutely vulnerable to terrorist theft. Take, for example, the closed city of Ozersk, a community of 85,000 people, whose existence was so hushed under the Soviets that it was not allowed a proper name, and was referred to only by its post office box numbers—first No. 40, then No. 65—in Chelyabinsk, an open city forty-four miles away. The nomenclature remains confused. Ozersk is often and mistakenly called Mayak, for its nuclear production area—an industrial complex within the city’s perimeter, a few miles from the residential center. The Mayak Production Association employed 14,500 people as of 2001, and since 1945 has been in the business primarily of processing HEU, plutonium, and tritium for nuclear warheads. Recently it has also thrown the business into reverse, as one of two sites in Russia where fissile material from existing warheads is extracted before shipment to another closed city for blending down. Many tons of the highest-quality weapons-grade HEU and plutonium are present at the site.
And nyet, this is not state secret.
Divulging it is not state crime.

Start with the all-American fact that Mayak is the location of the recently completed “Plutonium Palace,” a heavily fortified $350 million warehouse, which was paid for by the U.S. Congress, and has therefore been heavily publicized. The facility was designed to hold as much as 40 percent of the Russian military’s excess fissile material. For now the storage vaults remain empty because of technical and bureaucratic disputes, as well as, perhaps, a sense, in a Russia on the rise, of not wanting to place nuclear assets quite so far out of reach just yet. Nonetheless, there is little doubt that such a beautiful facility will eventually be used—and that the world will be better off when it is.
For those trying to counter the threat of nuclear terrorism, however, the possibility exists that the Palace is just another Maginot fort, a strong point that can be neatly ignored by the new strategists of war. The fort will neither reduce nor protect the large quantities of weapons-grade materials elsewhere in Ozersk. NNSA technicians have struggled to fill the gaps, installing some cameras and radiation monitors, and strengthening some floors and walls—but only in a few of the many buildings where they believe such work is needed, and only intermittently, as the Russians have allowed.

By perverse logic, therefore, Ozersk comes highly recommended to anyone in pursuit of a bomb. The facilities are tucked away two hours south of Ekaterinburg, down unmarked back roads, on a forested plateau of lakes and small rivers that would seem idyllic were it not for a number of decimated industrial towns and villages. Ozersk’s perimeter is large. It encompasses more than 50 square miles, and includes the city itself, the Mayak facilities, a network of paved and dirt roads, an internal bus service, one large internal checkpoint, multiple railroad lines, burial sites for radioactive waste, multiple radioactive lakes, some radioactive swamps, and a lot of radioactive forest. The main gate is on the north side. It has pens where Interior Ministry troops check vehicles going in or out, and verify people’s papers. The perimeter is marked by twin parallel chain-link barbed-wire fences, separated by a chemically defoliated strip that is apparently not mined, or raked, or checked for tracks even in the snow. The fences are in reasonable repair, but in many places have no road beside them, and they show no signs of being patrolled. If they are monitored remotely, it is safe to assume that they are not monitored well. On the south side of the site, they run through miles of empty forest. You could cross them almost anywhere with little immediate risk, though odds are you would eventually be caught, and the consequences would be severe. And to what advantage? You wouldn’t learn much by walking the streets. You might be able to send agents who could establish residency, but that would require too much time, and offer a poor chance of success. Better to back off and think things through, particularly since the essentials can be known from the outside.

Ozersk is in the nuclear business and nothing else. Its weapons-usable HEU is kept in Mayak as oxidized powder, flat metal pucks, elongated ingots, and finely machined warhead hemispheres. Each form is stored in a different type of steel container. The containers are light, because the shielding they contain is minimal. They are sealed but not locked. They sit in vaults or ordinary storage rooms. In addition to the standard containers, there are larger, brightly colored shipping containers, used to transport the material to and from other nuclear cities and sites, by truck and rail. Empty shipping containers are sometimes kept outdoors. High-resolution satellite photographs freely available on the Internet show them stacked in the yards, and in other ways help to identify the buildings in the complex. It does not matter that the photographs are old. Any of thousands of ordinary workers at Mayak could update them, and also provide information on material-processing schedules, NNSA upgrades, broken cameras, the patterns of the night shifts, and the locations of guards who use narcotics or drink on the job. It would not be difficult to find such an informant—for instance, in the taverns of Chelyabinsk. Afterward the action would have to be fast and accurate. Moving through the forest from the east or south perimeter fences, a raiding party on foot could hit any of the buildings within two hours. This would hardly be a sure thing. Ten years ago would have been a better time to try. But with luck it could still be done.

Or knowledgeable Americans urgently believe so. Some of the best of them work for a richly endowed organization known as the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI), which was founded by former Senator Sam Nunn and the CNN mogul Ted Turner. The director of NTI’s efforts in the former Soviet states is a smart, no-nonsense Washington insider named Laura Holgate, who spent years as a senior U.S. official grappling with Russian nuclear-weapons security. When we met, at NTI’s buttoned-up headquarters, in Washington, she repeated a colleague’s anecdote about a certain closed city where informal parking lots have sprung up outside of holes in the fence, because workers prefer not to bother with the gate. But I wanted to know about Ozersk, which seems to be more orderly, perhaps because of the quantities of bomb materials there. I asked about the security upgrades. She answered indirectly. “It’s a very challenging environment to work in. You set up a radiation detector, and it’s constantly going off, mostly false alarms. There’s so much clandestine movement of other stuff—cooking oil, insulation, you name it. So how are you supposed to catch the illicit movement of material as unradioactive as HEU? They put a little box of uranium in the corner, and they’re fine.” Moreover, the Russian government, she implied, can be somewhat dismissive of such matters.
Later, in Russia, I spoke to a modest American technician with a decade of experience in the secret cities of the Urals. He knew enough of Washington to want to remain anonymous, but did not seem interested in diplomatic maneuvering or nuclear policy. He was a detail man, a practitioner. He said, “Some of what the NNSA puts in is worthwhile, maybe. And other stuff seems, ah, not to get used. I took a tour one time, and they had installed a radiation monitor, a portal, for traffic going in and out of the site. So I say, ‘So, how’s the portal working?’
“And this Russian says, ‘Oh, we shut it off most of the time.’
“‘Why?’
“‘Because it’s always going off.’
“‘How come it always goes off?’
“He says, ‘Well … it’s the people on the buses. People go fishing in the lake, and when they catch fish and bring them out on the bus, they set off the radiation monitor. And then we’ve got to respond.’”
The technician laughed at his own story. Just when you think you’ve nabbed a terrorist, what you’ve really nabbed is a radioactive fish. After ten years around Russia’s nuclear facilities, he was not concerned. He said, “But you know, things like radiation portals? That’s just our method of security. They’ve got their own methods, which are probably as effective.”
“You mean human intelligence?”
“Yeah. It’s more people-intensive, the way they do it.”

Others have described Ozersk’s human side in dire terms—children selling drugs in the schools, mobsters in the construction and trucking business, large numbers of unvetted Central Asians arriving to do menial work that before would have been reserved for loyal Slavs. The worst of the lot are the soldiers whose duty is to guard the site. Called “the dregs of the dregs” by some critics, they are second-round conscripts, picked up by the Interior Ministry only after they have been rejected by the army. They in no sense constitute an elite corps, as the ministry sometimes claims. NTI has catalogued a string of known incidents of Mayak guards killing each other, committing suicide, stealing weapons, running away, buying narcotics, drinking on duty, and in one case imbibing a bottle of antifreeze and dying.

The problem for you, in your quest for a bomb, is that even these soldiers will fight. This is less a possibility than a fact. They will fight whether sober or drunk. Their presence at Ozersk means that no raiding party will be able to hit without provoking a noisy response. Still, American specialists have warned that a large and coordinated attack could overwhelm or counter traditional Russian defenses, pointing to the Chechen seizures of a Moscow theater in 2002 and a Beslan school in 2004 as evidence that terrorists within Russia already possess the wherewithal.
If you wanted a bomb, however, you would have to be concerned not only with getting your hands on fissile material but also with getting away. The getaway factor is not often raised in the United States, where the prevailing view is of a Wild West environment in which a nuclear bandit would need only to ride out of town in order to vanish safely. But up close to Ozersk, I kept running across evidence of a powerful and self-confident Russia that seemed more like its old autocratic self, and at least selectively under control.

The nearest international border to Ozersk is with Kazakhstan, only four hours’ drive to the south, but the route is poor, because it runs through Chelyabinsk and crosses border checkpoints using roads that can easily be blocked. A safer plan would be to head southwest, 1,200 miles or more, for the Caspian Sea or the Caucasus, with the goal of smuggling the uranium to Turkey through Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, or northern Iran. The trip, however, would require at least three days just for the escape from Russia—an interval that becomes the minimum head start required before the loss of material is noticed at Mayak. And raiders would be lucky to have three hours. In good conscience, therefore (and perhaps with some relief), a rational bomb-maker would abandon any idea of commando heroics.

But that is not to say you should give up on Ozersk. Possibilities abound for an inside job. A culture of mobsterism and corruption broadens the opportunities for recruiting thieves. Insiders could neutralize any practical defenses, pass undetected through the gates with a load of unshielded HEU, and provide a getaway team with a head start that could be measured in weeks or months—perhaps right up to the time an assembled bomb ignites. Linton Brooks described the possibility of insider theft as the greatest challenge facing the NNSA in Russia today. The solutions, which at best can only be partial, consist of efforts to complicate the task of would-be thieves, requiring them to bring more people into a conspiracy and to operate with larger teams.
An agent with deep experience in these matters said, “You try to make it more difficult by putting in doors that require two people to open. You put in video surveillance. You put in watchers to watch the watchers. You put in accounting systems to bring the facilities from paper ledgers into the bar-code era. But there are very deep-seated cultural issues here. In the Soviet days you were a very trusted person, an elite person, if you were working in these facilities. And now we come along and say, ‘OK, you’re not allowed to go into the vault by yourself anymore.’ That can take a while to sink in. Also, there’s a different perception of rules and regulations. The rule of law is not looked at the same way. There’s more skepticism in Russia. It’s a very complicated problem. Bricking up windows is part of the solution, but it’s not everything.”

It’s not as if the Russians don’t already know how to build strong rooms. I once mentioned to the American technician in the Urals that even ordinary doors there are heavy. He said, “One of the guys at the plant said to me, ‘Jack, I watch American movie last night.’” The technician imitated a Russian accent. “‘And I see something strange. Drug police. They kick in door! In Russia, this not possible!’”
Or maybe in Russia, this not necessary.

With 100 pounds of stolen HEU split between a couple of knapsacks, and a healthy head start on Russian security forces, you would not have to worry much about getting caught by Americans. The United States claims to be building a layered defense, but the only layer that amounts to much is the NNSA’s securing of stockpiles—and you have just penetrated it with the help of workers on the site. At this point the American defenses fall spectacularly apart. The reasons are ultimately institutional and complex, but initially may be as simple as confusion created by the expanding geometry of choices for anyone carrying stolen HEU toward an assembly point for a bomb. Will you go left or right? The roads keep forking, and you will often turn one way or the other for no more discernible reason than the fact that forward motion requires the choice.

American officials who would try to stop you face an infinite braid that becomes the measure of a hostile, corrupt, and anarchic world.

In Washington I spoke to one of the many officials in town who, though carrying out their assignments perfectly well, are too nervous about domestic politics to risk being identified. He described an NNSA effort called the Second Line of Defense, which installs radiation monitors at border-crossing points throughout the former Soviet Union. The program is most fully developed in Georgia, a skeletal nation threatened by separatist enclaves and barely able to keep warm through the winters. The official said, “The U.S. Corps of Engineers is working with Customs to build whole new border- crossing facilities in Georgia, and we’re in the process of installing upgraded radiation monitors, in conjunction with that.”

I said, “I guess I can see the logic of the radiation monitors, but why are we building customs stations for the Georgians?”
“It’s a joint venture to try to control smuggling.”
Georgia is one of the most corrupt nations on earth. Many of its politicians are crooks. Its officials routinely steal. Its economy is based almost entirely on black markets. Its people have nothing to survive on if they do not hustle. I said, “Why should we care about ordinary smuggling in Georgia? Cigarettes? Vodka? Fuel? For that matter, narcotics?” What I meant was, If even the ordinary black markets of Georgia are seen as a threat, where does the impulse to impose order end?

He stayed in his lane, but executed a tidy reversal. He said, “It’s a good question. And I don’t know that I have the answer, but the genesis anyway was nuclear. So I guess in conjunction with our new equipment, it makes sense to upgrade the stations.”

Hoping to get some notion of the realities, I went to a model Customs project, a station the Americans call “Red Bridge,” which stands at the main crossing point between Georgia and Azerbaijan. The first improvement there was the construction of a housing compound where for several years before, border guards had been living in tents and cooking over open fires. By the time the U.S. Department of Homeland Security was finished with it, in 2003, the compound consisted of five single-family houses, a barracks, a dining hall, an administration building, a vehicle-maintenance garage, a warehouse for supplies, an armory, various utility buildings, a dog kennel, two water-storage buildings, a sewage plant, an electrical substation, perimeter fences, two guard towers, two helipads, a sports field, a separate soccer field, some new paved roads and parking lots, and, of course, a parade ground. After the official opening, a Customs and Border Protection newsletter asked the CBP program manager, James Kelly, “Is it as grand as it sounds?”
“Indeed it is,” Kelly said. “It was built to Western standards.”

Golly, and that was just Phase One. The United States then shifted its spending down the road to the port of entry itself. Over the following two years, the CBP oversaw the construction of a $2.2 million facility, whose primary purpose would be to “help Georgia become a more effective partner in the worldwide effort to control the passage of terrorists and their weapons.” This time the improvements included a six-lane roadway, inspector booths, cargo-inspection areas, closed-circuit remote-control television cameras, lots of computers, a high-frequency long-distance radio-communication system, and the crowning glory—a beautiful air-conditioned two-story stucco building with spaces for processing the grateful public, as well as detention cells, back offices, a dormitory wing for Georgian customs agents, private sleeping rooms for American officials and other VIPs, and a second-floor patio, apparently for sitting outside on warm evenings.

The day I got there was too chilly for that. A short line of trucks crept in from Azerbaijan, and a few cars passed through in the opposite direction. The new radiation monitors were not yet in place, but within a few weeks they were certain to be. I asked to see the control room, which is meant to be the nerve center of the operation. There was a delay until the key could be found, whereupon the chief showed me in. The room was a windowless refuge, empty except for a few chairs, some computers, and a bank of flat-screen displays. Someone had left a video game on. Someone had left a magazine. Empty cardboard boxes were stacked in a corner. After a while an eager young man came in and demonstrated how a camera on the roof could be swiveled and zoomed.

The anonymous official in Washington tried to explain why such improvements matter. I had asked him why anyone carrying a bomb’s worth of HEU would choose to go through any official gate anywhere. He did not predict that anyone would. Using Georgia as an example he said, “The good news is that there aren’t very many of these border crossings. And to the extent we’ve got them covered, we force people to use horses, I guess.” Horses, mules, donkeys, tractors, dirt bikes, plucky little Ladas—whatever. A bit of off-road travel wouldn’t seem like much of an inconvenience to nuclear terrorists on the move, and American officials know it well. The problem is that U.S. agencies, when pressured by conflicting mandates and forced to work with corrupt and dysfunctional local governments, essentially throw up their hands at the complexity of it all, and abandon the fight in advance.

In this context Red Bridge is not just a customs post, but a premature surrender—and a typical one. Faced with the need to put systems in place that will function day after day to identify unexpected nuclear smugglers, America turns to the uniformed agents of local governments, loads them down with air-conditioned buildings and gadgetry, and then asks them to sit in a closed room watching for information from television cameras and radiation monitors. To make things worse, the failure is not individual but collective, and therefore difficult to correct. It appears to include even the clandestine services, some of which are chasing al-Qaeda around, but none of which shows signs of wanting to lay traplines through the back country on the off chance—highly unlikely in any given location—of snaring two knapsacks’ worth of dull grey metal. Of course it is possible that they are doing this, and being so discreet that for once they leave no evidence of their passage, but if I had to move a load of HEU across international borders, I would gamble that they are not.

It is as if the U.S. government, when looking at a world map for purposes of HEU interdiction, has declared entire regions to be off-limits to anything other than fictions. As noted, those back-country regions are where some of the world’s principal opium routes lie and, for independent reasons, are the areas through which stolen HEU seems most likely to pass. It is generally assumed that for the right price, opium traffickers will provide transportation, lodging, and expert advice to nuclear terrorists moving through. Indeed, the persistence of the drug trade worldwide is often used as an object lesson in the difficulty of trying to stop the smuggling of nuclear materials. A tired joke is that the best way to smuggle an atomic bomb is to put it into a bale of marijuana. For the United States the proximity between the two trades is an unfortunate coincidence, but it could be turned into a fortunate one, through quiet conversations with a few key people. If you wanted a bomb, you should of course be having quiet conversations with those same key people.

Finding them merely requires casual exploration along the preexisting lines of defense, especially along the national boundaries that cross the smuggling routes. The work would involve poking around meekly, sometimes with an amateur translator and guide. The purpose would not be to recruit peasant armies and spies, but to get a feel for the local functioning of power. In most areas there are only two or three people at the top, and they tend to be at once aggressive and benevolent men with interests larger than just the movement of drugs. Their names would quickly become apparent. Some might be dangerous to approach, but most would be hospitable to strangers. On the second or third trip back, a U.S. agent might make it known that if ever a load of HEU showed up, a large reward would be paid.

Some months ago I made the first of two brief trips through the mountains of far-eastern Turkey, in the Kurdish hinterland along the border with Iran. This is the prime smuggling country I mentioned earlier. The local villages may seem sleepy, but they are wide awake. It became apparent to me that the entire region is tightly sewed up, that nothing moves here without notice, and that any sustained activity requires approval. The authority is not the Turkish government. The army is here to fight the sporadic guerrilla war against Kurdish separatists, who occasionally ambush a patrol or plant a mine, then retreat higher into the mountains. The main garrison is in a tiny town called Bascale, which is better known for its heroin labs. When A. Q. Khan was building Pakistan’s nuclear-weapons facilities, some of the more sensitive parts passed through here.

Bascale has a large yellow house in a central compound, which belongs to the chief of a clan that is dominant for miles around, an extended family named Ertosi, which consists of 150,000 to 200,000 people. One afternoon I was invited in for tea. The host was a black-bearded heavyset middle-aged man who had arrived from Ankara for a few days. He was a son of the chief, and so was important, too. He had guards and flunkies around. We sat against the walls in a large bare room, with photographs of dead Ertosis at one end, and a big-screen television at the other. The television was tuned to a banned Kurdish station, broadcast via satellite from London. My translator introduced me as an English teacher on holiday, which threw our host a little off balance, I think. He wore a heavy gold chain and a diamond ring. He had an array of cell phones in front of him on the floor, several of which rang. Between calls, I asked him about the diesel trade. He said a little, but then clammed up when I got into details. To my translator he said, “Why does an English teacher want to know so much?”

Weeks later I returned to the area and sought out a certain subclan leader I had heard about. He was a powerful man, the chief of the 20,000 Ertosis who occupy the most active stretch of the border. I found him in a hamlet high on a mountainside. It was late at night, and the air was cold. We sat among ten of his men in a small stone room around a wood-burning stove. He was a small man, sixty years old, with sharp hooded eyes and a hooked nose. He was dressed like a Kurdish peasant, with a tweed jacket down to his knees. His hands were hardened by manual labor. From the ease with which he gave orders and the deference shown to him by his men, it was clear that he had been laying out law for many years. We avoided mention of narcotics or HEU, and talked instead in a transparent code about the business in “diesel fuel.” He said, “The government cannot control the border. The Kurds just naturally do.” No stranger could cross without his knowledge.

Now back to the project at hand. If you wanted to build a bomb, and paid attention to men like the clan leaders in the mountains, you should have no trouble getting the bomb fuel through.
Then comes the problem of assembly. You should take it as a given that no nation would dare to be associated with the construction of an independent atomic bomb. Not North Korea, not Sudan, not Iran. The certainty of retribution after its use far outweighs whatever benefit might be gained. Moreover, you could never trust those governments not to wait until the end and confiscate the goods. So the work will have to be carried out in secret—and in some private machine shop perhaps no larger than a five-car garage. The shop will contain numerically controlled milling machines and lathes, as well as other expensive equipment, and will require a plausible explanation—a front company set up to manufacture, say, transmission components. The best location would seem to be in some Third World city, where governmental control is lax, corruption is rampant, and the noise from the shop will be masked by industrial activities nearby. Take your pick: Mombasa, Karachi, Mumbai, Jakarta, Mexico City, and a finite list of others. You might as well choose Istanbul, because it’s close to where you’d be coming from.

Construction of the bomb would take maybe four months. The size of your technical team would depend on the form of HEU. At the minimum it would consist of a nuclear physicist or engineer, a couple of skilled machinists, an explosives expert, and perhaps an electronics person, for the trigger. The essentials of the work are easy to grasp. A cannon-type bomb employs two HEU hemispheres which when joined together form a single sphere. A sphere is the geometric shape that provides the smallest surface area in relation to mass, lowering the threshold of criticality. The receiving hemisphere is hollow on one side. The other hemisphere, known as the bullet or plug, has a perfectly matched convex surface on the opposing side. It sits in wait at the top of a steel barrel sometimes as long as a stepladder is high. When the time comes to detonate the bomb, a chemical propellant shoots the plug down the barrel. The ideal velocity is 1,000 meters per second, about as fast as a high-speed rifle round. The goal is to slam the masses together before the nuclear reaction has a chance to start. Once they have joined, the HEU can be trusted to do its job, though with a primitive, garage-made device there will be some uncertainty about the explosive yield. A common misperception about terrorist bomb makers is that they would try to imitate a military device, and would therefore require a level of expertise found only in government laboratories—but you would not care whether New York was hit with a ten- or a twenty-kiloton blast.

Even so, the construction of a bomb is not a casual project. The machinery, the noise, and especially the likely presence of team members who are not locals, provide the United States with the last chance of self-defense. A city like Istanbul, which appears from a distance to be anarchic, and is famously resistant to central authority, is up close and in practice a patchwork of tightly knit communities with something of the organic power structures of the borderlands. In even the most chaotic neighborhoods, where industrial shops are mixed among illegal apartment blocks and communities of impoverished newcomers and squatters, it would be difficult to keep the neighbors from asking inconvenient questions. The same is true in Mombasa, Karachi, and every other city where a bomb could conceivably be built. A United States government that could lay traplines in their slums would have a much better chance of stopping a terrorist attack than any amount of naval maneuvering or bureaucratic restructuring can provide.

In the end, if you wanted a bomb and calculated the odds, you would have to admit that they were stacked against you, simply because of how the world works—and that this may be why others like you, if there have been any, have so far not succeeded. You would understand, though, that the odds are not impossible. You would of course have many concerns as you moved ahead. But perhaps the thing that should worry you the least is the American government’s war on terror.

Autore: William Langewiesche

Fonte: www.theatlantic.com