Suitcase bomb

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A suitcase bomb is a bomb which uses a suitcase as its delivery method. While conventional bombs can be hidden in any type of container, suitcase bombs have been threats primarily in two different contexts: conventional bombs in suitcases on airplanes (where there are many suitcases, and where even a small bomb will cause a crash), and suitcases with small nuclear weapons inside (sometimes called suitcase nukes).

Suitcase bombs have been used in terrorist attacks in Israel — particularly cellphone-detonated bombs which are left behind in a public bus and set off.

In 1997, former Russian National Security Adviser Alexander Lebed made public claims about lost "suitcase nukes" following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. In an interview with the newsmagazine Sixty Minutes, Lebed said:

"I'm saying that more than a hundred weapons out of the supposed number of 250 are not under the control of the armed forces of Russia. I don't know their location. I don't know whether they have been destroyed or whether they are stored or whether they've been sold or stolen, I don't know."

However both the US and Russian governments immediately rejected Lebed's claims and cast questions to his credibility. Russia's atomic energy ministry went so far as to dispute that suitcase nuclear weapons had even ever been developed by the Soviet Union. Later testimony however insinuated that the suitcase bombs had been under the control of the KGB and not the army or the atomic energy ministry, so they might not know of their existence. Russian president Vladimir Putin, in an interview with Barbara Walters in 2001, stated about suitcase nukes, "I don't really believe this is true. These are just legends. One can probably assume that somebody tried to sell some nuclear secrets. But there is no documentary confirmation of those developments."

The Russian government's statements on this matter have been contradictory. First they denied that such weapons had ever existed; then they said that all of them had been destroyed. The best available information suggests that several hundred suitcase nukes were manufactured, but that they have a shelf life of at most a few months in between maintenance and parts replacement. Even if rumors that some suitcase nukes were stolen in the period between 1989 and 1992 are true, it is highly unlikely that they still would produce nominal yield. Most likely, an attempt to detonate one of these devices would scatter plutonium, but not produce any fission.

Whether or not Russian "suitcase nukes" exist, the threat of the old Soviet nuclear arsenal falling into malicious hands has been behind many American and Russian joint-initiatives after the Cold War to bolster Russia's ability to keep its nuclear weapons secure and accounted for, while the amount of weapons is being scaled down as well. Even if such weapons do exist, and have been stolen, the dangers of a terrorist organization getting its hands on them may be highly overestimated, given the logistical difficulties of advertising, seeking, and purchasing such a politically and economically valuable device. Additionally, the tritium in the neutron initiators likely required to detonate such devices would have decayed significantly by the present time, making their detonation considerably more difficult.

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Only a nation with an extremely advanced nuclear program could manufacture warheads small enough to fit into a suitcase. Both the USA and the USSR manufactured nuclear weapons small enough to fit into large backpacks during the Cold War, but neither have ever made public the existence or development of weapons small enough to fit into a suitcase. The smallest nuclear warhead manufactured by the USA was the W54, used for the Davy Crockett warhead which could be fired from a 120 mm recoilless rifle, and a backpack version called the Mk-54 SADM (Small Atomic Demolition Munition). While this warhead, with a weight of only 51 lb (23 kg), could potentially fit into a large suitcase, it would be a very tight fit. While the explosive power of the W54 — up to an equivalent of 1 kiloton of TNT — is not much by the normal standards of a nuclear weapon (the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II were around 13 to 15 kilotons each), it could still do tremendous physical damage to a structure (it would be many, many times more powerful than the explosive attack on the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma in 1995, for example, with a yield of 0.002 kiloton).

The technology required to manufacture a nuclear warhead miniaturized to such an extent that it could fit into a suitcase restricts the independent development of "suitcase nukes" to only nations with highly-advanced nuclear weapons programs which have performed many nuclear tests.

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