Wall Street Journal - OpinionJournal - Extra:
Baggage Claim / The myth of "suitcase nukes."
BY RICHARD MINITER / Monday, October 31, 2005 12:01 a.m. EST
[...] All portable nuclear devices--which are much bigger than a suitcase--were stored at a central facility under heavy guard. Lt. Gen. Igor Valynkin, chief of the Russian Defense Ministry's 12th Main Directorate, which oversees all nuclear weapons, denied that any weapons were missing. "Nuclear suitcases . . . were never produced and are not produced," he said. While he acknowledged that they were technically possible to make, he said the weapon would have "a lifespan of only several months" and would therefore be too costly to maintain.
[...] "For now, suitcase-sized nuclear bombs remain in the realm of James Bond movies. Given the limitations of physics and engineering, no nation seems to have invested the time and money to make them. Both U.S. and the USSR built nuclear mines (as well as artillery shells), which were small but hardly portable--and all were dismantled by treaty by 2000. Alexander Lebed's claims and those of defector Stanislev Lunev were not based on direct observation. The one U.S. official who saw a small nuclear device said it was the size of three footlockers--hardly a suitcase. The desire to obliterate cities is portable--inside the heads of believers--while, thankfully, the nuclear devices to bring that about are not.
Mr. Miniter is author of 'Disinformation: 22 Media Myths That Undermine the War on Terror' (Regnery, 2005), from which this article is excerpted. It is available from the OpinionJournal bookstore. "
