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 been able to erase from my mind the image of a single Samsonite suitcase containing a nuclear device as powerful as that which obliterated Hiroshima. If you're prepared to kill yourself blowing up one person, I thought, why not blow up 200,000 people? Then I had a further dreadful thought. Given the propensity of al-Qaeda to do these things in triplicate, why stop at one suitcase? Why not detonate suitcases simultaneously in London, Moscow, New York?
Certainly, President Bush is aware of this possibility. One month after 9/11, on October 11, 2001, the director of the CIA informed Bush that al-Qaeda had a 10-kiloton bomb, stolen from the Soviet arsenal, ready to blow up in New York. After several weeks of panic, during which Vice-President Dick Cheney left Washington for an "undisclosed location", the CIA report turned out to be a false alarm.
Meanwhile, the planting of a dirty bomb in a major city remains, as they say, a real possibility. What's more, it's been done: on November 23, 1995 Chechen separatists put one such device (composed of cesium-137) in
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After the CIA reported that
al-Qaeda had a 10-kiloton bomb, Dick Cheney left Washington for an ‘undisclosed location’ |
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Moscow's Ismailovsky Park - then alerted journalists to its whereabouts.
It's not just me on whom Allison's book is having its effect. The friend in Cumbria who alerted me to it, a level-headed man not given to hyperbole, pronounced Nuclear
Terrorism the most important book he had read. This week I learned of a man who, after reading it, flew off for the weekend to Berlin: he's decided to start spending his money and enjoying his life while it lasts.
As for me, I've sold my flat in London and am heading in the New Year for Tasmania. As General Lebed warned Yeltsin, it takes only one person to trigger a nuclear device. 
Nuclear Terrorism is published in the US by Times Books. The UK paperback edition will be published next March by Constable
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