Alice Bachini almost manages to scare me silly with talk of nuclear weapons in suitcases (this article must surely be in the NSA ‘Dodgy’ Inbox via the Echelon Internet System, being pored over for hidden significance).
However a few clues about the person carrying it: a decent sized nuclear weapon is going to need a twenty five kilogramme lump of Uranium 235, or a smaller piece of plutonium (I don’t know how much smaller). There are assorted devices for triggering the detonator, initiating fission and of course a very strong cradle (and heavy) to hold the whole thing together while the whole thing is carried around.
Last weekend I watched an entertaining film called “Bad Company” in which a couple of CIA agents played by Antony Hopkins and Chris Rock threw the briefcase around as if it contained only a couple of sandwiches and a copy of the daily paper. I’m no Arnold Schwarzenegger (I probably weigh more but not for the right reasons) and I’m quite sure that a forty or fifty kilogramme suitcase would be beyond my capacity to carry one-handed for any distance. I would have thought that someone struggling two-handed with an attache case they could barely lift would be a fairly indiscrete sight. It would also be a very naughty gag to pull at a station as a practical joke.
Realistically we’re looking at a device in a vehicle. It is a safe bet that no European city is safe but I would be amazed if the US government hadn’t installed radiation detection equipment on all major roads leading into the major cities. The Mayor of London is too busy trying to mess up the traffic to worry about such niceties. Even a heavily shielded lump of radioactive material can be detected fairly easily at a distance. At school we played with tiny pieces of uranium encased in lead which we could detect yards away with Geiger counters. Indeed in the movie, such a device was used to track down the bomb.
