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.
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."
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
W-54, 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 W-54 — 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).
Whether Russian
"suitcase nukes" exist, much less are lost, is still
currently unknown, though 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 lost or stolen, the dangers of a terrorist organization
getting its hands on them may be highly overestimated, given the
logistical difficulties of advertising, seeking, and actively
purchasing such a politically and economically valuable device in total
secrecy.
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.
However it is conceivable that if such weapons had ever been produced,
that they could be stolen or sold to malicious organizations or states
without advanced nuclear technology of their own.
