Michael Richardson: Weapons of mass disruption await

Barely 24 hours before suicide bombers struck in Bali last weekend, Australian and Singaporean military specialists ended an exercise designed to cope with an even more terrifying prospect - a terrorist attack using chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear weapons.

The week-long exercise in Sydney by members of the Australian Defence Force's Incident Response Regiment and its Singaporean counterpart focused on preventing terrorists from using a mass casualty weapon, or if they did, responding to the crisis.

The exercise centred on the two threats considered most likely: radiological or chemical bombs. In both, conventional explosives would disperse radioactive or chemical poison.

Prime Minister John Howard announced after a meeting with state and territory leaders that as part of new counter-terrorism measures, the federal government would spend A$17.3 million ($18.8 million) over the next five years to establish an Australian Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Data Centre within the Australian Federal Police organisation.

Concerns that such horrific weapons could be used against civilian populations may sound like the stuff of science fiction. Yet many Western and Asian officials and arms control experts believe a chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear (CBRN) terrorist attack is highly probable somewhere in the world in the next decade.

These deadly materials and the technology to make them is becoming more widely available through trafficking, dispersal of scientific and industrial knowledge via the internet, and the spread of nuclear weapons beyond the nine states (the United States, Russia, China, France, Britain, Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea) known or thought to have them.

Singapore's defence minister Rear Admiral Teo Chee Hean warned last year that the nightmare of terrorists getting their hands on CBR weapons, or collaborating with rogue regimes in the use of these weapons, was no longer unthinkable.

"The illicit trade in weapons of mass destruction is intricate and sophisticated," he said. "The counter-proliferation effort has to be as sophisticated and comprehensive."

This year, Richard Lugar, chairman of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, commissioned a survey of 85 arms control and national security experts to assess the danger.

Asked to rate the possibility of a chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear attack on any nation, the respondents put the likelihood at 50 per cent over five years and 70 per cent over 10 years.

An attack with a radiological or "dirty" bomb, combining a conventional explosive such as dynamite or ammonium nitrate with cancer-causing radioactive material, was seen as the most likely form of attack, with a risk of 40 per cent over the next decade.

The United Nations' nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), has outlined four possible terrorist scenarios involving nuclear weapons or radioactive materials.

The first, theft of a nuclear bomb, is considered highly unlikely because arsenals are closely guarded.

But should it happen, experts have estimated that between 500,000 and two million people could be killed if a one megaton nuclear bomb exploded in a major city.

The second possibility is for terrorists to acquire sufficient amounts of plutonium or highly enriched uranium and the equipment and expertise needed to build and detonate a crude nuclear explosive device.

A third threat is a terrorist attack on, or sabotage of, reactors or other nuclear facilities to contaminate surrounding areas with radioactivity.

The targets could be nuclear power plants used to generate electricity; facilities for making nuclear fuel; nuclear research reactors that can produce radioactive isotopes; or hospitals, medical centres and industries that use these radioactive elements for X-rays, radiation treatment of cancer patients, disinfecting food, and for many other important health or economic services.

The nuclear plants and fuel facilities are generally considered to be tightly secured, but the same cannot be said for more than 270 research reactors which IAEA says are in operation in at least 56 countries.

William Potter, a nuclear security specialist at the Monterey Institute of International Studies in California, says about 130 of the reactors in nearly 40 countries run on highly enriched uranium.

Among them are more than a dozen reactors in seven Asian and Pacific nations.

He told an Asia-Pacific conference on nuclear safeguards and security last November that given the risk of terrorists gaining access to civilian research reactor sites, it was imperative for all facilities using highly enriched uranium to be converted to run on low-enriched uranium fuel similar to that used in nuclear power plants for generating electricity.

Last week, the agency reported that illicit trafficking of nuclear and other radioactive substances was increasing, raising the prospect of terrorists acquiring isotopes such as Cesium-137, Americium-241 or Cobalt-60 to put into a "dirty" bomb.

Member states reported 121 trafficking incidents last year, about half involving criminal activity. It was the first time the annual tally has risen since 2000.

The report follows a region-wide check in the past year by the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation. It found unsecured cobalt in two unidentified Asia-Pacific countries after radiation therapy centres closed.

A team of 10 experts from the organisation is training officials from 11 Southeast Asian and Pacific island nations under a three-year programme to help them to find and secure radioactive waste that could otherwise fall into the hands of terrorist bomb makers.

A radiological dispersion device may not be a real weapon of mass destruction when compared to a nuclear explosion or the weaponised release of a deadly biological agent such as anthrax. But a "dirty" bomb would certainly be a weapon of mass disruption in any city.

There would be public panic over radioactivity, decontamination of affected areas would take a long time and the economic cost could be huge.

* Michael Richardson is a visiting senior research fellow at the Institute of South East Asian Studies in Singapore. He is the author of A Time Bomb for Global Trade: Maritime-related Terrorism in an Age of Weapons of Mass Destruction published by ISEAS.