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Eight countries are known to have nuclear weapons -- the United States,
Russia, China, Great Britain, France, India, Pakistan and Israel. David
Albright, a nuclear-weapons expert and president of the Institute for Science
and International Security, points out that Pakistan's program in particular
was built almost entirely through black markets and industrial espionage,
aimed at circumventing Western export controls. Defeating the discipline of
nuclear nonproliferation is ingrained in the culture. Disaffected individuals
in Pakistan (which, remember, was intimate with the Taliban) would have no
trouble finding the illicit channels or the rationalization for diverting
materials, expertise -- even, conceivably, a warhead.

But the mall of horrors is Russia, because it currently maintains something
like 15,000 of the world's (very roughly) 25,000 nuclear warheads, ranging in
destructive power from about 500 kilotons, which could kill a million people,
down to the one-kiloton land mines that would be enough to make much of
Manhattan uninhabitable. Russia is a country with sloppy accounting, a
disgruntled military, an audacious black market and indigenous terrorists.

There is anecdotal reason to worry. Gen. Igor Valynkin, commander of the 12th
Main Directorate of the Russian Ministry of Defense, the Russian military
sector in charge of all nuclear weapons outside the Navy, said recently that
twice in the past year terrorist groups were caught casing Russian
weapons-storage facilities. But it's hard to know how seriously to take this.
When I made the rounds of nuclear experts in Russia earlier this year, many
were skeptical of these near-miss anecdotes, saying the security forces tend
to exaggerate such incidents to dramatize their own prowess (the culprits are
always caught) and enhance their budgets. On the whole, Russian and American
military experts sound not very alarmed about the vulnerability of Russia's
nuclear warheads. They say Russia takes these weapons quite seriously,
accounts for them rigorously and guards them carefully. There is no confirmed
case of a warhead being lost. Strategic warheads, including the 4,000 or so
that President Bush and President Vladimir Putin have agreed to retire from
service, tend to be stored in hard-to-reach places, fenced and heavily
guarded, and their whereabouts are not advertised. The people who guard them
are better paid and more closely vetted than most Russian soldiers.

Eugene E. Habiger, the four-star general who was in charge of American
strategic weapons until 1998 and then ran nuclear antiterror programs for the
Energy Department, visited several Russian weapons facilities in 1996 and
1997. He may be the only American who has actually entered a Russian bunker
and inspected a warhead in situ. Habiger said he found the overall level of
security comparable to American sites, although the Russians depend more on
people than on technology to protect their nukes.

The image of armed terrorist commandos storming a nuclear bunker is
cinematic, but it's far more plausible to think of an inside job. No observer
of the unraveling Russian military has much trouble imagining that a group of
military officers, disenchanted by the humiliation of serving a spent
superpower, embittered by the wretched conditions in which they spend much of
their military lives or merely greedy, might find a way to divert a warhead
to a terrorist for the right price. (The Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev,
infamous for such ruthless exploits as taking an entire hospital hostage,
once hinted that he had an opportunity to buy a nuclear warhead from the
stockpile.) The anecdotal evidence of desperation in the military is
plentiful and disquieting. Every year the Russian press provides stories like
that of the 19-year-old sailor who went on a rampage aboard an Akula-class
nuclear submarine, killing eight people and threatening to blow up the boat
and its nuclear reactor; or the five soldiers at Russia's nuclear-weapons
test site who killed a guard, took a hostage and tried to hijack an aircraft,
or the officers who reportedly stole five assault helicopters, with their
weapons pods, and tried to sell them to North Korea.

The Clinton administration found the danger of disgruntled nuclear caretakers
worrisome enough that it considered building better housing for some officers
in the nuclear rocket corps. Congress, noting that the United States does not
build housing for its own officers, rejected the idea out of hand.

If a terrorist did get his hands on a nuclear warhead, he would still face
the problem of setting it off. American warheads are rigged with multiple
PAL's ( ''permissive action links'') -- codes and self-disabling devices
designed to frustrate an unauthorized person from triggering the explosion.
General Habiger says that when he examined Russian strategic weapons he found
the level of protection comparable to our own. ''You'd have to literally
break the weapon apart to get into the gut,'' he told me. ''I would submit
that a more likely scenario is that there'd be an attempt to get hold of a
warhead and not explode the warhead but extract the plutonium or highly
enriched uranium.'' In other words, it's easier to take the fuel and build an
entire weapon from scratch than it is to make one of these things go off.

Then again, Habiger is not an expert in physics or weapons design. Then
again, the Russians would seem to have no obvious reason for misleading him
about something that important. Then again, how many times have computer
hackers hacked their way into encrypted computers we were assured were
impregnable? Then again, how many computer hackers does al Qaeda have? This
subject drives you in circles.

The most troublesome gap in the generally reassuring assessment of Russian
weapons security is those tactical nuclear warheads -- smaller, short-range
weapons like torpedoes, depth charges, artillery shells, mines. Although
their smaller size and greater number makes them ideal candidates for theft,
they have gotten far less attention simply because, unlike all of our
long-range weapons, they happen not to be the subject of any formal treaty.
The first President Bush reached an informal understanding with President
Gorbachev and then with President Yeltsin that both sides would gather and
destroy thousands of tactical nukes. But the agreement included no
inventories of the stockpiles, no outside monitoring, no verification of any
kind. It was one of those trust-me deals that, in the hindsight of Sept. 11,
amount to an enormous black hole in our security.

Did I say earlier there are about 15,000 Russian warheads? That number
includes, alongside the scrupulously counted strategic warheads in bombers,
missiles and submarines, the commonly used estimate of 8,000 tactical
warheads. But that figure is at best an educated guess. Other educated
guesses of the tactical nukes in Russia go as low as 4,000 and as high as
30,000. We just don't know. We don't even know if the Russians know, since
they are famous for doing things off the books. ''They'll tell you they've
never lost a weapon,'' said Kenneth Luongo, director of a private
antiproliferation group called the Russian-American Nuclear Security Advisory
Council. ''The fact is, they don't know. And when you're talking about
warhead counting, you don't want to miss even one.''

And where are they? Some are stored in reinforced concrete bunkers like the
one at Zhukovka. Others are deployed. (When the submarine Kursk sank with its
118 crewmen in August 2000, the Americans' immediate fear was for its nuclear
armaments. The standard load out for a submarine of that class includes a
couple of nuclear torpedoes and possibly some nuclear depth charges.) Still
others are supposed to be in the process of being dismantled under terms of
various formal and informal arms-control agreements. Some are in transit. In
short, we don't really know.

The other worrying thing about tactical nukes is that their anti-use devices
are believed to be less sophisticated, because the weapons were designed to
be employed in the battlefield. Some of the older systems are thought to have
no permissive action links at all, so that setting one off would be about as
complicated as hot-wiring a car.

Efforts to learn more about the state of tactical stockpiles have been
frustrated by reluctance on both sides to let visitors in. Viktor Mikhailov,
who ran the Russian Ministry of Atomic Energy until 1998 with a famous scorn
for America's nonproliferation concerns, still insists that the United States
programs to protect Russian nuclear weapons and material mask a secret agenda
of intelligence-gathering. Americans, in turn, sometimes balk at reciprocal
access, on the grounds that we are the ones paying the bills for all these
safety upgrades, said the former Senator Sam Nunn, co-author of the main
American program for securing Russian nukes, called Nunn-Lugar.

''We have to decide if we want the Russians to be transparent -- I'd call it
cradle-to-grave transparency with nuclear material and inventories and so
forth,'' Nunn told me. ''Then we have to open up more ourselves. This is a
big psychological breakthrough we're talking about here, both for them and
for us.''

The Garage Bomb One of the more interesting facts about the atom bomb dropped
on Hiroshima is that it had never been tested. All of those spectral images
of nuclear coronas brightening the desert of New Mexico -- those were to
perfect the more complicated plutonium device that was dropped on Nagasaki.
''Little Boy,'' the Hiroshima bomb, was a rudimentary gunlike device that
shot one projectile of highly enriched uranium into another, creating a
critical mass that exploded. The mechanics were so simple that few doubted it
would work, so the first experiment was in the sky over Japan.

The closest thing to a consensus I heard among those who study nuclear terror
was this: building a nuclear bomb is easier than you think, probably easier
than stealing one. In the rejuvenated effort to prevent a terrorist from
striking a nuclear blow, this is where most of the attention and money are
focused.

A nuclear explosion of any kind ''is not a sort of high-probability thing,''
said a White House official who follows the subject closely. ''But getting
your hands on enough fissile material to build an improvised nuclear device,
to my mind, is the least improbable of them all, and particularly if that
material is highly enriched uranium in metallic form. Then I'm really
worried. That's the one.''

To build a nuclear explosive you need material capable of explosive nuclear
fission, you need expertise, you need some equipment, and you need a way to
deliver it.

Delivering it to the target is, by most reckoning, the simplest part. People
in the field generally scoff at the mythologized suitcase bomb; instead they
talk of a ''conex bomb,'' using the name of those shack-size steel containers
that bring most cargo into the United States. Two thousand containers enter
America every hour, on trucks and trains and especially on ships sailing into
more than 300 American ports. Fewer than 2 percent are cracked open for
inspection, and the great majority never pass through an X-ray machine.
Containers delivered to upriver ports like St. Louis or Chicago pass many
miles of potential targets before they even reach customs.

''How do you protect against that?'' mused Habiger, the former chief of our
nuclear arsenal. ''You can't. That's scary. That's very, very scary. You set
one of those off in Philadelphia, in New York City, San Francisco, Los
Angeles, and you're going to kill tens of thousands of people, if not more.''
Habiger's view is ''It's not a matter of if; it's a matter of when'' -- which
may explain why he now lives in San Antonio.

The Homeland Security office has installed a plan to refocus inspections,
making sure the 2 percent of containers that get inspected are those without
a clear, verified itinerary. Detectors will be put into place at ports and
other checkpoints. This is good, but it hardly represents an ironclad
defense. The detection devices are a long way from being reliable.
(Inconveniently, the most feared bomb component, uranium, is one of the
hardest radioactive substances to detect because it does not emit a lot of
radiation prior to fission.) The best way to stop nuclear terror, therefore,
is to keep the weapons out of terrorist hands in the first place.

(cont'd)

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