Homeland Security Today May 21, 2008
Scare at Swedish Nuke Plant Evokes Concerns Over Security
Scores of threats have been made over the last 40 years
By Anthony L. Kimery
The detention of two contract workers at the Oskarshamn nuclear power plant in southern Sweden on suspicion of planning sabotage after a bag one was carrying was found to have traces of an explosive known to be used by terrorists brings to mind the sorts of attempted sabotage and bombings of nuclear power facilities that took place back in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, primarily in the United States.
It also reminds that the security of US nuclear power and other facilities must constantly be tested and assessed, especially since terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda have considered and openly threatened to attack such sites.
Federal audits in recent years have continued to find lax and inadequate security at too many of the nation’s nuclear power plants. Last October, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that with regard to securing US nuclear material, the Department of Energy "has made little progress consolidating and disposing of special nuclear material."
GAO also found the NRC was unable to assess the adequacy of security at the nation’s 104 commercial nuclear power plants at 65 facilities in 31 states.
In addition, GAO determined action may even be needed to reassess the security of NRC-licensed research reactors, some of which are located on the grounds of universities across the nation.
One of the two men Swedish police took into custody is a male contract welder who was stopped in a security check when traces of triacetone triperoxide, or TATP, were found on a carrying bag.
“We understand that it isn’t something he needed for the job,” a police spokesman said.
The other man who was detained also a contract employee at the plant.
One of the two men reportedly is already known to police for unspecified reasons, and b men are colleagues from the same welding company that was contracted to work at one of three reactors at the plant.
TATP is an explosive commonly used by Islamist jihadi suicide bombers in Israel and elsewhere in the Middle East. It’s especially favored by Palestinian bomb makers. TATP was a component of the explosive which "shoe bomber" Richard Reid tried to detonate on an international flight in 2001 and, more recently, was used in the bombs exploded by the London suicide terrorists.
In recent years, there has been a dramatic increase in the use of TATP explosives by terrorists around the world, largely because it’s easy to make and difficult to detect. In one raid in 1998, Palestinian Authority security personnel uncovered 800 kilograms of TATP in a Nablus garage.
“TATP is a fairly easy explosive to make, as far as explosives manufacturing goes. All it takes is acetone, hydrogen peroxide and a strong acid like hydrochloric or sulfuric acid,” states a GlobalSecurity.org fact paper on TATP.
But because of its instability, TATP also increases the likelihood of premature detonation. Because of its instability, it has been called the "Mother of Satan” by some Islamist terror groups and suicide bombers. This instability, terrorist experts say, is responsible for many of the deaths of Palestinian bomb makers while making bombs.
Earlier this year, Denmark's chief prosecutor charged two Muslim men with alleged ties to Al Qaeda, with plotting a terrorist attack using TATP explosives.
Danish intelligence gathering efforts were increased after Al Qaeda stated the country was a potential target following the 2005 London bombings.
TATP also was linked to the London suicide bombings, which killed 52 commuters, after traces of the explosive were found in the suspects' home.
That terrorists would consider attacking nuclear power facilities comes as no surprise to seasoned US counterterrorists. Federal investigators noted that Al Qaeda-linked Ramzi Yousef, the convicted mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, encouraged followers to attack nuclear power plants. So, too, has Al Qaeda leader, Usama Bin Laden.
Among documents seized in Afghanistan after the US routed Al Qaeda and the Taliban were descriptions, maps, and high-resolution 1-meter commercial satellite imagery of US atomic power facilities.
"What we have found in Afghanistan confirms that — far from ending there — our war against terror is only beginning," President Bush said in his Jan. 30 State of the Union address to the nation.
US intelligence agencies have uncovered plans of US nuclear power plants at terrorist bases in Afghanistan, which indicate attacks on these facilities were planned.
Among the caches of materials left behind by fleeing Al Qaeda and Taliban forces was evidence of “casing” of North Anna, a nuclear power plant in Virginia roughly 70 miles south of the nation’s capital, according to senior US counterterrorist intelligence analysts.
Following the Sept. 11 attacks, the North Anna nuclear power plant was put on a high state of alert, as were all of the nation's 103 nuclear power plants which provide 20 percent of the nation’s electricity. Within days, soldiers of the Virginia Army National Guard were called to active duty to provide security at Virginia’s two nuclear power plants.
Another nuclear power plant that may have been considered a target by Al Qaeda is New York’s Indian Point, which one of the hi-jacked planes flew over on its way to New York City.
The 9/11 Commission Report revealed that Mohammed Atta, the plot's ringleader who piloted one of the planes that hit the World Trade Center, "considered targeting a nuclear facility he had seen during familiarization flights near New York."
Given that the reconnaissance flight paths used by the terrorists included the Hudson River corridor and the next closest nuclear facility to New York City is over 70 miles away, the plant Atta had in mind is believed to have been Indian Point.
Largely vanished from the institutional memory of intelligence though is that scores of threats were made against civilian nuclear power plants over the last 40 years.
Indeed. Nuclear power facilities were targets of terrorist attacks throughout the world in the 1970’s. Attacks that heralded the age of nuclear terrorism.
Beginning with the discovery in 1969 of a dynamite bomb near the University of Illinois, Urbana nuclear research reactor, and a pipe bomb found later the following year at the 497-megawatt Point Beach 1 nuclear power plant near Two Creeks, Wisconsin shortly before the reactor began operation, nuclear terrorism in the form of attacks on nuclear power plants in the US became a serious though now largely forgotten national security threat.
In Nov. 1971, an arsonist struck the Indian Point 2 nuclear power plant at Buchanan, New York causing an estimated $10 million in damage. That same month, valves and switches were tampered with by an insider at Commonwealth Edison’s Zion Nuclear Station near Chicago, which had they not been discovered could have resulted in a “China Syndrome” event.
Severed cables and clogged helium filters were next discovered at the Ft. St. Vrain nuclear plant in Colorado, and later that summer an intruder entered the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant compound despite its security fences and guard towers, and wounded a night security guard before escaping.
On October 10, 1977, a bomb exploded at Portland General Electric Co.’s Trojan nuclear power plant in Columbia, Oregon. The Environmental Assault Unit of the New World Liberation Front claimed responsibility.
Beginning on March 25, 1973, terrorists began attacking nuclear power plants around the world. It began with 15 members of the People’s Revolutionary Army (ERP) attacking the Atucha Atomic Power Station 60 miles north of Buenos Aires. The group overpowered the plant’s five guards, seized firearms from security posts, and began to break into the power plant itself.
Two plant officials managed to summon police, who arrived quickly and were able to repel the terrorists, all of whom escaped. The attack was part of a campaign of terrorism by the ERP in Argentina which later included several other unsuccessful attacks on nuclear power facilities.
In 1976, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) belatedly disclosed that there had been more than 100 bomb threats directed at nuclear power sites in America. Over the next 12 years, dozens of incidents of terrorism targeting nuclear power plants were carried out around the world prior to the International Task Force on Prevention of Nuclear Terrorism convening in late 1985 to address the issue of terrorists “going nuclear.”
Just months before, the Philippines-based New People’s Army attempted to sabotage the island nation’s first nuclear power plant. Muslim members of the New People’s Army would later assimilate into Philippine terrorist organizations like Abu Sayef, which is supported and guided by Al Qaeda.
Throughout the 1970’s, dozens of terrorist attacks were carried out against nuclear facilities worldwide. In 1978, the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs held hearings on the Omnibus Anti-Terrorism Act introduced by Sen. Abraham Ribicoff. Committee Chairman John Glenn prefaced the hearings by pointing out there had been no less than 44 serious nuclear threats made in the United States since 1977.
Ribicoff’s and companion bills introduced in the House were designed to strengthen the federal government’s programs and policies for combating international and domestic terrorism. After considerable debate, the bill was passed by the Senate under the title, “Act to Combat International Terrorism,” but its counterpart legislation in the House withered on the vine due to inaction.
The bill would have mandated increased airport security, including restrictions on persons boarding flights with “a concealed deadly or dangerous weapon which is accessible to such person in-flight.”
"We know people are concerned regarding terrorist attacks," that’s why "protecting the public's health and safety has always been our number one priority. We take it very seriously,” Rick Zuercher of Virginia nuclear power plant operator Dominion Power told the Fredericksburg, VA Freelance Star following the 9/11 attacks.
Zuercher said the company is working closely with federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies to strengthen physical security, which may prevent an on-ground bombing or attack by terrorists, but does nothing to defend against a suicidal terrorist at the controls of a jumbo jetliner — a threat that will be hard to erect bulwarks for short of deploying batteries of anti-aircraft surface-to-air missiles at nuclear power and weapons facilities – a move some authorities and members of Congress have argued the need for.
As far back as the mid-1970’s, L. Manning Muntzing, then Director of Regulation of the NRC’s predecessor, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), warned that highly trained terrorists could take over a nuclear power plant near a major American city and destroy it in such a way as to kill perhaps millions.
On March 24, 1974, former US Navy underwater demolitions officer Bruce L. Welch testified to a congressional committee that “as one trained in special warfare and demolitions, I feel certain I could pick three or five ex-underwater demolition, Marine reconnaissance, or Green Beret men at random and sabotage virtually any nuclear reactor in the country.”
GAO and other covert goverment testing of the security of nuclear power plants and other nuclear sites have found that well trained and resourced individuals are still able to breach this security - in some instances, "very easily," according to a military Special Operations Forces member familiar with the covert testing.
“How quickly they forget,” quipped a retired FBI agent involved in responding to an incident thirty years ago that should have been made the subject of required study at NRC and other federal security agencies.
On a Friday evening in Feb. 1972, three jittery armed men commandeered a Southern Airways DC-8 bound for Florida with 30 passengers and demanded a $10 million ransom. The men were equipped with guns, grenades, and parachutes.
The hijackers diverted the jetliner first to Detroit, then Cleveland, and finally to Toronto, where they rejected an offer of $500,000. The hijackers then forced the plane’s pilots to take off for Knoxville, Tenn., where they threatened to slam the airliner into Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a key US nuclear weapons lab.
The hijackers’ frightening threat was taken seriously; all Oak Ridge reactors were shut down and the plant’s employees evacuated. The apocalyptic-like threat was never carried out, but it served, at least temporarily, to illuminate a disturbing new dimension of modern terrorism.
Intelligence collected by US authorities since the 9/11 attacks clearly indicates nuclear power plants have been identified as targets by Al Qaeda, as noted in a report by the 9/11 Commission. Although the report does not identify any of the nuclear facilities that Al Qaeda has potentially targeted, nuclear facilities near Washington, DC had been the subject of surveillance by some of the 9/11 hijackers and their associates in the months before the attacks.
“As originally envisioned, the 9/11 plot involved even more extensive attacks than those carried out on September 11,” the 9/11 Commission report stated. Initially, ten planes were to be hijacked and used “to attack targets on both the East and West coasts of the United States … these hijacked planes were to be crashed into CIA and FBI headquarters, unidentified nuclear power plants, and the tallest buildings in California and Washington State.
Illustrations, photos and interrogations of Al Qaeda members in Afghanistan, at secret CIA facilities, and elsewhere, prompted NRC to warn that terrorists planned to slam an airliner into a US nuclear power plant.
The NRC said "no specific location or timeline was given for the attack," but FBI headquarters nevertheless sent the warning to all its field offices. The advisory also went to power plant operators across the nation, including all 103 US nuclear power plants.
"During debriefings of an Al Qaeda senior operative, he stated there would be a second airline attack in the US," the memo said. "The attack was already planned and three individuals were on the ground in the states recruiting non-Arabs to take part in the attack.
"The plan was to fly a commercial aircraft into a nuclear power plant to be chosen by a team on the ground. The plan included diverting the mission to any tall building if a military aircraft intercepts the plane."
Four of the hijacked 9/11 jetliners flew perilously close to at least a dozen operating commercial nuclear reactors, from Pilgrim, Millstone, and Indian Point between Boston and New York, to Surry, North Anna, and Calvert Cliffs near Washington, to Peach Bottom, Limerick, and Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania.
© Copyright 2008, KMD Media, LLC.
