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quote:
CAIRO (Reuters) - A pan-Arab newspaper said Sunday that the al Qaeda organization led by Osama bin Laden (news - web sites) bought tactical nuclear weapons from Ukraine in 1998 and is storing them in safe places for possible use.
There was no independent corroboration of the report, which appeared in the newspaper al-Hayat under an Islamabad dateline and cited sources close to al Qaeda

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After the Soviet Union broke up in 1991, a former Russian National Security Adviser, Alexander Lebed, said that up to 100 portable suitcase-sized bombs were unaccounted for. Moscow has denied such weapons existed.
Lebed said each one was equivalent to 1,000 tons of TNT and could kill as many as 100,000 people.


http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20040208/wl_nm/security_qaeda_nuclear_dc_1
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I wonder how long it will be before US airlines ban suit cases. Laughing
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America and Russia had many suitcases like that as a delivery mechanism/ deterrent in the cold war. They dont last very long as the radioactive component used decays after about 7 and a half years. (Its a special type as to be small enough)
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what kinda crap nuke is that?! 7.5 years??

i did some searching, and people are claiming all sorts of things, from a couple of decades to a few years...

http://groups.google.co.nz/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=suitcase+nuke+half+life
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The decay meant that after about 7 years the bomb became extremely unreliable, it may or may not reach fission.

It was a great deterent, you could walk right up to the white house and detonate it long before any missles ever got on thier way..

Its been a few years since i read about it but the author of the report was a journalist who interviewed nixon (i think) and commented about how nixon was warned that the russians had nukes right in washington. At the time he dismissed it as ramblings until he found out later what exactly it was.

I believe the article was in time magazine and i saw it mentioned in reasonaby trustworthy media on the internet.