At least it was new to me, when the Israeli’s rigged the phones of Hamas to explode. Turned out they’ve been there and done that thirty years ago! Sixty years ago, 1962, the U.S. proved they could parachute a two man team in a HALO jump into foreign territory, set up a 98 pound nuclear weapon in minutes, and exfil them successfully. These are both recorded in the 2019 book by Annie Jacobson, Surprise, Kill, Vanish: The Secret History of CIA Paramilitary Armies, Operations and Assassins.
And if that story doesn’t get you read The Declassification Engine: What History Reveals about America’s Top Secrets a 2023 book by Matthew Connelly. He details the 22 times nuclear weapons have been “lost”, crashed, and even two times that pilots accidently hit the button to drop them, and they did drop, but a fail-safe in place prevented the bombs from leaving the plane armed. Speaking of fail-safes. Kennedy, when taking office, was appalled at how easy it was for just about anyone to launch and ICMB, so he demanded a code be punched it. Later it was found out that the military in charge didn’t want to risk a delay – even seconds could hinder the response – so they programed them all to 0000.
Back to what I originally meant this blog to be. In 1995 the Israelis were desperately trying to kill a man they dubbed the Engineer who was a genius at making suicide vests and other bombs, but they couldn’t get close enough to him. Here’s Jacobson’s account of how they did:
“The Shin Bet had previously used an uncle of Osama Hamad’s, a man named Kamil Hamad, as a paid informant. In the fall of 1995, the Shin Bet blackmailed the uncle into working for them, …. The Shin Bet gave the uncle a cell phone and told him it needed to be put into the hands of the Engineer. The Shin Bet said it wanted to listen to the Engineer’s conversation with Hamas. The uncle was not privy to the fact that the cell phone was an engineered explosive device, outfitted with fifteen grams of RDX explosives. On January 5, 1996…the Engineer received a call from his father on Osama Hamad’s cell phone. Overhead an Israeli SIGINT aircraft, equipped with technology provided by the U.S. Secret Service, listened in on the call. When voice recognition software confirmed the caller ID, the Shin Bet remotely detonated the cell phone bomb, instantly killing the Engineer” (474).
The parachuting nuke tale is equally troubling. The military was debating using a tactical nuclear weapon to close the Hoh Chi Min trail by which the North Vietnamese communists were arming and resupplying their troops in the south. They said a tactical nuclear weapon would do it. A Green Beret, Billy Waugh from Bastrop, Texas by the way, tested it first on a remote island in the Pacific. And then blew one up at the Nevada nuclear test site in 1966. He and a fellow Green Beret jumped from 36,000 feet with a 1-2 kiloton nuclear weapon. They set the timer for 4 hours and then left for their rendezvous point. Attorney General Robert Kennedy witnessed this, but it was Robert McNamara that put the kibosh on using tactical nuclear weapons on the battlefield, as terrorists would rapidly adopt this strategy (627ff).
Given all the above, I don’t think our greatest danger is from terrorists using a “suitcase nuke” but the machinations or miscalculations of our own special services even if they are in defense of our country.
