Suitcase nuclear device

A suitcase nuclear device (also suitcase nuke, suitcase bomb, backpack nuke, snuke, mini-nuke, and pocket nuke) is a tactical nuclear weapon that is portable enough that it could use a suitcase as its delivery method.

During the 1950s and 1960s both the United States and the Soviet Union developed nuclear weapons small enough to be portable in specially designed backpacks.

Neither the United States nor the Soviet Union have ever made public the existence or development of weapons small enough to fit into a normal-sized suitcase or briefcase. The W48 however, does fit the criteria of small, easily disguised, and portable. Its explosive yield was extremely small for a nuclear weapon.

In the mid-1970s, debate shifted from the possibility of developing such a device for the military to concerns over its possible use in nuclear terrorism. The concept became a staple of the spy thriller genre in the later Cold War era.

The term "suitcase (nuclear/atomic) bomb" was introduced during the 1950s with the prospect of reducing the size of the smallest tactical nuclear weapons even further, albeit purely as a "figure of speech" for miniaturization, not necessarily for the delivery in actual suitcases.^{[citation needed]}

The value of portable nuclear weapons lies in their ability to be easily smuggled across borders, transported by means widely available, and placed close to targets of strategic value, or as means to render enemy land uninhabitable. In nuclear weapon design, there is a trade-off in small weapons designs between weight and compact size. Extremely small (as small as 5 inches (13 cm) diameter and 24.4 inches (62 cm) long) linear implosion type weapons, which might conceivably fit in a large briefcase or typical suitcase, have been tested, but the lightest of those weighed nearly 100 pounds (45 kg) and had a maximum yield of only 0.19 kiloton (the Swift nuclear device, tested in Operation Redwing's Yuma test on May 27, 1956). The largest yield of a relatively compact linear implosion device was under 2 kilotons for the cancelled (or never deployed but apparently tested) US W82-1 artillery shell design, with yield under 2 kilotons for a 95-pound (43 kg) artillery shell 6.1 inches (15 cm) in diameter and 34 inches (86 cm) long.^{[citation needed]}

The potential existence and whereabouts of suitcase-sized Soviet nuclear bombs became an increasingly fierce subject of debate in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Major concerns regarding the new Russian government's overall security and control of its nuclear stockpile were raised on 30 May 1997, when an American congressional delegation sent to Russia met with General Aleksandr Lebed, former Secretary of the Russian National Security Council. During the meeting, Lebed mentioned the possibility that several portable nuclear suitcase bombs had gone missing. According to Lebed, "during his short tenure as the Secretary of the Security Council in 1996, he received information that the separatist government in Chechnya possessed small nuclear devices. In an attempt to clarify the situation, he created a special commission under the chairmanship of his assistant, Vladimir Denisov. According to Lebed, the commission was only able to locate 48 such munitions of a total of 132, an indication that 84 were lost". However, Lebed subsequently "changed the total number of suitcase nukes several times, stating in the end that the number was between 100 and 500, but probably closer to 100", although "[i]t should be noted that almost nothing is known about the methods of the commission's work". Lebed would make several press releases and give television interviews regarding the matter later in the year.

During an interview with CBS newsmagazine Sixty Minutes on 7 September 1997, Lebed would claim that the Russian military had lost track of more than a hundred out of a total of 250 "suitcase-sized nuclear bombs". Lebed stated that these devices were made to look like suitcases, and that he had learned of their existence only a few years earlier. On 10 September, the Ministry for Atomic Energy of the Russian Federation (MINATOM) rejected Lebed's claims as baseless. "'We don't know what General Lebed is talking about. No such weapons exist,' a ministry spokesman told AFP. 'Perhaps he meant old Soviet nuclear artillery shells, which are all being safely guarded.'" Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin "ridiculed Lebed's account as "absolute stupidity" and said that "all Russian nuclear weapons are under the total and absolutely reliable control of the Russian armed forces", while a spokesman for the Russian Ministry of Defence, Vladimir Utavenko, stated that "there are no nuclear bombs in Russia out of [the] control of the Russian armed forces." Utavenko also questioned the credibility of Lebed on this particular issue because "he never dealt with nuclear security questions and cannot know the situation." In an interview with Russian news agency Interfax, Lebed's former deputy, Denisov, claimed that he had led a special working group in July 1996 to explore whether any such weapons had been deployed. "According to Denisov, the working group concluded within two months that there were no such devices in the active Russian arsenal and that all the weapons were in "appropriate" storage facilities. However, he said the group could not rule out the possibility that similar weapons were located in Ukraine, Georgia or the Baltic states."