AMERICA'S THIN YELLOW LINE

THE BROADER PICTURE

Somewhere in the New Mexico desert, a fighter plane has been downed, its nuclear payload seized by terrorists. Sealed inside radiation hazard suits, the men and women from ARG (Accident Response Group) have been assigned. Their mission: to secure and disable the warhead, thus averting the vaporisation of a vast amount of American real estate. Meanwhile, on the streets of New Orleans, ARG's sister unit, NEST (Nuclear Emergency Search Team), is engaged in a covert search for a home-made radiological bomb. Squads of plain-clothes nuclear physicists are scouting the city, equipped with camouflaged devices calibrated to register the presence of gamma radiation.

Thankfully, each scenario is a training exercise, as lavish and theatrical as anything staged by Hollywood. If the acronyms recall fictional organisations like SPECTRE, that's only too appropriate: ARG and NEST were formed to combat exactly the sort of schemes favoured by megalomaniac Bond villains. ARG specialises in the recovery of "Broken Arrows", a term which, thanks to Johns Woo and Travolta, is now known to millions as the military code- word for a nuclear weapon in non-governmental hands. NEST is more discreet: since 1975, its team of scientists and plutonium-disposal experts have tackled 110 threats of nuclear blackmail. All turned out to be hoaxes, but 30 were deemed serious enough for a response.

Photographer Ken Jarecke made a unique visit to these top-security units, thanks to a lumbering bureaucratic process. "First they said yes, and then they decided that they didn't want to let us in, but the chain of command operated too slowly to prevent us coming," he explains. Instead of being surrounded by crew-cut warriors, he found himself the welcome guest of a group of affable academics. "They're old-style patriotic government employees, not in it for the money but because they believe in what they're doing. A dedicated bunch of people in a dangerous line of work."

The threat of nuclear terrorism occupies an obscure position on the American political agenda. Last year, Republican presidential candidate Dick Lugar attempted to exploit the issue, but failed to induce much anxiety despite $300,000-worth of TV ads, with the candidate booming "Nobody wants to talk about nuclear terrorism. But hiding from it won't make it go away." It's a sentiment echoed by Steven Dolley, research director of the Nuclear Control Institute, an independent nuclear watchdog based in Washington. "The public enjoys this sort of story but doesn't take it very seriously: it's seen as very much a Tom Clancy thing. Lugar was dismissed as a wacko."

So could a terrorist really build a nuclear bomb in his garden shed with some pilfered plutonium or uranium? Steven Dolley concedes that "it's a bit more than a garage DIY project, but well within the capabilities of well-organised and funded terrorists". Nobel Prize-winner Luis Alvarez, who helped build the world's first nuclear weapon, has pronounced it child's play: "With modern weapons-grade uranium, the background neutron rate is so low that terrorists would have a good chance of setting off a high- yield explosion simply by dropping one half of the material on to the other half. Even a high-school kid could make a bomb in short order." Dr Gerald Myatt, acting head of Oxford's Particle and Nuclear Physics department, sets the age threshold higher but agrees that, once fissionable material was obtained, "constructing a device would be relatively simple. Undergraduates could probably do it. I doubt whether they would get a full yield, but they could certainly construct something that would explode and spread fission products into the environment."

Worryingly, Myatt is sceptical about NEST's chances of finding such a device: "A lead container would make it virtually undetectable." NEST is rumoured to be sitting on some technology well beyond the capability of any civilian outfit, but it's anybody's guess whether this will be sufficient to sniff out the world's first genuine case of nuclear terrorism. For now, it seems that the best hope lies not in these hi-tech hit squads, but in the low price of Semtex. !