Suitcase nuclear device
[1][2] 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.
[10] 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.
[10] 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".
"[13] 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.
"[10] Chief among these talks was the matter of the existence of portable nuclear devices in the arsenal of the former Soviet Union and the possibility of these weapons proliferating across the globe.
[10] Although absent from the hearings himself, Lebed's interviews were frequently cited as a cause for concern throughout them, particularly his claims regarding the 84 missing nuclear devices and their apparent capability of killing 100,000 people each.
[14] Moreover, his primary rebuttal against Moscow’s denial was that these devices were never listed on any inventory to begin with due to their highly sensitive nature, particularly as a result of their supposed use by the KGB, with targets ranging from the United States to various NATO countries in eastern Europe.
[14] However, "Yablokov’s assertion contradicts all available information about the chain of custody of nuclear weapons, which were supposedly the sole responsibility of the 12th GUMO.
[10] Yablokov also clarified his source of information, which up until this point had remained ambiguous, citing communications between scientists working at the Krasnoyarsk-26, Tomsk-7, Chelyabinsk-65, and Penza-19 nuclear installations located in Russia.
"[11] Stanislav Lunev, the highest-ranking GRU officer to defect to the United States, has claimed that such Russian-made devices exist and described them in more detail.
If the battery runs low, the weapon has a transmitter that sends a coded message either by satellite or directly to a GRU post at a Russian embassy or consulate.
"[11] Valynkin further stated that although "the production of suitcase sized nuclear weapons is theoretically possible",[13] it would be a "very expensive and ineffective undertaking" because they would only have a short life span and would require frequent maintenance.
"[13] Lunev suggested that suitcase-sized nuclear weapons might already have been deployed by GRU operatives working on US soil to assassinate US leaders in the event of war.
One such cache, identified by Vasili Mitrokhin, exploded when Swiss authorities sprayed it with a high pressure water gun in a wooded area near Bern.
It represents the smallest diameter complete, self-contained physics package to be fielded and had a yield of 72 tonnes of TNT (300 GJ).
Nuclear weapons designer Ted Taylor has alleged that a 105 millimetres (4.1 in) diameter shell with a mass of 19 kilograms (42 lb) is theoretically possible.
