- Posner, Gerald L.
Secrets
of the Kingdom.
New York: Random House, 2005.
ISBN 1-4000-6291-8.
-
Most of this short book (196 pages of main text) is a straightforward
recounting of the history of Saudi Arabia from its founding as a
unified kingdom in 1932 under Ibn Saud, and of the petroleum-dominated
relationship between the United States and the kingdom up to the
present, based almost entirely upon secondary sources. Chapter 10,
buried amidst the narrative and barely connected to the rest, and
based on the author's conversations with an unnamed Mossad (Israeli
intelligence) officer and an unidentified person claiming to be an
eyewitness, describes a secret scheme called “Petroleum Scorched
Earth” (“Petro SE”) which, it is claimed, was discovered by
NSA
intercepts of Saudi communications which were shared with the Mossad
and then leaked to the author.
The claim is that the Saudis have rigged all of their petroleum
infrastructure so that it can be destroyed from a central point
should an invader be about to seize it, or the House of Saud
fall due to an internal revolution. Oil and gas production
facilities tend to be spread out over large areas and have been
proven quite resilient—the damage done to Kuwait's infrastructure
during the first Gulf War was extensive, yet reparable in a
relatively short time, and the actual petroleum reserves are buried
deep in the Earth and are essentially indestructible—if a well is
destroyed, you simply sink another well; it costs money, but you make
it back as soon as the oil starts flowing again. Refineries and
storage facilities are more easily destroyed, but the real long-term
wealth (and what an invader or revolutionary movement would covet
most) lies deep in the ground. Besides, most of Saudi Arabia's export
income comes from unrefined products (in the first ten months of 2004,
96% of Saudi Arabia's oil exports to the U.S.
were crude), so even if all the refineries
were destroyed (which is difficult—refineries are big and
spread out over a large area) and took a long time to rebuild, the
core of the export economy would be up and running as soon as the wells
were pumping and pipelines and oil terminals were repaired.
So, it is claimed, the Saudis have mined their key facilities with
radiation dispersal devices (RDDs), “dirty bombs” composed of Semtex plastic
explosive mixed with radioactive isotopes of cesium, rubidium (huh?), and/or
strontium which, when exploded, will disperse the radioactive material over
a broad area, which (p. 127) “could render large swaths of their own
country uninhabitable for years”. What's that? Do I hear some giggling
from the back of the room from you guys with the
nuclear bomb effects computers?
Well, gosh, where shall we begin?
Let us commence by plinking an easy target, the rubidium. Metallic
rubidium burns quite nicely in air, which makes it easy to disperse,
but radioactively it's a dud. Natural rubidium contains about 28% of
the radioactive isotope rubidium-87, but with a half-life of about 50
billion years, it's only slightly more radioactive than dirt when
dispersed over any substantial area. The longest-lived artificially
created isotope is rubidium-83 with a half-life of only 86 days,
which means that once dispersed, you'd only have to wait a few months
for it to decay away. In any case, something which decays so quickly
is useless for mining facilities, since you'd need to constantly
produce fresh batches of the isotope (in an
IAEA
inspected reactor?) and install it in the bombs. So, at least the rubidium part
of this story is nonsense; how about the rest?
Cesium-137 and strontium-90 both have half-lives of about 30 years and
are readily taken up and stored in the human body, so they are suitable
candidates for a dirty bomb. But while a dirty bomb is a credible threat
for contaminating high-value, densely populated city centres in countries
whose populations are wusses about radiation, a sprawling oil field or
petrochemical complex is another thing entirely. The
Federation
of American Scientists report,
“Dirty Bombs: Response to a Threat”,
estimates that in the case of a cobalt-salted dirty bomb, residents
who lived continuously in the contaminated area for forty years after
the detonation would have a one in ten chance of death from cancer
induced by the radiation. With the model cesium bomb, five city
blocks would be contaminated at a level which would create a one in a
thousand chance of cancer for residents.
But this is nothing! To get a little perspective on this, according
to the U.S.
Centers
for Disease Control's
Leading Causes of Death Reports,
people in the United States never exposed to a dirty
bomb have a 22.8% probability of dying of cancer. While the one in
ten chance created by the cobalt dirty bomb is a substantial increase
in this existing risk, that's the risk for people who live for
forty years in the contaminated area. Working in a contaminated oil
field is quite different. First of all, it's a lot easier to
decontaminate steel infrastructure and open desert than a city, and
oil field workers can be issued protective gear to reduce their exposure
to the remaining radiation. In any case, they'd only be in the contaminated
area for the work day, then return to a clean area at the end of
the shift. You could restrict hiring to people 45 years and older,
pay a hazard premium, and limit their contract to either a time
period (say two years) or based on integrated radiation dose. Since
radiation-induced cancers usually take a long time to develop, older
workers are likely to die of some other cause before the effects of
radiation get to them. (This sounds callous, but it's been worked out
in detail in studies of post nuclear war decontamination. The rules change
when you're digging out of a hole.)
Next, there is this dumb-as-a-bag-of-dirt statement on p. 127:
Saudi engineers calculated that the soil particulates beneath the
surface of most of their three hundred known reserves are so fine
that radioactive releases there would permit the contamination to
spread widely through the soil subsurface, carrying the
radioactivity far under the ground and into the unpumped oil.
This gave Petro SE the added benefit of ensuring that even if a
new power in the Kingdom could rebuild the surface
infrastructure, the oil reserves themselves might be unusable for
years.
Hey, you guys in the back—enough with the belly laughs! Did
any of the editors at Random House think to work out, even if you
stipulated that radioactive contamination could somehow migrate
from the surface down through hundreds to thousands of metres of
rock (how, due to the abundant rain?), just how much radioactive
contaminant you'd have to mix with the estimated two hundred and
sixty billion barrels of crude oil in the Saudi reserves to
render it dangerously radioactive? In any case, even if you could
magically transport the radioactive material into the oil bearing
strata and supernaturally mix it with the oil, it would be easy to
separate during the refining process.
Finally, there's the question of why, if the Saudis have gone to all
the trouble to rig their oil facilities to self-destruct, it has
remained a secret waiting to be revealed in this book. From a
practical standpoint, almost all of the workers in the Saudi
oil fields are foreigners. Certainly some of them would be aware
of such a massive effort and, upon retirement, say something about it which
the news media would pick up. But even if the secret could be kept, we're faced
with the same question of deterrence which arose in the
conclusion of
Dr. Strangelove
with the Soviet doomsday machine—it's idiotic to build a
doomsday machine and keep it a secret! Its only purpose is to deter
a potential attack, and if attackers don't know there's a doomsday machine,
they won't be deterred. Precisely the same logic applies to the putative
Saudi self-destruct button.
Now none of this argumentation proves in any way that the Saudis haven't
rigged their oil fields to blow up and scatter radioactive material on
the debris, just that it would be a phenomenally stupid thing for them to
try to do. But then, there are plenty of precedents for the Saudis doing
dumb things—they have squandered the greatest fortune in the history of
the human race and, while sitting on a quarter of all the world's
oil, seen their
per capita GDP erode to fall
between that of Poland and Latvia. If, indeed, they have done something
so stupid as this scorched earth scheme, let us hope they manage the
succession to the throne, looming in the near future, in a far
more intelligent fashion.
July 2005 