Vialls tells pretty, superficially plausible stories, but has a habit of making obvious technical mistakes. Here's just one:

"You see, Plutonium emits only alpha radiation, which is for all practical purposes “invisible” to a standard Geiger counter. If you do not believe me then ask the American Environmental Protection Agency, whose staff will confirm this."

You might also try reading Richard Rhodes's The Making of the Atomic Bomb, or The Secret History of the Atomic Bomb, a compilation of the Smyth Report and material declassified in the '80s.

If you do, you will find out that the only practical method of manufacturing Pu-239 in quantities sufficient for a weapon is to irradiate U-238 in a fission reactor. The U-238 Absorbs a neutron, becoming U-239, which decays by beta emission into Np-239, which subsequently decays by beta emission into Pu-239.

The trouble that the Manhattan Project found with this is that some of the Pu-239 nuclei get "overcooked", absorbing a neutron to become Pu-240. Pu-240 is very prone to spontaneous fission, which produces neutrons. The high neutron background of reactor-made Pu due to Pu-240 is the reason that gun assembly designs for a Pu bomb had to be abandoned- the gun method simply couldn't create a critical assembly fast enough to prevent premature detonation caused by the stray neutrons.

Viall's claim of 99.78% pure Pu-239 still allows for .22% of other isotopes; if the Pu is manufactured in a reactor some of this will inevitably be Pu-240; consequently the material can be expected to produce some level of neutron emission. Neutrons are extremely difficult to shield against; hence, his premise of a bomb core with no detectable emissions looks rather shaky.

Here's another:

"In direct contrast with its more deadly cousins beta and gamma, alpha can travel only a few feet and is incapable of penetrating human skin. If you can afford an incredibly expensive and highly-specialized Muller tube or similar, you may be able to detect tiny amounts of alpha directly outside the Sari Club, though you will more than likely be defeated in this quest by the Bali environment."

If you assume that the products of the bomb will consist entirely of Pu-239, this might be true. But what about the fission products? The fission of plutonium or uranium produces a stew of lighter nuclei, pretty much all radioactive, with half-lives measured in weeks or months, and decaying in a variety of ways which produce all the different kinds of ionizing radiation. In fact, the way that the efficiency of the Trinity test was measured was by sampling the fission products scattered in the vicinity of the bomb site by the explosion. The finding of fission products or their daughter products would incontrovertibly establish the nuclear nature of the explosion.

The premise that a fission bomb could be detonated without leaving clearly identifiable traces also looks mighty shaky. Even if the requisite sampling and analysis of material from the bomb site were not done (implausible because with all the recent hype about "dirty bombs" it's unlikely that checks for radioactive contamination in the area of a terrorist bombing would be neglected), the inevitable appearance of radiation sickness among survivors and rescuers would give the game away.

Vialls' dramaturgy also suffers from a common problem: creating realistic motivations for the characters, and doing so in detail. Assume the premise that the bombing was the work of the CIA/Mossad/insert chosen boogeyman here.

One can easily construct a plausible motive for such actors to stage a terrorist incident: to pressure the Indonesian government into acting in the desired way by increasing their perceived threat level. It's when we ask "why use a nuke?" that the motive falls apart.

If the purpose is to create a perception of direct terrorist threat, a large but not societally disruptive loss of life and a spectacular-looking but not ruinous amount of destruction are clearly desirable. Does this objective require the use of nuclear weapons?

As tens of millions of twentieth-century dead could testify, chemical explosives are in fact quite efficient at extinguishing life and destroying property. It's probably safe to assume that the CIA and Mossad have access to the most advanced products of chemical engineering and could create a spectacularly destructive bomb without the need to resort to nuclear explosives.

What then would be the motive for choosing to go nuclear, particularly given the substantial risk that the nature of the bomb would be exposed?

If the use of a nuke were established, it would be obvious to the entire world that some government was involved in the bombing. What purpose would this serve?

One possible motive would be to focus blame on another nation to provide a pretext for military action against it. For example, the CIA could set off a nuke in Bali, wait until investigation established the fact of a nuclear explosion and then produce "evidence" tying the bomb to Iraq or some other enemy-of-convenience.

The trouble with this scenario is that a "micro-nuke" doesn't just say "national government involved", it says something much more specific: "government of highly advanced industrial nation with plenty of facilities for development and testing of esoteric variations on the Bomb involved". The set of such nations is a small one; no-one would be likely to believe that a nation which has yet to construct and test the crudest of fission bombs would have a "micro-nuke" up its sleeve. The finger of blame would be unmistakeably pointed at the very few nations with such technical capacities, particularly the US and possibly Israel.

Which advanced nation would be chosen to take the blame for being the source, and what purpose would this serve?

So, Vialls's story involves the CIA/Mossad/boogeyman of the week fabricating a terrorist attack for political purposes. That's plausible. It also includes them choosing to use technology completely inconsistent with the capabilities of those to be blamed and unnecessary to the purpose of causing enough death and destruction for a useful provocation, technology which if discovered would negate their objective of fixing blame where they want it and clearly demonstrating their own involvement. That's a lot less plausible.

There are plenty of "security forces" in the world with the ability and amorality to stage a terrorist attack for their own purposes. That hardly needs demonstrating. Neither does the idea that such an agency could do a good job of imitating someone else's M.O.

What does need demonstrating is how the use of a nuclear explosive with its attendant risk of exposure would advance any cause other than enhancing Vialls' story.

If this fellow wants to advance in the conspiracy industry, he would do well to read Mark Twain's "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses" and perhaps take a few courses in dramatic writing.

Exactly one year, one month and one day since 9-11...

whenever some major event occurs, i always wait with amusement to see what 'alternative' theories pop up. this is one of the daftest yet. true, 'time' [or 'newsweek' - i get them mixed up] reported on the danger of these kind of things rattling around, but i doubt they're being used.

Very erudite comment ptc, obviously a classical scholar as well as a nuclear physics buff. Interestingly naming yourself after Roman emperors. Still, I dont believe you've adequately explained how so many bodies have simply disappeared or are present in tiny shards of tissue.
Are you saying because there are flaws in Joe Viall's theory, we better believe the official tale.
Well, while I wouldn't swear my life on the former, the last thing on earth I'd believe is the latter.
We've already heard the tale of the infiltration of 'hairies' in the campaigns of the Seventies

It was a *fertiliser* bomb.

Before you come back with 'but how did it destroy 47 buildings' etc. etc., bear in mind that most of those buildings were flimsy structures made largely of wood, and remember that the Omagh bomb was probably made of 50kg or so of fertiliser/diesel in a car boot, whereas the Bali bomb was probably around 500kg in the back of a van. The so-called 'mushroom cloud' is nothing more than a pall of smoke from the burning nightclub.

All this crap about 'micro nukes' detracts from the sense that there is more to this attack than 'al-Quaeda' - why would the US/Israelis use a sophisticated weapon not posessed by the 'terrorists' where a simple truck bomb will do just as well?