Worst case scenario?
I'm not so sure.
I frankly don't have enough knowledge or information on which to make an educated guess as to the possibility that nukes may explode over several major cities. What I think I can say is that my reading of non-proliferation materials suggests that our non-proliferation efforts are a joke, particularly in Russia.
As far as dirty nukes are concerned, all that is needed is the radioactive material in a few cancer treatment machines installed inside a conventional bomb. Very easy, very simple. I can show you events such as the dispersal of radioactive material from a Mexican machine into rebar that was detected only because some of the rebar ended up at Los Alamos, where it was detected by the radiation detectors there. Cobalt 60, by the way, has a half life of about 50 years. It was the largest nuclear radiation accident in North American history though very few people are aware of it.
How many radiation therapy machines worldwide do you think are properly secured? I daresay that very few of them are.
americaspolicy.org
Samalayuca's Silent Steel
Nearly 13 years ago, a cancer-therapy machine was removed from the Medical Center for Specialities in Ciudad Ju rez and taken to a Ju rez junkyard that later sold the machine along with other scrap metal to two steel foundries for recycling. The machine contained 6,000 tiny pellets of radioactive Cobalt-60, which contaminated thousands of steel rebars (used to reinforce concrete) and furniture parts.
The contaminated steel rebars soon found their way to the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, where they triggered a radiation detector. An international effort to track down and retrieve all the deadly steel commenced. Radioactive rods and metal furniture were eventually recalled from 23 states and three other countries as well as from across Mexico.
Mexican officials calculated that close exposure to the leaking cobalt-60 would be equivalent to absorbing 35,000 chest X-rays. Already one junkyard worker has died from a rare bone cancer, and others have suffered from sterility and skin discoloration.
The recovered radioactive material was entombed in concrete in Samalayuca, 35 kilometers south of downtown Ju rez. Recently, however, some 150 tons of the material was trucked from an open field in a section of Ciudad Chihuahua called Nombre de Dios, dumped at the site, and left uncovered. The discovery of this fact has sparked protests within Ju rez, concern among the residents of Samalayuca, and offers of assistance from U.S. environmentalists.
The protests, led by the Alianza Internacional del Bravo (AIB) of Ju rez and the Comit‚ de Solidaridad y Defensa de los Derechos Humanos (COSYDDHAC) of Cd. Chihuahua, have halted the ongoing transfer of contaminated material to Samalayuca. The two groups plan to investigate the level of contamination of the Nombre de Dios site and the Samalayuca dump, using a geiger counter loaned via the Texas Center for Policy Studies.
Cobalt 60 has an exceptionally intense gamma-ray activity, and environmentalists fear that it may leach into groundwater or be carried with dust to nearby agricultural and residential areas, according to F‚lix P‚rez of the AIB. According to the Mexican nuclear safety commission, the cobalt is one-fourth as radioactive as it was a decade ago. The commission has not tried to argue, however, that above-ground, unlined storage is a safe disposal method.
How about bulk asbestos in a dirty bomb?
An ingenious terrorist can do a lot of damage which we cannot imagine and for which we are simply not prepared. |
