Hawkmoon,
I did more reading and as a result I do tend to feel that the chances of a dirty bomb originating out of Iraq's program from the 80's seems less likely.
However, humans on a mission can achieve remarkable results in a year, in 5 years, in 10 years. Many of the issues with the dirty bomb of 1980's as reported in the links I provided are nothing but engineering issues.
Furthermore, once the material is irradiated, it must be used very quickly before radioactive decay makes them ineffective
True enough, and this is what made them desirable for battlefield use or use against a territory that one intends to occupy.
But we need to change mindsets here. Terrorists against us do not care about short half life of material. Lets say Iraq's original program was designed to produce weapons useful for the conquest of nearby Arab lands, as well as Israel. Surely they would want to occupy those lands and therefore the nature of the weapon - short duration of threat.
But change the target and the whole picture changes. USA. England. Canada. OBL and Saddam do not want to occupy us, at least not this millenium, but weakening us? Sure. SO the weapon's goals radically change. The dirtier, longer half life, the better, I would imagine is their design center for any weapon. If they could make a section of NYC unihabitable for a long period of time, it would be a dream come true for them.
So its a different mindset. I do not have the engineering and science background to judge whether it is feasible to build such a dirty weapon (perhaps exploding a reactor is the simplest appoach, sure worked for Chernobyl); not can I gauge the likelyhood of terrorists or nation-states could gain sufficient materials to produce weapons of this sort.
It does seem, to this lay person, that developing such a weapon is easier than producing a nuclear bomb. And it also seems to me that with a different mind set - "take on the US directly" that they have been or will be taking a different approach to weapons production.
Its all just theoretical thinking. My real interest in pursuing this as a possibility is to think about what kind of a response we would be able to mount. Sure we could bomb with bigger and nastier bombs but who and where?
Some other stats as to sources of raw material:
uic.com.au
- There are now some 440 commercial nuclear reactors in 31 countries, with over 350,000 MWe of total capacity.
- Fifteen countries depend on nuclear power for at least a quarter of their electricity. France and Lithuania get around three quarters of their power from nuclear energy, while Belgium, Bulgaria, Hungary, Japan, Lithuania, Slovakia, South Korea, Sweden, Switzerland, Slovenia and Ukraine get 35% or more.
- France is the worlds second largest consumer of uranium at 10,000 tonnes per year. The USA uses 17496 tonnes of uranium for nuclear reactor use.
[sounds like France is target rich for the 'crash the plane' or other terrorist attacks']
- Egypt, Iran, Indonesia (all places of potential unrest) have budding nuclear energy programs
- Pakistan has two energy producing reactors, India has 14
bullatomsci.org
- The number of criminal proceedings related to the radioactive materials trade can be counted on the fingers of one hand, even though the International Atomic Energy Agency lists more than 20 incidents of fissionable material disappearing from former Soviet nuclear centers from early 1991 to spring 1993.
- Within the past year [1994], material containing uranium 235 was discovered at a customs post in Brest; 250 kilograms of a substance containing commercial-grade uranium were stolen from a refining plant in the town of Glazov, Udmutria; and a kilogram and a half of material that included uranium 238 was stolen from a similar plant in Podolsk. Ten kilograms of polonium were stolen from a federal nuclear research center, Arzamas-16, near Nizhny Novgorod (formerly Gorky).
- The following day we took the pinched lead pipe in its cookie box to the director of the Moscow Center of Radio Analysis Control, Sergei Belopukhov. "Of course there is plutonium here," Belopukhov said. "But the sample also contains plutonium 242, plus cesium, americium, thorium, and some fission fragments. Well, it's your usual reactor utility waste. It's ideal material for terrorists, but you can't make a real bomb out of this." [mw: that's what we are talking about...]
- bullatomsci.org [source of much of the above, have a read]
And from "Wild Atom", by CSIS
csis.org
About the Authors: "For four decades, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) has been dedicated to providing world leaders with strategic insights on—and policy solutions to—current and emerging global issues"
- In December 2000, at Russia’s Chelyabinsk nuclear-weapons complex, an employee helps the local mafia steal 200 kilograms (kg.) of weapons-grade, highly enriched uranium (HEU) and 20 kg. of weapons-grade plutonium—enough material to fashion two uranium and three plutonium weapons of 10–20 kiloton yield.
- The plutonium, purchased by Iran, is stolen on arrival in Tehran by a radical faction of the Iranian-supported Hizballah, which had been seeking fissile material since setting up its covert nuclear facility in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley in 1995.
[al Qaeda has working relationships with Hizballah]
And the list goes on.
Maybe car, truck, and gas tanker bombs will be much more common, but after events of 9-11, who's to say that dramatic escalation is not their new mode of operation?
Terrorsts seeking to inflict maximum terror must naturally gravitate to that which we fear most - chemical, biological, and nuclear attacks. We've seen how effective a low tech, low impact attack using Anthrax has been in freaking out the public.
Seems likely that if they have nuclear materials - which there appears to be ample evidence that they do - they will attempt to use them. And not its more likely that they will use them in ways we might not have imagined earlier.
No one imagined flying aircraft bombs, except for perhaps Tom Clancy in 'Debt of Honor'.
Cheers
Mike |
