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Politics : Sioux Nation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Patricia Trinchero who wrote (1699)	11/18/2004 10:01:02 PM
From: Raymond Duray	Respond to of 361123

Pat, Re: Padilla's dirty bomb would have been a dud but there are dirty bombs that could do damage. Please provide URLs to bona fide sources that make this assertion in rational fashion. I haven't seen a single one. And I've searched for them. My research leads me to believe that the American public are so ignorant of the facts about metallurgy and radioactivity that they've been bamboozled both by the Bushies and by the very disingenuous anti-nuclear activists who used a lot of deceit to stop the nuclear power industry. While reining in the excesses of the nuclear power industry was a worthwhile cause, the means used by the activists was terribly dishonest. With regards to your comparison of a "dirty bomb" in an American city vis a vis the damage done to the environment in Iraq, keep in mind that you are talking about orders of magnitude differences in quantities of uranium involved. A terrorist detonated bomb might have on the order of 30 or 40 pounds of U-238 or possibly some degree of artificial enrichment boosting the U-235 percentage above the normal level. So, you're talking about mere pounds or mere ounces of the radioactive U-235 isotope. Compare that with the published figures on expended DU munitions in Operation Desert Storm or the lastest Operation Iraqi Liberation (O.I.L.) : Desert Storm: 300 Tons or 600,000 pounds according to reliable sources: deploymentlink.osd.mil 30/600,000 = .00005 or 0.005% of what was used in 1991. O.I.L. probably consumed five times as much DU, if not more. Anywhere from two million to four million pounds of this scourge. seattlepi.nwsource.com Really, you're comparing two entirely different phenomenon when you bring up the U.S. military's indiscriminate and genocidal use of DU in Iraq vis a vis what one tiny device might do here. We're not talking one order of magnitude differential, but five orders of magnitude. That's huge. *** Re: Bin Ladin takes advice from people who are far wiser than Padilla. Yes, his handler in the 1980s was the C.I.A.'s Milt Beardon.