Dave Eberhart, NewsMax.com
Thursday, June 20, 2002

As in the case of a terror attack with a classic mushroom cloud-producing nuclear weapon of the first kind, there are plenty of doomsayers predicting the inevitability of "dirty bombs” finding their way to American cities. Dirty bombs are the poor man’s nuke and consist of radioactive material wrapped around a core of conventional explosives.

For example, Leonard Spector, a former Energy Department arms control expert, maintains that fashioning a dirty bomb is even easier than cranking out anthrax, and "we will experience this before much longer.”

You’ve got to give credence to folks such as Spector. After all, Abu Zubaida, 31, a Palestinian who served as bin Laden’s military field director until he was shot and captured in Pakistan, warned CIA and FBI agents that a dirty nuclear bomb was in the terror game plan.

Chilling corroboration quickly followed: Abdullah al Mujahir, a U.S. citizen, was arrested May 8 when he arrived at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport on a flight from Pakistan. With him reportedly were documents describing Zubaida’s dirty bomb.

"We have disrupted an unfolding terrorist plot to attack the United States by exploding a radioactive dirty bomb,” the attorney general said, qualifying that the suspect had not gotten much past the planning stage.

Tempering these ominous signs, however, experts note plenty of tough hurdles for the terrorist with a dirty bomb in mind.

The most nettlesome issue for our would-be dirty nuke bomber is that the kind of highly radioactive materials ideal for their bomb have notoriously short half-lives. It would be certainly tough to keep such a volatile item fresh and lethal on the shelf.

Perhaps the best example of the short half-life phenomenon came in the 1990s when United Nations inspectors scoured the reported test sites of dirty nukes in Iraq. Saddam Hussein had tested such devices in the 1980s, yet only a decade later the teams detected no trace of residual radiation.

Too Hot to Handle

What’s more, a dirty bomb using a highly radioactive outer casing would be literally too hot to handle, much less transport inconspicuously to the target zone.

Joseph Indusi, chairman of the Nonproliferation and National Security Department at Brookhaven National Laboratory, notes that any highly radioactive fuel for a dirty bomb would have to be stored in, carried in and at some point removed from heavy, cumbersome casing (around 10,000 pounds).

"[It’s] not a simple scenario,” Indusi advises. "It’s not as simple as driving a plane into a building.”

And the alternative of using a diluted radioactive element would greatly mitigate the effects the terrorists seek.

A dirty bomb made of the most potent radioactive fuel would generate possibly 2,000 urban casualties, say experts at one end of the scare scale. Other experts shrug and forecast maybe a dozen casualties.

Representing one extreme end of the potential harm debate is Dr. John W. Poston Sr., a professor of nuclear engineering at Texas A&M University, who maintains that by its very nature explosive dispersal of any radioactive material dilutes it, making it hard for a person to get a dose either lethal or strong enough to cause acute illness.

Backing up Poston’s conclusion, the Center for International and Strategic Studies recently did a computer analysis based upon a 4,000-pound TNT bomb exploded in front of Washington’s Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. The model featured the conventional explosive wrapped with a pound and a half of radioactive cesium.

Said the computer: There would be contamination an area in which tens of thousands of people live and work, but the annual dosing of citizens would be small in most of the area, adding roughly 25 percent to the amount already beaming forth from natural and artificial sources.

Such cold empirical data provokes folks such as Bruce Blair, president of the Center for Defense Information, to conclude, "I’m fairly fatalistic about a dirty bomb being used against us, but I’m not afraid of it.”

"They’re [dirty nukes] not about killing people but about scaring people,” adds Matthew Bunn, a nuclear expert at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. "Even a small amount would be enough to create a big scare and economic disruption.”

But would such a big scare and economic disruption be justified?

The Radiation Bogeyman

Yes, say some experts who testified recently before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The fear of all that glows in the dark, engrained in Baby Boomers growing up in the shadows of the Cold War, is not wholly irrational worry about a radiation bogeyman bumping around in the night.

The reality of any nuclear "poison” is that it can kill – slowly or rapidly, all depending on the "curies.”

A curie is the measure of the intensity of a radioactive source. Just a tenth of a curie can kill people in a few weeks. A full curie is considered a very strong source. By example, a single curie source unshielded in a typical office could wipe out the workers in only a matter of days.

But, alas, say experts such as Poston, such a discreet source as our office example is wholly different from having that same source all but vaporized in the dispersing explosion that characterizes a dirty nuke.

Nonetheless, there appears to be a virtual mother lode of curies out there for the terrorists to tinker with. This unhappy fact, coupled with the existence of such characters as Abu Zubaida and Abdullah al Mujahir, has to move the warning alert status of a potential dirty nuke attack somewhere past "yellow” in homeland security guru Tom Ridge’s color-coded warning board.

Recently, for example, radioactive cesium was discovered in a heap of waste metal in a North Carolina steel mill. It was only two curies in intensity but more than enough to create a killing zone.

But there are even more extreme examples of potent radiation sources lying about. In the former Soviet republic of Georgia, three hunters in the woods happened upon two rusting cylinders of an incredibly lethal material. Each of those canisters contained 40,000 curies of material.

In 1995, Chechen rebels left a canister of cesium-137, used for industrial and medical purposes, in a popular Moscow park.

And it’s not as if the terrorists have to import their own curies. Domestically there are about 2 million radiation sources in the U.S. More than 21,000 licensees hold tickets to possess and use radiation for everything from radiotherapy of cancer patients to measuring the depth of asphalt.

According to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, there were 107 reports of lost or stolen sources in a recent six-month period.

Beyond the Dirty Nuke

Potentially there are other dirty tricks for terrorists to play with the radiation card.

In 1995, for instance, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory did a study that concerned radiation sources being placed into water supplies. The scientists concluded that plutonium dumped into a typical city reservoir would sink to the bottom. What little got dissolved would be diluted by the volume of the water. Net result: Consumers would get a smaller dose than from natural background radiation.

Another Livermore scenario has plutonium particles released in the air by explosion. The conclusion: If a kilogram of plutonium were blasted into the skies over a city the size of Munich, Germany, and if 20 percent became airborne in breathable particles of the right size to lodge in the lungs, the effect would be to produce fewer than 10 eventual deaths from cancer.

All of this may not be as simple as the FDR adage, "All we have to fear to fear itself.” But what is simple is that the terrorists are counting mostly on fear itself to do the harm in any dirty nuke attack.

Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:

Homeland/Civil Defense

War on Terrorism

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