How easy is it to make a dirty bomb? It seems to me that most readily available radio-isotopes are metals of some kind, which aren’t easy to disperse over a wide area. Putting explosives next to a metal object just makes radioactive shrapnel, unless it just warps it a bit.
Without a public hue-and-cry, where’s the incentive for elected reps to listen to We The People instead of Them The Lobbyists?
The incentive-scales still probably tip towards Them The Lobbyists, but at least this gives us a chance!
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More or less, yes. The general public can do nothing really about it. Most people are already aware of the idea, if not through the news, then through movies, TV, and video games.
I guess some level of general awareness is fine, but anything beyond that is just going to be used to build walls, excuse war and torture, profile and discriminate, and other bad things. The likelihood of this happening I feel is very low, but things like this tend to blow out of proportion quickly.
Never mind a dirty bomb, places like Iran have access to military grade explosives, RPGs, and artillery shells. Many deadly IEDs in the middle east use artillary shells as the explosive. A dozen guys with back packs and delayed timers could cause massive damage. This is an even more likely scenario than a dirty bomb, but it, again, is very unlikely.
Yeah, but that isn’t how our brains tend to work. We tend to exaggerate the dangers of the unfamiliar, and ignore the dangers of the familiar.
More or less, yes. That and some place like Iran knows that if they did something like that, it would be over for them.
I didn’t realize the dirty bombers had a lobby… er I guess maybe there is a radioactive material lobby?
But they have a point. At what point are checks and measures ridiculous to prevent something that has NEVER HAPPENED.
From the article:
Previous efforts to beef up the tracking of nuclear materials have been successfully resisted by nuclear industry lobbyists.
So having a congressional group do a red team exercise and raise awareness in congress might actually be a good idea.
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How else will it get the attention needed for mitigation? In computer security, there is a concept of responsible disclosure, but if a vendor doesn’t address it, then public disclosure is what is needed to ensure mitigating the issue gets proper attention.
Meh! It’s made a few passes through the news cycle already. It will again, undoubtedly.
And of course news organizations are none too fond of proportional reactions like, “For a lot of radioactive materials the best way to protect yourself is take a shower right after and throw away your clothes you were wearing.”
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I don’t think a nation state adversary will be stopped if the US public is not allowed to hear anything about explosives…
Hmm - let me clarify: Not suggesting “not allowed to hear”. I am encouraging caution that the issue isn’t blown out of proportion. Please review any one of the dozens of hot stories in the past to see the public’s over reaction. Can you not see Trump latching on to this story and twisting it?
Having the people who actually monitor this sort of thing, the various alphabet agencies, do their jobs is important as well.
Anecdotal data: I have a friend who got a license to make Tritium sites, and had to go through an incredible amount of expense and paper work. Though I suspect that what ever license the undercover person got in the article was much different.
ETA - Similar discussion of this kind happened after the OKC bombing and regulating fertilizer.
from the OP:
Ask an economist. Usually around the point where the cost of the measure are the same as or greater than the cost of the something.
okay, this is a point we agree on. I read your first comments with a rather different meaning, sorry.
PS But the CIA and NSA* should blow this issue out of proportion, per your first post in this thread?
* sorry @tropo
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Oops - added an extra “not” in there.
No, of course I am not encouraging FBI, CIA, NSA blow this stuff out of proportion. It is just those and other agencies are the ones actually supposed to be monitoring this stuff. So while it is highly unlikely, it is their job to keep up on such things and investigate possible threats. They are the ones who can actually DO something about it in regards to monitoring etc.
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Depleted Uranium shocks into fine dust. That’s what Gulf syndrome was claimed to be caused by. DU dust from all the tank rounds.
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Fine metal fillings exploded on top of a tall building?
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Steal a years supply of polonium 210 americium from a smoke detector factory. Grind it into a powder and bulk it out with something more pedestrian but nasty - say, powdered beryllium. Set it on fire and have the smoke get sucked into the ventilation system of the Empire State building. The beryllium smoke gets you a high body count, but the radioactive part will get you the headlines.
Fortunately most terrorists seem to either not know a lot about chemistry or not be very imaginative.
Edit to fix stupid mistake.
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In powdered form, you can disperse fine metal dust quite widely with enough wind. Or mix it with something that burns and metal particles will adhere to and disperse with the smoke. That’s what fallout is, after all - bits of uranium, cobalt, etc, adhering to dust or smoke particles that get blown downwind. A dirty bomb is basically an attempt to achieve fallout without the nuclear explosion.
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Nitpicking here, but smoke detectors use Americium.
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Yup. And cracking open smoke detectors and handling their radiation sources improperly makes you end up looking like this:
(That’s David Hahn’s booking photo, aka the nuclear boy scout, years after his incident with the garden shed, when he was caught yet again working on his atomic dream.)
Imagine if you were futzing with enough material for a dirty bomb, instead of just a dozen or two smoke detector Americium sources.
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I’d like to say that it fell apart because it requires an evildoer country (always North Korea, in the stories) to acquire both nukes and pretty awesome missiles, but to decide to make its suicide nuke run at the US with a single EMP rather than just lobbing a dozen at each of our cities. “Yeah, our country’s about to get glassed… but at least we did widespread if patchy damage to their electrical infrastructure.”
But I’m not so naïve as to think these things go away because of actual reasons–or for that matter spring up in the first place.
National Geographic did a detailed, like 15 page article on dirty bombs years ago. It showed calculated blast radii of different kinds of bombs of diverse types. Conventional, radiological, fission, and fission-fusion. They all look bad, but only the conventionals were constrained in any way. We can’t control the wind (intentionally) yet, but we can throw enough radioactive material into the air to kill a lot of people, and cause birth defects and stillbirths and raise cancer risk for those who survive that for a pittance in both effort and monetary cost, and it can last generations.
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Personally, I find this more sphincter tightening than any nuclear weapon. With a nuke, you can just walk towards it, and end up nice and dead in a little bit. No mess or fuss (well… depending on distance from the epicenter, possibly very messy and fussy, but it doesn’t last long). Just dead. With these kinds of infrastructure killers, you have to deal with fucking Mad Max if you’re unlucky. I’d choose the dirtnap. You could easily put one together for like $500 in material. I have PDFs of the original research on them. They’re not very complicated devices.
They basically make a big boom turn into a fart, and in return some of that energy is converted into a massive EMP. Or whatever load you want, as long as it can handle a power source that rivals or surpasses lightning.
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Unfortunately I can easily think of several ways to make a simple but very effective dirty bomb using radionucleides and readily available household (or at least Home Depot) ingredients. You could in theory make a portable but low yield nuclear weapon given enough smoke detectors.
Personally I feel that the Texas official should be locked up pour décourager les autres, and a general tightening of the rules is required. We’ve probably all read the horror stories of medical cobalt-60 sources finding their way to scrapyards.
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