Posted on 03/05/2006 7:16:39 AM PST by SJackson
Around four years ago, a team of security professionals from a Washington think tank played a game of Let's Pretend. The group parked a yellow, 66-passenger school bus on Independence Avenue, on the National Capitol Mall, near an overhead rail line.
Congress was in session that morning; people were flocking to national monuments. The weather was also nice that day - sunny, warm, with low humidity - and there was a steady breeze blowing in from the southeast. All the necessary conditions were there.
The team from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) then imagined that their bus was packed with 4,000 pounds of TNT and a pound and a half of radioactive cesium-137. What would happen to Washington, DC, they wondered, if the bus went ka-boom?
Interestingly, most of the pretend casualties were caused by the regular old TNT and flying debris; the damage from the cesium was negligible by comparison. However, notes Phil Anderson, the man who headed the CSIS team, the fact that radiation was involved in the blast "had an enormous psychological impact on the public." The so-called dirty bomb proved to be a weapon of mass hysteria.
Radiation is "something unseen and mysterious for most people," says Ivan Oelrich, a nuclear physicist with the Federation of Atomic Scientists.
Even if the radiation levels are not particularly high, they will not return to their homes or places of business. Unfortunately, terrorists know this as well and while a nuclear weapon is beyond their grasp, radioactive materials are not. In fact, the modern world is filled with the stuff.
Irradiation plants, for instance, use cobalt-60 to kill harmful bacteria in food, while radioisotope thermoelectric generators, which provide electricity to remote areas, contain strontium-90. Even household smoke detectors contain trace amounts of americium-241.
One attractive candidate for a dirty bomb is cesium-137, used by hospitals for anti-cancer treatment. How dangerous is cesium? In 1987, four people from Goiania, Brazil lost their lives when they stumbled upon a radiotherapy machine at a junkyard and played with the glowing, blue dust found inside.
BOTH CHECHEN terrorists and al-Qaida have built dirty bombs.
In 1995, Chechen rebels notified a Russian television station that they buried cesium in Moscow's Ismailovsky Park. This time, they didn't explode anything, but three years later, the Russian-backed Chechen Security Service found a container filled with radioactive materials attached to a mine hidden near a railway line.
As far as al-Qaida goes, Muhammad Atef's predecessor, Abu-Ubaydah al-Banshiri, drowned in Lake Victoria in 1996 while on a mission to procure material for a dirty bomb. And, documents captured in 2003 in Afghanistan show, the Taliban helped al-Qaida succeed in building a dirty bomb.
Fortunately, even if al-Qaida or another terrorist group was to detonate a dirty bomb in a city and radioactive material would be dispersed over a wide area, it is unlikely that it would be enough to do any real harm.
"The so-called safety limits for radiation exposure are exceedingly conservative," explains Fred Singer, physicist and president of the Arlington-based Science and Environmental Policy Project. "You can exceed them by a factor of 10 or 100 and not suffer any damage."
In fact, a dangerous concentration of radiation would melt most containers - but try telling that to the public right after a non-conventional terrorist attack. Citizens would clamor for a very expensive clean-up, draining the public coffers; businesses would come to a halt.
So how does one overcome the fear?
"The answer is more education," Anderson insists.
The terrorists know this so we will be safe until that day.
The next president will be tested early.
--why the real solution should usually be to wash the area down good and get back on with life--
Common knowledge. We don't need a think tank to tell us that.
If you want to have fun, ask the average American if a medium nuke were detonated in mid-Colorado, how far into the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans would the blast damage extend?
The answers could compete with "kids say the darnest things". Americans are clueless about lethality or damage whenever the word "nuclear" is used. Clueless about many things. Just look at who keeps getting elected!
Actually to a somewhat lesser degree there's also an exagerration of the effectiveness of chemical weapons you see a lot.
If I know Al Quaeda, they'll take it out on George Bush to discredit the Republicans just BEFORE the election to assure a Hillary victory. They'll do anything within their power to have Democrats in office again. Playing with patsies in "negotiations" is far less difficult than hiding in a cave taking your lumps
A fine example of irrational nuke phobia was the Three Mile Island partial meltdown. Some radioactive gas was released to avoid over-pressure. By the time it mixed with the atmosphere, no individual off the fenced premise of TMI was ever exposed to more radiation than a normal medical or dental X-ray.
Nonetheless, 200,000 panicky residents flung a few belongings and the kids in the car, and ran screaming into the night. Especially since the actual casualties of TMI were 0, it is a statistical certainty that many more people were hurt or killed in the traffic of the evacuation, though I have never been able to get an estimate of those numbers.
I agree wholeheartedly.
LOL! True!
Would an apology suffice?
Correct! The only reason they worked in WWI was trench warfare.
rl
Nah, but a cookie might :)
Some post-TMI "flight pattern" anectdotes were very intriguing indeed.
I know a family who figured they weren't safe where they were, so they drove fifty miles upwind to stay at the home of the husband's relatives.
The home was available because the relatives themselves had decided that they weren't safe there, so they had driven fifty miles upwind to stay with that husband's relatives.
I like to point out, if any of the "refugees" decided to go stay with Uncle Ed in Denver, they got twice the radiation exposure due to altitude they would have gotten rowing the river and literally clinging to the site perimeter fence.
Next article, "Weapons of Mass Manipulation: the MSM."
Didn't Darwin's Sixth Law state "Survival of the most Intellegent. ;-)
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.