Posted on 11/30/2007 7:35:00 AM PST by rwbusa50
The very day after Canada's Defense Minister warned of a dirty bomb or nuclear device entering North American ports in a cargo container, Slovakian police thwarted the sale of enough weapons grade uranium to prove him right.
On Wednesday, Peter Mackay told an Ottawa conference of transportation security experts that the greatest threat facing North America is international terrorists detonating,
"a crude radioactive dispersal device or a conventional nuclear bomb after smuggling it in one of the millions of cargo containers arriving annually on foreign ships." As reported by Canwest News service:
"His assessment of the maritime threat is the bluntest yet from a government minister and echoes concerns high-ranking U.S. officials have expressed publicly for years: al-Qaida has nuclear ambitions, is working to develop the nuclear capabilities to match, and just one of the containers arriving annually on North America's shores could be a Trojan Horse harbouring the unthinkable." The Ottawa group also heard Gary Gilbert of U.S based Hutchinson Port Holdings suggest it's more a matter of when than if: ...
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
I hate to say it, but eventually one of these will get through. And while we’re all wrangling over the constitutional rights of terrorists, they’ll be attacking.
Maybe then we’ll finally drop the big one on Mecca.
“Maybe then we’ll finally drop the big one on Mecca.”
I’ve been advocating at least the threat of this all along. Something along the lines of “To all Muslim extremists...knock it off or Mecca will be a glass parking lot.”
Yep.
We should have done it on 9/12.
I envision a scenario where The White House/Capitol get hit and then we finally respond as we should.
I doubting this story went down as reported. Weapons grade uranium means uranium enriched to ~90% U-235. That is enormously expensive and highly controlled. What probably occurred is that somebody was trying to sell some natural uranium or uranium ore. No big deal. Natural uranium is about as rare as silver and it isn’t particularly dangerous. It used to be added to paints and glass to make a nice yellow pigment. You can probably find some glassware and plates with it on ebay. The biggest thing you have to worry about with natural uranium is heavy metal poisoning if ingested.
This convenient coincidence reminds me too much of the eclipse “prediction” scene in “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.”
Does this have anything to do with the “bumper sticker war” John Edwards told us about?
If it’s “enough weapons grade”, why DIDN”T it explode? More ignorant media hype. Probably just reactor-grade.
The original story I saw doesn’t say “weapons grade”, it was talking about “refined uranium” in quantities that could be used to produce a dirty bomb. ANY radioactive material in ANY quantity can be considered dangerous if used in a dispersal bomb.
A pound of semi enriched uranium is not enough to make an actual nuclear device. Dirty bombs are vastly overrated.
Wrong!
U-235 has a half life on the order of 700 million years. U-238 has a half life on the order of 4.6 billion years. The activity (the number of decays per second measured in Becquerels or Curies) will be very small unless very large quantities are used since A = ln(2) * N / t_1/2 where N is the number of atoms and t_1/2 is the half life. In fact, you would need about 3 tonnes of natural uranium per curie (pure, not an oxide which would be heavier).
That may be, but...
The way environmentalism is going, they would probably call in FEMA and quarantine the area and remove topsoil and wash building if they found a TRACE of uranium.
It’s my understanding that they already do this when they find lead or other heavy metals in the area nowdays.
I would have to backtrack, but in at least one of the incidents it was highly refined weapons grade uranium or plutonium. A little over a POUND. The price was pretty highly refined as well. IIRC, $33,000
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