So our attention once again returns to the possibility of another terrorist attack in New York. Whether or not the young man apparently involved in the recent failed bomb explosion in Times Square has bats in his belfry is beside the point. What is more important than knowing his mental state is a public understanding that sooner or later, if current trends continue, there will be a successful bomb explosion, and an explosion of more consequence than an explosion of fertilizer and propane gas alone.
Our problem is not fertilizer but nuclear material.
A true nuclear explosion? We don't like to think about it. As the physicist Martin Rees recently reminded us, "A nuclear explosion at the World Trade Center, involving two grapefruit-sized lumps of enriched uranium, would have devastated three square miles of southern Manhattan, including the whole of Wall Street."
But in reality our most serious problem is not the possibility of a true nuclear explosion in New York, but the possibility (maybe probability) of an ordinary explosion contaminated with radioactive material--a "dirty" bomb.
Unfortunately, although dirty bombs are often also called "nuclear" devices, the explosion of such a device does not involve nuclear events. They are really ordinary explosive material packed with radioactive material, the ordinary explosion dispersing the radioactive material over a wide range--contaminating everything, people, objects, the grass in the parks, and the lungs and bones of your children.
Are we safe? The question has been at the forefront of American politics for nearly seventy years, ever since the beginning of the atomic age. But given the methods of modern warfare, and more recently the methods of terrorism, the question is now more a question for scientists rather than a question for politicians and generals. Unfortunately, politicians and generals don't always welcome the answers of scientists, and when that happens, the answers of scientists are likely to be kept secret or to be buried in a mountain of paper to keep the answers from public awareness.
Terrorism -- nuclear, chemical, biological -- remains the most serious threat to the United States and other industrialized democracies, and although democracy is based on the idea of an "enlightened" electorate, governments are not in the habit of fostering enlightenment if such enlightenment interferes with short-term political objectives. At the present time, the declarations of government officials that domestic security against terrorism is in good hands and sufficient can be characterized as at best a twisting of reality. It's a public disservice to tell the public they are safe when science indicates they are not safe. In dangerous times, short-term political expediency can be a lethal strategy.
The realities concerning terrorist use of a crude "hand-delivered" nuclear device or a dirty bomb are disturbing, and the public needs to be made aware of these realities.
Administrative chaos in Russia following the collapse of the Soviet Union has made the enormous nuclear arsenal of the Russians a potential source of nuclear devices and nuclear materials for terrorists with financial resources.
Approximately 600 tons of weapons-grade uranium or plutonium are believed to be stored across the former Soviet Union under poor security conditions. The International Atomic Energy Agency has reported that illegal trafficking in nuclear materials has doubled since 1996, and the agency has counted 370 confirmed cases of smuggling of such materials between 1993 and 2001. A US State Department study has noted that as many as 130 terrorist groups worldwide have expressed interest in obtaining nuclear capabilities -- among them Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda group. Some analysts maintain that with a softball-size lump of enriched uranium, a few materials readily available at a Radio Shack store, and a competent university engineering graduate at hand, terrorists would have a reasonable chance of making a crude nuclear weapon.
Reality: Explosion of merely a "crude" nuclear weapon in Manhattan or one of the boroughs would be enough to close down New York City.
The problem of the enrichment of uranium by Iran is not merely a question of whether Iran will ever launch an atomic warhead at anyone. The more important question is whether Iran will ever make enriched uranium available to terrorist groups.
Former Soviet scientist Vadim Birstein has publicly declared that enriched uranium has already been smuggled out of Russia by the Russian Mafia. If this is true, the most prudent course to protect the United States against a nuclear or radiation disaster is to put aside antimissile defense, Star Wars, x-ray lasers blowing up missiles in space, and concentrate security resources on the possible smuggling of nuclear materials or a nuclear device into the United States by ordinary means.
For example, the policy of random inspection of only a small fraction of the contents of inbound container ships is essentially a policy of exposing the largest American cities to nuclear roulette. Does it make sense to examine every individual who crosses the border but not every crate that crosses the border?
It's unlikely that terrorists would try to do damage with radioactive material not coupled to an explosive. Radioactive material alone is unsuitable for exposing large numbers of people to large doses of radiation, and small doses may not affect health for many years. Explosives packaged with radioactive material are the simplest "nuclear" device, and such a "dirty bomb" can be devastating to a city. There might not be much physical damage from such an explosion, but the fear and panic about radioactive contamination would be intense, disruptive, and could last for years.
So our problem is that although a terrorist dirty bomb exploded in a major cosmopolitan city will not physically destroy the city, such a catastrophe would put Americans and the civilized world in a state of panic whose consequences are unpredictable. As a resident of such a city, I have yet to see any official advice or preparation that would be helpful to ordinary people, no advice, no special medical facilities, no shelters, no evacuation plans--the public remains ignorant. Are the local officials as ignorant as the public, or are they too busy watching the sky for guided missiles?
The first terrorist "nuclear" bomb will be a dirty bomb exploded at ground level, in an apartment or small house, in Manhattan or central London, or in a place like Brooklyn or Islington. Nuclear catastrophe will not come from guided missiles in the sky.
Anyone remember their high school science? Remember the teacher talking about the problems you'd encounter if you were to zoom a flea up to the size of an elephant and vice wersus? the old cubed/squared problem?
Let's take a city block, half a mile on a side, with buildings that average out to 10 stories high.
That's some 68 million square feet to contaminate. And if you got your hands on some highly radioactive material that would only need a millionth of an ounce to contaminate a square foot of ground to the point where a cleanup would be needed, you'd still be talking 4 pounds that you'd have to get, then mix with explosives, surround with a shield, then transfer to the site. And unless that explosion killed anyone, all that you'd have accomplished is to keep a decomtamination unit busy for a week, increased the odds of about the same number of people who fly out of a major cities airport in a day getting cancer by about the same amount as those peoples airplane flight does. To get it to the point where people would actually feel sick, you're talking hundreds of pounds, and that's before you count the explosive to spread it.
Faved!
Right now 180+ countries are gathered in NY to get rid of up to 25,000 nuclear bombs and the article like this one are a cheap attempt to divert attention from the real problem.
The truth is P5 countries specially US is that main road block in the way to achieve nuclear free world and nobody is paying attention to what is going on in NPT review confrence in NY right now!
At least 120 countries have united position against US in this confrence and US is pretending that she has the world behind her against Iran. talk about ignorance!
What has the "larger group" done, in their eyes to deserve such a henious punishment.
Find that answer and the targeted larger group and the horror of such an event could be defused.
Some countries have been responsible for the whole sale slaughter of whole families, mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins and friends. Such distruction is the death of peoples' hopes and dreams and futures. For such peoples, their last remaining spark of life is dedicated to the distruction of the inhuman beast which eat their families.
Can they forgive the distruction of their families, their futures? Could you? For the larger part of us, the horrors of such suffering is unknown, though for some of us, the knowing of others suffering is not unknown and I for one empathize with their griefs and hope they will eventually find a peaceful way to resolve their terrible suffering, if such is possible.
Norge
Rolf Krogsæther
A hint as to why they didn't ask why can be found in what happened when Gallup did a survey of what is termed 'the muslim world', and looked at the data.
When you look at the small minority who saw 9/11 as justified what do you think you find?
That they were all deeply religious and totally committed to following the letter of the Koran? Actually, it turns out they came in all flavours of religiousity, from those deeply committed to those who paid lip service at best (you could call them 'Muslims in name only'), and were pretty evenly spread in that range.
That they were poor and uneducated? Well, actually, they trended above average in income and education.
That they hated freedoms like democracy? Well, actually, the majority of them said they wanted to see more democracies in the Muslim countries.
The much touted danger of Iran sharing nuclear technology and/or actual weapons with a terrorist group does not pass even a cursory test of objectivity. [1] "Would any regime just hand weapons-grade uranium over to extremists over whom it had no control?" There can always be the first time in recorded history that a state actor gives the means for its own extinction to a foreign 'group'. But, are we to accept as a given that the millennially-minded 3000+ year surviving civilization not only aspires to national suicide, but wishes the timing of its guaranteed obliteration to be at the whim of a foreign terrorist group? Is there no likelier candidate other than Iran for setting a new record in staggering shortsightedness?
From http://www.bibijon.org/iranimage/
[1] http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/03/05/how_not_to_contain_iran
JOHN MUELLER: Well, mainly because they don’t exist. No one has really been able to find anything that’s a loose nuke. If you did actually buy or sell—buy or steal a nuclear weapon, what you’d find is that it’s got a lot of locks on it, and there’s very few people who know how to unlock it. In the case of Pakistan, for example, they keep their weapons in pieces, so you’d have to steal or buy one half, find—go to another secure location and buy or steal the other half, somehow know how to put tab A into slot B, and set it off. The number of people—as I say, the number of people who know how to set them off is very small. The people who designed them are not—do not know how to set them off. And the people who maintain them do not know how to set them off. So just getting the bombs—and they also have locks on them which will, if tampered with, will cause a conventional explosion, which will cause the weapon itself to self-destruct, effectively, in a conventional explosion. So the danger is extraordinarily small, it seems to me.
From http://www.democracynow.org/2010/4/14/was_obama_nuke_summit_necessary_or