They Didn't Like Cassandra, Either.

Just so you know where I'm coming from on this - I attended The Marine Corps Reserve School for Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Warfare Defense. I graduated first in a class of sixty-three students.

So, you wanna ask me hard questions about the difference between blood agents and nerve agents, or expected persistence of liquid nerve agents under varying weather conditions, or the difference between alpha and beta particles and gamma rays, fire away. It's been a few years, but I still recall most of that stuff, and my old class notes are in this folder right over here.

I've added to this knowledge over the years by continuing to research the subject, and through several informal contacts I've maintained with people that are in a position to know. I'm not going to footnote and annotate this entry six ways from Sunday, but I assure you, I've got references for all this stuff. 90% of them you can find yourself by googling around with well-chosen search terms.

Within five years, the will be a serious attack using some sort of WMD somewhere in the United States. This attack will kill hundreds, if not thousands. It will prove impossible to prevent, without resorting to measures so draconian as to prove impossible to get the American citizenry to accept.

There are too many targets. Guard the government building and they'll hit the mall. Guard those and they'll hit the schools, or the water supply, or the bank, or the hospital. You get the idea.

There are too many Bad Guys. Even if they are able to abandon this insane concern with hurting innocent feelings, and start cracking down on likely-looking terrorists, the Bad Guys will simply change their spots. Instead of using Middle Eastern operatives, they'll recruit from other demographic groups, to include blue-eyed blonde guys from here in the States. In a diverse culture such as ours, this is an enforcement nightmare.

While they may have a difficult time finding suicide bombers over here, as we lack the requisite religious training, if you think for a cool million or two they couldn't find some gangbanger or skinhead to drop some toxins in the nearest public water supply, you've got a much higher opinion of human nature than I do. Hell, they got John Walker. a Cali rich kid, for nothing.

The materials are too easy to get. Despite our loudly trumpeted assurances that there are no missing nukes, for example, questions remain about some belonging to the former Soviet Union, as mentioned in this article by the BBC.

But let us leave those nightmare scenarios where they get some plutonium or enriched uranium aside, give ourselves the benfit of a doubt, assume all those operatives running all over that half of the world with Big Bags O' Money keeping supply down on the Black Market do the trick, and consider more mundane threats.

After the recent arrest of Jose Padilla, or whatever name he's using these days, the authorites were quick to point out that nothing had really gone on yet, that Padilla had done not much more than begin to research it on the internet.

As if the world had run dry of cybercafes, and he needed to return to Chicago to find a dialup connection.

Seventeen seconds later the broadcast airwaves and newspaper columns were filled with articles downplaying the effects of a dirty bomb. As the reports told it, the effects would be limited to a few deaths, and a slightly higher cancer risk down the road for folks in the surrounding blocks. The main effect, they said. would be panic.

Most of the scenarios mentioned involved the two most widely available isotopes. Cesium137 is used in the building industries to do things like check the integrity of welds, and measure the thickness of asphalt. The amounts used in these devices are quite small. However, they are openly available. They are supposed to be kept track of, and reported if they are lost, which they often are. When reported lost, they are only recovered half of the time.

Now, I'm going to go out on a limb here, and say that if we use these things here in the States, then they're probably a few in other countries, too, and not much harder to get, or less likely to wander off, either. Now how long do you think a wealthy, patient, foe, using some front companies, would take to get his hands on enough to make a few sizable dirty bombs? You do recall, do you not, that Osama and his happy little gang of cutthroats measure their operational planning time in years, correct? Does it make you feel better to learn that his family business that made them all those millions was the construction business?

The other mentioned isotope is Cobalt 60, found in rods about a foot and a half long, and most commonly used to irradiate food. There are thousands of these in use globally. Most of them are outside the US.

It is a much more intense source. The main operational problem with it is twofold - first, in it's bar form it's not too dispersable. It would need to be ground into a fine dust for maximum effect, or at least metal filings the texture of a coarse sand. It's a soft metal, so that's not the hard part.

The hard part is the fact that the stuff is so deadly that after one minute unshielded exposure you're a dead man walking with just a few weeks to live. After twenty minutes, you're so ill as to be incapacitated.

This is a technical challenge, but again, not one that a man with money and time enough can not overcome, especially if he has some martyrs that are willing to be used up in the process.

"Here, Abdul, go into that lead room, pick up that bar and start grinding until you die. Tell Allah hello, I love him, and fuck some virgins for me when you get there, OK? Saddam said he will give your family $10,000 for every minute you manage to stand up in there and work. Habib made it 17 minutes. Go for the record!"

Of course, the official SpokesExperts have denied the plausibility of such a scenario. As a typical Put The People Back To Sleep article, some hired gun for CBS pooh-poohed it here:

...as Milhollin said, "The Pentagon has decided that radiation bombs are not militarily effective because no one's been able to figure out a way to take radioactivity intense enough to hurt people and transport it somewhere and make a bomb out of it. It's that simple."

BZZZT! Wrong answer, on a few levels. The military doesn't use radiation weapons for entirely unrelated reasons.

Second, The Sheepul won't allow it. Remember the furor over the neutron bomb, how immoral such a weapon was?

Third, lingering contamination makes for all sorts of complications for subsequent military operations. It's nearly impossible to effectively conduct a battle in protective gear. That's why the military wanted the neutron bomb - you could run troops through the blast area a day later with no ill effect, and they wouldn't have to jack with decontaminating the area.

Use of any WMD was, according to plan, to be behind the battle lines in enemy support areas, to disrupt such things such as counterattacks and logistical operations.

How many of those three considerations that make a dirty bomb a poor choice for military operations apply to a terror organization? You guessed it, none.

As a final point on this, Milhollin is either flat fucking lying, or dumb as a box of rocks. If the military cannot design effective radiation shields for things like their suitcase nukes, the "Dial-A-Nuke" variable yield artillery shell that fits inside an eight-inch howiter tube, and several other tactical weapons, then how in the hell can we have those weapons? I assure you the weapons grade fissile materials in those weapons is highly radioactive, and US servicemen assigned to maintain them are not dropping like flies.

More troubling is the prospect of the Bad Guys getting Strontium90, some undetermined amount of which is sitting around the former Soviet republics. At least we hope it's still there. They've mounted an expedition to go round up these free-range mother lodes. An excerpt from the full article:

The IAEA has been working with Georgia since 1997 to upgrade levels of radiation safety and security in the country, where over 280 radioactive sources have been recovered since the mid-90's. Some of these sources were discovered on abandoned Soviet military bases and all have been placed in safe storage.

Sounds pretty good unless you're one of the those persistent types that reads to the very end of the article: "The second phase - an aerial and road survey covering different territory - is scheduled to begin in early September. The objective is to locate and recover other known or suspected orphaned radioactive sources in the country."

What happened to the journalistic principle of putting the most important info in the first few sentences? Why wasn't the headline "More Deadly Radioactive Material Missing - Search to Begin This Fall"?

The final hurdle the Bad Guys must leap is the delivery method. I can think of several, but the simplest is via ship. The amount of tonnage pouring daily into the US is huge, and very little of it is given more than a cursory glance.

Kim Petersen is the executive director of the advisory body the Maritime Security Council. He states, as reported here, that just 2% of containers entering the US were inspected.

The mayor of Boston is so freaked about the possibility of a LNG tanker going up that he asked to have them banned from the port there. A gas tanker goin up would be one hell of an explosion, garan-dam-teed to disperse the hell out of whatever you had. But a simple shipping container would be just about perfect for housing a nice size Dirty Bomb.

If it was me, though, I'd fill it full of "Dirty Rockets." Modify some small surface-to-air missiles by removing most of the explosive payload and replacing it with your DirtyDust, set the launchers up to point the missiles a bunch of different directions, with altimeter fuses set to go off a few thousand feet in the air, and you're done.

Pull it off on the Fourth of July, and odds are nobody would even know what happened until people started keeling over. Get the idea? You don't need to have a Dirty Bomb - just a Dirty Dispersal.

You won't have killed everyone, or even a sizable majority of the inhabitants, but the city would no longer be livable, and would effectively cease to be a viable economic entity. An isotope with a long half-life could cause the city to be abandoned for decades. Strontium90's is 28 years, Cobalt 60's is about five - you don't even wanna know about the really bad stuff.

Cleanup is virtually impossible. The only thing to do is try to wash the particles away with water. The Soviets used jet engines mounted on the beds of trucks. Fire up the engine, and feed water into the exhaust stream to powerwash the affected vehicles. In a civilian decontamination procedure, if you wanted to reclaim the city, you'd have to wash the whole city down, and somehow collect the water in the process, which would itself become toxic, and tranport that off somewhere. That's real workable. Now you know why they've just cordoned off Chernobyl.

Next July 4th, in the port cities of New York, New Orleans/South Louisiana, Houston, Corpus Christi, and just to let the West Coast into the fun, Long Beach, such an attack occurs. This would immediately wipe out roughly 30% of all tonnage, with the fractions of foreign cargo (can you spell oil?) even higher. The economic aspects would be beyond my abilty to describe, with ripple effects that would last for at least a decade. Toss in some supporting attacks on, say, the downtown areas of Chicago and Frisco, and the financial world is paralyzed, too.

We think of ourselves as being civilised but even today there are so many senseless acts of violence, random or otherwise, which destroy or frequently threaten to destroy our way of life. We are shown the world through superficiality - a montage of images flashing across movie and television screens, seen for a moment in time, then forgotten as other images jostle to make room for tomorrow's. We've become harden to the atrocities we know exist and can exist and we switch off our emotions because we don't want to know, not really, because it won’t happen to us, it couldn’t happen to us..

Life is cruel. It's cruel every where. The ways of men are often beyond comprehension. I am witness to the suffering of mankind, so much is caused by conflict and by the human debris disgorged by it, and I've come to learn that there is no end to the senseless nature and futility of the conflicts tearing countries apart.

I wonder what happens to man's reason, tolerance and compassion? Everyday I read the papers, listen to the commentators and the analysts and the news becomes a surreal collage of orchestrated madness. All too often the balance of peace resides in the profitability of terror. It is difficult to find understanding and absolution for the misdeeds of mankind. It goes hand in hand with intrigue, treachery and insane ambition? The end never justifies the means.

The world is floundering in a sea of blood and fire. Is this what we have created. Is this where nuclear technology will lead us. The dead and the despairing. There is no end in sight. Filled with hate and bloody haze. Tangled emotions, the fatal hour inexorably creeps closer. The new millennium sullied by the ever- increasing bloody lake of terrorism – there are those who will go their own way – they will go beyond recall. To become a part in the ever-shifting dreams of mankind’s agony inter-woven into a preordained trend of events.

Rivers of blood, black and turgid sliding by in time wherein beneath lies the world’s injustice and cruelty of men. Wandering in the colossal edifice of time, within dark corridors what do I see other than it is all founded upon the fallacy of men. Man could never be just. Whatever happens in the future, we will again witness Man’s superb and pathetic aberrations, the good and bad that rests within us all and his creations.

Pray for us ...

mld, 6/21/02, 9:19 PM

It's Not All THAT bad...

I don't disagree with what you have said, but I don't think I am nearly as pessimisstic about the human condition as you seem to be. As bad as things are, now is still the best time to be alive in the history of man.

Cruel as things can be, there is now more enlightenment that there has ever been. There is more freedom, more education, more wealth, and more compassion now than there has ever been.

There are the backwaters, and the reactionary cultures on this earth - we are having to deal with one now - but they are less important and less powerful in the overall scheme of things than they have ever been.

While I am brutally realistic about some things, I see over the past few centuries a remarkable advance in the human condition, one that I think will continue, barring some catasrophe such as an extinction level asteroid strike, a global plague of something like the Ebola virus, and the like.

I feel that what we must do at this point is to take this wealth and technical knowledge we now possess, and use it to get off this one lonely rock and out into the solar system, and then the galaxy, where we belong. Only then can we be safe from both cosmic accidents, and the darker side of human nature.

... link