What about airborne, rather than waterborne, delivery? I seem to remember Richard Preston’s antagonist in “The Cobra Event” using finely powdered glass as a substrate for a bug.
RR
I think what everyone is talking about here are referred to as “Dirty Bombs”. Basically, you don’t explode plutonium in a nuclear reaction, rather you just spread plutonium dust everywhere. The upside to this method is you can use less plutonium than you would for a nuclear bomb and the dust can render an area uninhabitable for a very long time.
There seems to be some disagreement as to just how bad such a bomb would be. [url=“http://www.sciam.com/1999/0999issue/0999infocus.html”]This article](http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/sciobs95/sciobs95-03.html) in Scientific American talks about what might happen had the Cassini space probe crashed into earth (the probe is carrying some 72 pounds of plutonium). The article mentions that death estimates varied from a few hundred to a few hundred thousand. Much of the deaths would be from cancer which would take awhile to kill its victims and may not be necessarily traceable to plutonium poisoning.
About the only good thing to say about this whole thing is that Plutonium 238 is VERY difficult stuff to come by. It requires hi-tech processing to manufacture and extract the needed material which is VERY expensive and difficult. Pakistan has been trying to get Plutonium for decades (its current nukes are all uranium devices) and only now is close to building the necessary pieces to get some. Once up and running they will be able to produce about 10-15 kilos of plutonium a years (source: Scientific American)
(I originally posted this as a new thread by accident.)
All this talk of attacking the reservoir or treatment plant seems like the hard way to get things done. If I were a super-evil terrorist, I’d attack the water at the place it would do the most damage (affect the most people) and be hardest to detect: in the water mains under the streets, as close to the treatment center as possible.
Maps of municipal water layouts have got to be pretty easy to come by (a walk down to the city hall; in Illinois I bet you could even call JULIE). The tools required for access would be a few worksuits and helmets, maybe some fake water company ID, and some handtools. Or you could just do it at night and get by with the tools. I don’t know much about large volume water pipe valve systems, but there’s probably an easy way to introduce contaminants into the supply without causing major leakage or disruption in service. Even if our villain had to get the bad stuff in there the hard way, it seems reasonable that he or she could research water pipes, learn to drill very small holes in one (diameter of .5 mm or less) and attach some pre-made pressure injection system.
Of course these are just five minutes’ worth of conjecture, and I don’t know much about the physics and administration surrounding municipal water systems (they’re all just quick guesses). It seems like everyone is quickly dismissing the possibility of such an attack without thinking about all of the vulnerable parts. Maybe it’s because I’ve been reading Bruce Schneier’s new book.
The problem still remains that there is a lot of water and even with the nastiest of chemicals or germs you have to have enormous amounts of the material to inflict significant damage.
Municipal water systems are huge and stretch over hundreds of miles. And while we can’t watch every single stretch of it, such sprawl makes it hard for a terrorist to attack the right place.