This is brilliant! Wrong, yes. But very clever.
Talk about thinking outside the box - these guys have something.
Can’t we ship a radioactive food truck to Syria? Surely the Syrian soldiers will come running for a lamb sandwich and some couscous. A falafel truck crusing through Afghanistan?
My question is what is the radioactive substance they would need to irradiate victims at 50 or 200 yards.
Seems like a brilliant Trojan Horse idea as well. Leave truck full of arms or whatever, and the enemy takes it home. Week later, their teeth are falling out, next week their jaw falls off, and they’re invalids within days.
Wolverines!
What?
Apparently it was an X-ray generator of some kind, not a radioactive isotope. Accounts/opinions seem to differ on whether it would have been effective or not.
Someone with knowledge of the actual output of x-ray equipment will likely be along directly, but I’m going to have to guess that setting up something to be lethal in the short term beyond a few feet for something portable is going to be severely impractical.
Simply because of the inverse square law. Basically states that doubling the distance from the source reduces the dosage to a quarter. ie. 1000 rads at 1 foot is going to fade down to 250 at two feet, 111 at three feet, and 62 at 4. Five feet gives you a whole 40.
Now if you were to set it up behind a counter somewhere where your target was going to be standing for an extended period it would be a viable and serious threat.
IIRC, reading an article about the Nazi’s some 30 years back, part of their sterilization plan included concealing a piece of radioactive material in a tall counter that undesirables were required to stand at while filling out a long document. The document having been designed to require a half hour to complete.
The inverse square law applies to things which radiate outwards in all directions. If your device produces a more focused beam, effectiveness need not fall off with distance much at all.
In fact, I was shot by such a device just a few days ago. I barely made it out of the dentist’s office alive!
What it really should say is “FBI provides all of the equipment and means for someone to carry out a plan they had previously only talked about, and then arrests them for it.”
Not that what the guy was doing was right, but it’s not like the FBI stopped him just in time to keep him from using the thing.
And a legal question: I also recall the case of the fella who built a bomb with materials supplied by the FBI, and drove it within a block of the White House where he attempted to detonate it. Why do they let it get to that point? Surely they have enough evidence to charge them long before the device is actually assembled.