MODS: I’m not trying to find out how to make a dirty bomb, since that would be illegal. This question may be more IMHO territory without a factual answer.
The recent coordinated attacks in Paris leads me to think that if ISIL/ISIS had the ability to detonate a dirty bomb near the Stade de France they would have, which leads me to think they don’t have that capability… but how is that possible?
Between North Korea, Iran and the ex-Soviet block there are lots of nefarious people who have the knowledge and wherewithal to cobble something together, and ISIL/ISIS has enough money to buy whatever they need.
Is it that hard to make a dirty bomb, or are the West’s nuclear detection and anti-terrorism capabilities really that good, or are we just lucky it hasn’t happened yet? I can’t believe ISIL/ISIS is that worried about some kind of retaliation from the West.
It is very easy to make a dirty bomb, because a dirty bomb is pretty much just some radioactive material duct-taped to a regular bomb. On the other hand, dirty bombs are also pretty much useless. The only reason a dirty bomb is more damaging than a conventional bomb is because people think it is more damaging and are thus more likely to overreact.
I think the bigger issue it that when you finally get down to people that will ACTUALLY plan AND carry out a terroristic plan for the most part you are dealing with idiots (thank God).
I guess I still don’t understand. If you want to create fear, panic and chaos wouldn’t you set off a dirty bomb since most people fear radioactivity and panic would ensue as millions of people try to flee the city all at once. Perhaps you wouldn’t end up killing as many people as you might otherwise, but in this case the two suicide bombers outside the soccer stadium didn’t end up creating the panic they intended, so wouldn’t a dirty bomb had been a much more effective way, at least in that case? BTW, I don’t think we are dealing with idiots.
Look I don’t think that THAT is that hard to do. And that it IS not that hard to do when push comes to shove.
Which tells me that most terrorists are idiots, because it sure looks like to me that such things are doable.
For that matter, I (and I am sure I am not alone) can probably come up with dozens of ways to implement terroristic attacks over a long weekend that haven’t been done yet.
No, I am not going to list them here. But again, IMO it makes the point that the large majority of terrorists are idiots.
Not that we should ASSUME such as a first line of defense, because…hey…some smart assed motivated one will figure out a good way to do his thing…
It’s not hard to make a dirty bomb. It’s hard to make an effective dirty bomb. In order to actually endanger anyone you need fairly tightly controlled material. You can’t just stick some old radium-dial watches in a suitcase.
Dirty bombs are perfect terrorist weapons in that they are good at inspiring terror. HBO made a film called A Dirty War about a dirty bomb plot that involved detonating a dirty bomb in the center of London. In the last scene, they show the area where the bombing occurred sealed off with a chainlink fence with the notion that these structures can’t be occupied safely for the next 30 or so years.
As was pointed out, it is trivially easy to make a dirty bomb. The only hard part is getting ahold of the radioactive materials. Hospitals often have supplies (don’t know how much) of radioactive isotopes for various therapies. Surely, ISIS has captured some territory with such a hospital, but perhaps the materials were evacuated in advance.
As far as how to smuggle such things into Europe, it may be a little harder that smuggling in, say, drugs because most ports of entry use radiation detectors.
Now a dirty bomb plot would require a significant number of plotters, beyond the bombers themselves, and some really serious opsec to prevent the plot from being uncovered before execution. I would have said that US and European governments have a pretty good handle on that sort of thing before last Friday.
Even if they had an entire hospital’s supply of radioactive materials and were somehow able to put all of it into, say, a truck bomb, it wouldn’t be that big a deal. If they stuffed you in that truck for a few hours you might be in danger but otherwise you’re talking about not much more than background radiation.
I wasn’t thinking about hospital-grade radiologics… I was thinking of weapons-grade stuff that North Korea, as just one example, has no problem producing. Now Russia may have a problem with selling this stuff to IS, but North Korea desperately needs foreign currency to feed it’s population, from whatever source they can get it. Are we saying that it’s impossible to get high-grade material on the black market these days and that’s what’s keeping IS from making a truly deadly dirty bomb, or is the smuggling it into Europe or the US the hardest part?
North Korea also desperately needs to be perceived as being more trouble to kill than to leave alive. Backing radiological attacks against NATO powers is not a good way of doing that.
The panic of a dirty bomb, while nice from a terrorist’s point of view, doesn’t give the ultimate satisfaction of bodies in the streets. Dirty bombs are no more effective at immediately killing people than regular bombs. As for the radiation, you basically end up with one of two results: All the radioactive material clusters in a small area (so relatively easy to clean up), or all the radiation spreads out and disperses (and is essentially just a small blip against the regular background radiation. You’d see a bigger risk from radiation by taking a couple of extra plane trips or moving to Denver.
In addition, radioactive materials, unsurprisingly, emit radiation. If it’s strong enough to be dangerous when strapped to a bomb, it’s strong enough to set off any and all radiation detectors when you try to gain entry. And that concentrated radiation, if unshielded, can easily kill the people who are trying to deliver the bomb before they even have a chance to take it to the target. In short, trying to set off a dirty bomb increases your chances of failure without really increasing the impact of your attacks
If you want to kill a lot of people for the evening news, use guns and regular bombs. If you want to kill people from radiation, send them all plane tickets to Denver.
I think one needs to distinguish between an effective dirty bomb that scares the shit out of the public and an effective dirty bomb that makes people who actually know something about all things radioactive going “ohhh fuck, this is a nasty mess indeedy”.
If I atomize 100 grams of cobalt-60 in front of the New York Stock Exchange, would you want to work in that building anymore? After the clean-up, the radiation from the granite might be worse, but the spectre of RADIATION will probably keep people away in droves for years.
Manhattan, being a big, symbolic target would likely have extra protection, like radiation detectors on the bridges or something. Places like Seattle, L.A., or Houston might not.
That said, resources spent on a dirty bomb plot might be better spent elsewhere, like attacking the electrical grid, but if you’ve got a bunch of Cs-137 kicking around…
Hospital-grade isotopes are perfectly capable of killing people and have done so, from patients accidentally overdosed to hapless garbage pickers who didn’t realize what was in that hunk of junk they got from the landfill/dump until it was too late.
The problem, as noted, is how to deliver it effectively, to get it past border checks, disperse it neither too much nor too little, and so forth.
Since the Bad Guys in question clearly have people willing to die for the cause I don’t think the problem of the radiation potentially killing off the bomb maker(s) would really be that much of an issue for these folks.
Specifically with regard to ISIS, part of the answer is that until Paris and the Russian jet bombing, ISIS had shown no interest in attacking the West. They’ve been focused on building their caliphate on home turf.
More generally, I think the reason for no dirty bombings is that the level of difficulty involved in creating and placing one is not commensurate with the effect. Terrorists cause plenty of disruption without it. Look at airplane travel–we all take off our shoes at security because of a bomb that didn’t go off, and we can’t bring in water bottles because of a plot that never came to fruition.
For most values of “impossible,” yes. The idea that there are, or were in recent history, arms bazaars where one could buy weapons grade uranium is an idea out of James Bond movies. And I mean James Bond as in the spy movies that have literally no connection to reality, but are very exciting.
If they or anyone else had the capability, they would have used it by now. Which means that they probably like the idea, but can’t see a way to weaponize it and have been informed through their own sources of everyone else’s reply here.
Now a dry ice fog machine, with urisol , that has potential.
The catch 22 of dirty bombs is the really dangerous stuff in the quantity to cause problems is–really dangerous, so you have to shield it–heavily. Heavy shielding prevents good dispersal. If you remove the shielding, its pretty obvious, plus you expose yourself–which jihadists might not mind. There used to be a bad joke among people who worry about this stuff–How do you find a dirty bomb? You follow the path of diarrhea and vomit.
I ran a small NucMed dept for about five years plus part-timed at large depts in major-sized depts. I can say with certainty that average-to-large Hospital NucMed Dept does not have on-hand/on-site, at any single point in time, an effective largish dirty-bomb-level amount of long-lived isotopes. There is a general policy of ordering-for-delivery as needed of the longer-lived isotopes as the hospital does not like to pay big bucks for something to possibly not get used before it decays to too low of a dose. And every delivery/dose/disposal is recorded for auditing by Nuclear Reg Commission - been through more than a few thorough ‘accountings/inspections’ with NRC folks of use and disposal involving everything in Dept.
And nothing NucMed related is ever tossed in general ‘landfill’ trash. Used syringes, for example, go into specially-labelled syringe/sharps-disposal boxes that are kept in lead-lined areas until rad levels are pretty much near-background ot less. Then taken away with rest of the sharps bio-hazard boxes and marked as ‘safe’ with clear labelling/dating upon the box itself. Ten half-lives was a rule-of-thumb overall, and then some…
Usually, the long-lived stuff is shipped back to company (not stored on-site) for long-term disposal when newer ‘fresher’ one is needed, IME. The only long-lived isotopes a ‘general’ NucMed dept would generally have long-term are low-level detector-calibration sources used once a week or so. Very trivial amounts overall. Point-source Co57 ~BB-sized thing embedded in plastic disk or such about size of a quater, IME, usually, and in uci range of activity.
The most common source of imaging isotope is from atechnetium generator
and the source of the Tc99m is from the moly-99 within the unit. I went through one a week and returned them 10 to 15 at a time via Fed-Ex (who delivered them as well) after appropriate decay times/geiger-countings, etc. A half-life of 66 hours spread out widely in area just would not be very effective as a ‘terrorist’ weapon to deny area entry for significant period of time. The amount within when spread out by an explosion would be of low-level, relatively speaking, in any one spot on average. Other individual-dose isotopes I used semi-regulatly with relatively short half-lives were Indium and Thallium, but on a lower frequency than I-131 or Tc-99 by far.
Now there are Rad Therapy places that can have multiple high-level long-lived isotopes for the machines/treatments, but the amounts present at each site, if desired to be used for an effective-coverage-area in concept of dirty-bomb denial of area’s use - well there just are not that many places that have such to steal from.
Its the very,very long-lived isotopes (uranium and its close-relatives) that would make a dirty bomb useful for an effective denial of area’s use - and nothing like that would be found in a hospital, period. Or in any appreciable quantity. There is no use for such type/amount of such material. The medical-level long-lived stuff was always ordered dose by dose. To get enough medical high-level stuff, you’d have to steal/take from where the hospitals order it from, IME. The NRC (in USA anyways), in a manner of speaking, ensures that there is only so much on-site at any one time, and also cost-effectiveness of stockpiling stuff that somewhat rapidly goes away is also a reason why there is rarely a large amount of longish half-lived radiation at any one hospital at any one time. At least that was how it was when I was in that field of Radiology.
And, for anyone interested, here’s a great article on worlwide use/suppliers of radioisotopes in medicine.