Why can't ISIL/ISIS get a dirty bomb?

Factual Questions
21

We’ve established that it’s trivial to construct a dirty bomb, if you can gather together enough nuclear material. We can also assume, quite easily, that ISIS/ISIL really, really, really wants to obtain a dirty bomb and set it off somewhere. Anywhere will do. Nothing else strikes more terror into the heart of the public at large, never mind the actual facts – the majority of people still won’t drive within a mile of Three Mile Island, even though that accident released less radiation than a typical coal-fired power plant does on an average day.

Therefore, we can safely conclude that obtaining a large amount of radioactive material for a dirty bomb must be really, really hard to do. Part of the problem is that nuclear debris leaves a signature that can be traced back to its source. North Korea may be pleased as punch to aid ISIS/ISIL in nuking a small part of the planet, but they’re not so keen on getting blamed for it. Same goes for China, Pakistan, India and Russia. (The ex-Soviet states have mostly relinquished their stockpiles of weapons-grade uranium, though piles of it show up in broom closets now and again…) There’s also geography at play – Syria and N.Korea are thousands of miles apart, so how’s the material gonna get there? Send it via FedEx?

Now, it’s always possible that a lone nuclear tech somewhere with an axe to grind may co-operate with ISIS by sneaking out some glowy stuff – but that also comes with problems. First, no matter which country they’re in, these guys are watched like a hawk. So you’d need a conspiracy of two or more people, probably lots more, to defeat security measures. Then there’s getting in contact with the right people – radical Muslim fanatics and educated nuclear technicians don’t travel in the same circles, and this kind of job isn’t something you would advertise on Craigslist.

And what if they get caught? Delivering black market glowy stuff to terrorists is the worst form of treason imaginable, they would be treated worse than Jared Fogle in prison. Of course, the Russians and Chinese probably wouldn’t let him get that far – heck, even in America, such a problem might be “dealt with” by arranging a Karen Silkwood-style car accident. Or maybe by arranging a more elegant solution such as accusing them of cheating on a test, or something like that – I dunno, who knows.

But it goes without saying that in the fullness of time, somebody somewhere someday will set off a dirty bomb, or worse. I’m frankly amazed that it hasn’t happened yet – the CIA/GRU/MI6 must be putting in a ton of overtime these days.

22

It shouldn’t be… but there have been unfortunate cases of just that happening:

The Goiânia, Brazil is the one I use most often as an example of how this sort of thing can happen, but this list has quite a few accidents related to medical equipment being scrapped/melted down/recycled.

Unfortunately, yes, there are cases of medical items being inappropriately disposed of.

23

Isn’t a rod of cobalt-60 used in a cancer treating machine the kind of thing that would be dangerous enough to cause fear? The imaging isotopes aren’t radioactive enough, but C-60 is.

The problem is it’s a powerful gamma emitter, and you’d need some serious shielding to keep the terrorists alive long enough to plant it. Other problem is how many of those rods are lying around?

24

Broomstick: You are absolutely correct that in other countries that are less well-regulated/enforced, so to speak, there are ‘accidents’ and/or thefts of disposal. I should have been more specific in saying “in the USA”, for certain. Mea culpa :frowning: And I was also meaning the isotope material itself used by the average NucMed places - not industrial-level businesses.

I don’t see anything (on casual read-through of your link) that states a hospital itself (not a third-party possessor) disposed of its radioactive-type property wrongly in the US in relative recent times, but human-error/software flaw(s) definitely can/will pop up rarely. Seen that with a relatively new-model CT unit one time, but we caught it during daily routine calibration testing, fwiw. GE was there within a few hours to diagnose the software was screwed during power-on chain-of-events, and fixed it promptly then and there. That is/was more my point overall. But, yeah, most other countries don’t have quite the level of attention/enforcement/inspection to NucMed/ionizing-rad stuff as what I worked under, IMHO.

When the Dept i worked in replaced its oldish NucMed unit (single-detector) with a new dual-head detector machine for doing work the new cardiologist wanted, Siemens asked if I wanted to get the dollars for the large amount of lead that surround the detector assembly (similar to a short barrel about 3’ across and two feet high or so) - they basically gave it to me and a co-worker’s husband ran a scrap metal business who accepted lead for recycle. There was some NRC end-of-life-for-machine ‘disposal’ paperwork involved with Siemens and I and the scrap metal manager with geiger measurements/wipe tests and such noted, etc, then it took 6 of us to move the dang ‘barrel’ of lead onto a trailer. I still have a few of the internal photo-detectors packed away somewhere for ol’ times’ sake :slight_smile:

Habeed: That’s kinda what I was trying to convey about the relatively few overall (in relation to hospital diagnostic imaging depts) sources of long-lived isotopes. There are not that many Rad Therapy Depts in any one locale to target effectively for theft(s) of largish amount of isotope(s). It would be hard to steal surreptitiously/safely the rad-source without being dead pretty soon after. You’d need some notable manpower/eqpt to move the heavy shielding needed just to get it anywhere semi-safely, even just out of building, IMHO. Plus you’d most likely have to get stuff from multiple places to spread enough over a wide-enough area explosively to make a really bad scenario other than psychological fear, I am pretty sure. Not an easy thing to try and do.

25

This really is the bottom line, though perhaps we should give counter-terrorism a little credit. The lack of dirty bombs and the rarity of attacks like Paris is silent praise for the CIA and similar groups around the world. We hear about it when intelligence organizations fail, but not so much when they succeed.

26

Because they’re very naughty, so they’re not allowed to have one.

27

One point is that setting off a dirty bomb won’t be obvious to any observer. The radioactivity is invisible. They’d have to tell people about it and then someone would have to get out the geiger counters to confirm. So one of them won’t have the immediate impact that terrorists desire.

28

If by “immediate” you mean “first 5 minutes”, then I agree. If by “immediate” we mean “as soon as somebody from the emergency department shows up to check”, the news will be around the world within minutes thereafter.

And yes, a heck of a lot of first world police and fire units have radiation detectors as routine items on their cars/trucks.

If a bad-guy group does fire off a dirty bomb you can also be sure they’ll tell the world pretty darn quickly. Within minutes to an hour. And within a further few minutes that news will be around the world.
Believe me; you’ll know plenty soon enough to be scared by it if scared is your attitude to this stuff.

29

Suppose ISIS takes over a hospital in it’s territory and diverts some of the material for use in dirty bombs. They could probably do that assuming that the material isn’t evacuated when ISIS begins to encroach. The material should be a powder. BTW, ISIS need not bother NK or any nuclear power unless they are trying to make a nuclear weapon which isn’t being discussed here.

Now they have to smuggle it into a target country. I don’t know how hard it is to smuggle something into Greece or what the controls are on cargo moving among EU countries. I also don’t know what protections would be needed to insure that the smuggler didn’t die before handing his cargo over to the bomb makers. If it were an alpha source, it probably wouldn’t require a lot of protection.

Big cities might have radiation detectors strewn about to help detect this kind of thing, but I would bet smaller cities don’t.

The radiation doesn’t really have to be very deadly. If it caused one additional case of cancer in every 10,000 people, it would still be pretty terrorizing to many people.

The hard part, to me, is establishing an organization to plan and execute a dirty bomb attack and stay under the radar of the authorities. Before 11/13, I would have thought the authorities had this pretty well locked down. Now I kind of think it’s a matter of when, not if.

30

As bad as 11/13 was, it didn’t require all that much coordination, certainly not as much as smuggling in nuclear material. Guns and explosive material were obtained via existing black market sources rather than directly from ISIS, and the communications for the 11/3 attack appear to have been almost exclusively between France and Belgium, not between France and Syria which would have triggered scrutiny.

So I wouldn’t agree that it changed anything, let alone opened the floodgates to any attack they care to do. Until they can operate with near impunity across guarded borders without getting caught, and that doesn’t seem to be the case now, I’m not personally going to be any more concerned.

31

Read about the famous case of the abandoned hospital in Brazil. Some scrap scroungers found the radiation treatment machine and took the sample and passed it around the neighbourhood. People slept with them, people rubbed it on their bodies. There were quite a few after-effects, and a number of people died (4?) - but the net result was not a lot of injuries, considering a large amount of radioactivity was floating around the neighbourhood for several weeks.

Goiânia accident - Goiânia accident - Wikipedia

A bomb that spread enough radiation to be lethal before there was time to evacuate the area - and spread the lethal dose over more than a few dozen feet - that would be pretty large sample of pretty intense radioactivity. That sort of material is pretty hard to get your hands on. It’s not something that’s easily bought in the third world, unless you have a friend who works in the local nuclear power plant and is dumb enough to commit suicide by smuggling the matrial out under his clothes.

That tiny sample in Brazil was behind a huge amount of metal shielding; imagine what a amount of radiation shielding a chunk of intensely radioactive material the size of a 2-litre pop bottle would need. Then, what precautions would you take while grinding it into a fine powder (consistency of flour or icing sugar) to properly disperse a wide area? You’d need some serious vent hood and protective gear, or disposable minions. (Vent? VENT? Gahhh!)

(This is why I wonder how the mailed anthrax after 9/11 was prepared. This stuff was lethal if encountered on envelopes, yet someone ground it to a fine powder without killing themselves?)

And, as mentioned, the one thing all first world countries do is place radiation detectors at most ports of entry.