I know they say that a lot of hot air blows from Washington, D.C., but do they? I will dred the fallout! 
You can also more or less count out a Bhopal scenario in DC. They don’t have much, if any chemical-related manufacturing here. Not that someone couldn’t dump something in the water supply. But even there, it’s pretty unlikely that enough stuff that would last long enough would be introduced. It’s logistically not a good option.
We’re all much more likely to be killed in traffic than any of these “ooh, scary!” scenarios.
Stranger [hic] Thanks for that fantasic post. I’ll sleep better tonight. You’ve certainly [hic] done your job of fighting ignorance.
Just stay off the road, cowboy.
But now, on review, I have to nitpick…myself. :smack:
For some reason, I associated boosted fission weapons with deuterium and fusion weapons with tritium fuel, which is exactly arse backward. Boosted weapons use tritium to enhance the reaction by generating extra neutrons via an incomplete fission reaction. There are some boosted designs that use lithium deuteride with a seperate, secondary fission core, sort of like an incomplete Teller-Ulam design, but I believe that these are less favored given the additional size and amount of fissionable material required. Most modern multistage fusion weapons use the more stable lithium deuteride, some of which gets converted to tritium via neutron reflection to allow for a D-T fusion reaction.
There was, for a time, some serious concern regarding a number of so-called “suitcase nukes” that were alleged to be missing from Ukranian stockpiles following the collapse of the former Soviet Union, and subsequent allegations that some of said weapons were made available on international arms markets. The fact that the weapons have not been used in the interveneing 13 years, however, argues that either the claims are utterly bogus or the weapons were, at worst, purchased by existing nuclear powers to reverse engineer for their own arsenals. At this point, the unmaintained weapons are of questionable functionality at best. A terrorist group would be unlikely to stockpile weapons indefinately for any number of reasons.
Similarly, while a small number of Soviet ballistic missile submarines have been lost at sea (most famously the Golf-class sub that was the object of the infamous Project Jennifer clandestine salvage and recovery effort) the weapons are likely to be unusable, both due to age, exposure, and the security systems designed to prevent tampering (which on American nuclear devices are called Permissable Action Links). As such, a recovered SLBM warhead is most likely unusable as-is, though the weapons material could potentially be reused to fabricate a new weapon, a la the scenerio in Tom Clancy’s The Sum of All Fears. Again, though, it would require someone with considerable technological resources and experience to manufacture a working device.
This isn’t to say that proliferation isn’t a problem, or that a cash-poor nuclear power like Pakistan or North Korea wouldn’t be willing to trade materials or even completed weapons for hard cash, but on the whole I’d be more concerned about a tornado or twenty car pileup on I-10 (a daily threat) than I’d worry about a rogue nuclear strike.
Stranger
Thanks for the great posts Stranger.
The greatest damage from the detonation of a dirty bomb would result from the fear and subsequent financial harm.
I know that the risk of biological attack is currently very small, but if research was commenced on genetically modified smallpox, we may have a problem.
A biological attack would be more effective as a dispersed delivery - e.g. the biggest biological terrorist attack in the USA that September, with 751 confirmed cases of salmonella. A plume from DC would not be a concern.
Ah, the good old Rajneeshes. I just studied them (along with Avenging Israel’s Blood) in my Chem/Bio weapons class. Interesting people… :rolleyes: