This is a little too juicy to pass up:
From BBC News: British Home Secretary Jacqui Smith is warning Brits that the threat of “terrorists” attacking Brits with a “dirty bomb” is “severe” – meaning an attack is “highly likely” and “could happen without warning”. In addition …
The BBC’s home affairs correspondent, Daniel Sandford, said chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons “have always been something al-Qaeda have aspired to” but the report warns they are now within terrorists’ grasp.
“There is a concern now among officials in the Home Office that the chances of them getting hold of this material have increased in a world of failed states, in a world of easy availability of radiological material in hospitals and in a world of greatly increased smuggling of these kinds of materials.”
He added that the greatest concern was not over an attack by a nuclear warhead, but with a so-called dirty bomb which could contaminate a wide area and trigger panic.
Here’s from Wikipedia on the so-called “dirty bomb”:
The term dirty bomb is primarily used to refer to a radiological dispersal device (RDD), a speculative radiological weapon which combines radioactive material with conventional explosives. Though an RDD would be designed to disperse radioactive material over a large area, a bomb that uses conventional explosives would likely have more immediate lethal effect than the radioactive material. At levels created from most probable sources, not enough radiation would be present to cause severe illness or death. A test explosion and subsequent calculations done by the United States Department of Energy found that assuming nothing is done to clean up the affected area and everyone stays in the affected area for one year, the radiation exposure would be “fairly high”, but not fatal. Recent analysis of the Chernobyl accident fallout confirms this, showing that the effect on many people in the surrounding area, although not those in close proximity, was almost negligible.
If they did not clean it up for a year, radiation exposure would be fairly high, but not fatal. And this assumes, of course, a year’s worth of exposure. And note that traditional explosives, which are freely available, are far more dangerous.
The Brits are still at it, doing Bushlike fear mongering. And it’s interesting, because even they say that the worst result would be that a dirty bomb could “trigger panic”. And here are Smith and Sandford, doing their best to help out.
Footnote 1: There are people who deliberately set out to hurt other people for political reasons, and some of these people are not American. But there is no such thing as “Al Qaeda”. That’s an American invention designed to make us fearful and to justify government intrusions into our lives and to shred our constitution.
Footnote 2: Who was it said “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary”?
Footnote 3: The late Tim Russert, supposedly one of the toughest interviewers in American media, once provided Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld with a platform so that Rumsfeld could talk about the Tora Bora Complex, supposedly an impregnable fortress that housed Osama bin Laden and thousands of his dedicated soldiers. It was all a lie. A very big lie. There are bases in Afghanistan where soldiers trained – the U.S. military knows about these bases – where they are, how big they are, etc. The U.S. military built them during the 1980’s.
Piece of Mindful 