Dirty Bomb?

In Arnaud de Borchgrave’s spotlight piece today, he mentions the need for the United States and Russia to work together on the Nuclear question;

Russia and America need each other today on several critical fronts, from transnational terrorism to the security of Russia’s 8,000 nuclear weapons and thousands of tons of weapons-grade uranium and plutonium. A small amount of these nuclear materials would be sufficient to make a radiological (“dirty”) bomb that would render Wall Street or downtown Washington around the White House uninhabitable for years.

Actually, the threat of a ‘Dirty bomb’ has been greatly exaggerated. I first became interested in the subject of what constitutes a legitimate ‘Weapon of Mass Destruction’ when I read Gregg Easterbrook’s article in the New Republic entitled “Term Limits: The meaninglessness of “WMD””(Issue date 10.07.02). Easterbrook debunks the myth of chemical/biological weapons as being any more destructive or dangerous than conventional explosives. In fact, Chemical weapons tend to immolate on detonation, and biological weapons (anthrax, for instance) tend to be very difficult to spread, except under what could be considered impossibly perfect weather conditions. The Anthrax scare following the 9/11 attacks was, at the time, blamed on Iraq by Rush Limbaugh, utterly absent any evidence of course, but the only thing close to a suspect ever named in the investigation is a former USAMRIID employee.

As for the Dirty Bomb “threat”, it really doesn’t exist either. Melissa Mitchell, writing for the University of Illinois, reports;

“This is just silly,” said mathematics professor Julian Palmore, who also has a faculty appointment in Illinois’ Program in Arms Control, Disarmament and International Security and teaches courses on terrorism and national security. “The administration is making announcements and the media are picking up on them and sensationalizing the whole process.”

“The upshot of it all,” he said, “is that detonating a dirty bomb just doesn’t make sense” because such bombs are, in effect, inefficient delivery systems for dispersing radioactive material.

Even if terrorists got access to radioactive isotopes and wrapped them around a conventional explosive
device – an unlikely scenario, according to Palmore – the real danger would come from the explosion, not the spread of radioactive material. “If you’re thinking in terms of pellets of radioactive material that might be spread through an explosion,” he said, the danger is minimal because “it doesn’t disperse in the air; you would just go through the area with a Geiger counter and clean it up.”

This is very consistent with the thrust of Easterbrook’s piece – that conventional explosives are more dangerous than scary hobgoblins conjured up by the media (bad news sells) and the state, which always requires fear or apathy to continue to operate. Of course as Easterbrook points out, there is one real WMD; nuclear weapons. I don’t mean some fantasy rocket that North Korea or Iran might one day have, but the real ones, the real tested and proven weapons, the vast majority of which reside in the hands of the US and Russia. And de Borchgrave is right – these weapons need to be monitored very closely, and even *gasp*! dismantled!