Sure, let’s not worry and do nothing about the terrorists, after all, “they couldn’t do that much damage”, right?
So a few thousand people die immediately and several thousand may get cancer as a result, later, but that’s no reason to actually try to prevent a terrorist attack. Let’s just sit here “being smart” and wait for it to happen...
“One example is the radiological accident occurring in Goiânia, Brazil, between September 1987 and March 1988: Two metal scavengers broke into an abandoned radiotherapy clinic and removed a teletherapy source capsule containing powdered caesium-137 with an activity of 50 T Bq. They brought it back to the home of one of the men to take it apart and sell as scrap metal. Later that day both men were showing acute signs of radiation illness with vomiting and one of the men had a swollen hand and diarrhea. A few days later one of the men punctured the 1 mm thick window of the capsule, allowing the caesium chloride powder to leak out and when realizing the powder glowed blue in the dark, brought it back home to his family and friends to show it off. After 2 weeks of spread by contact contamination causing an increasing number of adverse health effects, the correct diagnosis of acute radiation sickness was made at a hospital and proper precautions could be put into procedure. By this time 249 people were contaminated, 151 exhibited both external and internal contamination of which 20 people were seriously ill and 5 people died.[11]”
From Wikipedia, which is also trying to set people’s mind at ease — what’s a dirty bomb explosion among friends in a big city...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirty_bomb
Nice strawman. I never said that we should not stop terrorists from detonating such a dirty bomb; obviously we should take any and all possible measures to stop such an occurrence. The point I was making is that the main factor that makes a dirty bomb more dangerous than a conventional one is our own ignorance and scientific illiteracy. Your example just goes to prove my point. People hear the word “radioactivity” and react the same way to it, whether it’s 90 kg of naturally occuring uranium (which is relatively benign) or cesium 137, which would be highly dangerous.
A dirty bomb detonation in a crowded urban area would be a big deal. There would be thousands killed, but the same could be said for a conventional explosion in such a location. The dirty bomb is made worse by those who don’t understand that the most potent weapon of the terrorists who detonate it is our own fear and panic.