Posted on 10/30/2001 4:17:08 PM PST by DrCarl
uuhhh....Vauss is a self-described survivalist (former); maybe he learned?
It sure does looks like he learned some things. And he is nice enough to share that knowledge with the rest of us who are ignorant on the subject. An example of one of the greatest benefits to being part of FReepdom.
Who is "They"? What exactly was said? What do "they" consider the heartland?
10/31 - Halloween: The one day of the year when people of middle eastern people could wear ANY type of disguise, the more outlandish the better, and travel about without arousing suspicion. Given the heightened awareness and willingness on the part of many citizens and law enforcement personnel to profile, this provides the terrorists with a ready-made opportunity to pass unnoticed into some potential target areas. There has already been speculation on other threads about smallpox contamination of halloween candy or costumes. Whether that happens or not, halloween is one time when lots of kids are out and about after dark, sometimes in large groups -- potential targets, I fear, with darkness plus costumes providing cover for terrorists.
11/1 - All Saints Day: A day when large numbers of Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Anglican Christians attend church during the day. As the recent massacre in Pakistan illustrated, churches full of worshipers must now be considered potential targets of the terrorists. Large churches located in the central downtowns of major cities would be especially attractive targets for bombs or biological weapons.
11/2 - Anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, the first legal step that led to the creation of Israel. There could be many potential targets within Israel, Britain, & the US. This could potentially be the best day for OBL to try to provoke massive riots and rebellions throughout the "moderate Islamic" world, with the aim of overthrowing regimes like the House of Saud and replacing them with Taliban-style regimes.
Given what we know about the Al Qaeda MO, it seems likely that they will not just strike at a single target, but rather at multiple targets simultaneously. We should not rule out the possibility that each of these three days will bring a different wave of attack, with each day utilizing a different weapon against a number of similar targets.
Make that "people of middle eastern origin".
Sorry, late & blurry-eyed!
Uh, no.
Even the most "efficient" nuclear weapon consumes less than 1% of its fissile material. *Any* nuclear bomb is going to scatter the vast majority of its radioactive "fuel" over the countryside.
And while several pounds of vaporized Uranium or Plutonium scattered over hundreds of square miles would be nothing to look forward to, it wouldn't really be that much of a health hazard, overall.
What makes nuclear weapons a real mess from the standpoint of radiactive fallout is actually a side-effect from the explosion itself -- the high-energy neutron and photon spray of the blast itself causes the remnants of the bomb, and a lot of the matter around it (air, water, dirt, etc.) to undergo nuclear changes which cause *them* to mutate into radioactive material as well. For example, there's no Strontium or Iodine in the bomb itself, and not much in the environment, but the nuclear blast transmutates other elements in and near the blast into highly radioactive Strontium-90 and Iodine-131 (among others).
This is why airburst nuclear explosions create a hell of a lot less radioactive fallout than ground-burst explosions -- air transmutates into radioactive isotopes less readily than does the solid matter at ground level. And underwater nuclear explosions are really nasty -- the US tested underwater explosions in the "Crossroads" series of tests, and was astonished at how intensely radioactive the seawater around the tests had become.
A "dirty nuke" is not one that is "designed not to burn all its fuel", since no nuke does, instead it's one that is packed with material that is easily transmuted into nasty radioactive isotopes by the blast itself. Cobalt is one good candidate for such a "dirtifier".
Not at all.
Unlike anthrax spores, which aren't easy to detect if present in a large volume of material, radiation at least has the virtue of being easy to scan for.
Radiological bombs set off in a few fields of crops would be a total waste. The government would quickly map out the (rather small) affected areas, cordon them off, and absolutely every other agricultural field in the country would be perfectly safe -- and could easily be proven so with geiger counters and other similar instruments.
If anyone was paranoid about a particular food shipment, it too could be quickly tested and cleared. I would have absolutely no apprehension eating produce after such an event.
It would *not* be like the old joke:
A farmer was tired of kids jumping his fence and eating his watermelons, so he put up a sign: "Warning, one of the watermelons in this field has been poisoned."The next day he went to check his field and found that the sign had been replaced with another which said, "Now two of them have..."
I don't think so.
The EMP bomb is one that is simple in theory ("set off explosives inside of a charged coil"), but hard to pull off in practice.
The coil has to be massively charged moments before detonation (not a low tech-task), and the shockwave of the explosion has to travel from one end of the coil to the other at exactly the same speed that the magnetic field collapses across the coil (even harder).
This is not something you could whip up in a high school science lab, or even most university EE departments.
Furthermore, it's not something you could get right without some trial and error and testing, and I can guarantee that experimental EMP blasts would catch the attention of a lot of monitoring equipment, both government and private.
I also have to wonder how accurately that word captures the intended meaning of the original language the screed was delivered in. Things have a way of getting lost in translation.
It's not that simple. If they announced a "possible target" and evacuated that city (which itself would cause *HUGE* disruptions and logistical nightmares -- ever evacuate several million people, including hospitals?), then the terrorists could bring the country to its knees for the next ten years by doing *nothing* but sending fake messages to each other in the hopes that we would intercept them and trigger yet another evacuation. "Abdul, we strike at Miami on the Tenth, prepare yourself for martyrdom..."
Screw that.
NO!!!
Tincture of iodine is poisonous.
This was meant to be a question for those more versed in chemistry than I: Like can the solution of iodine be reacted with any widely available substance to make it non poisonous, yet effective. Old antidote books recommended drinking a mixture of starch (e.g. corn starch) and water, to neutralize an ingestion of tincture of iodine. I imagine that taken straight it would be as caustic as chlorine.
I will ask the moderator to nuke the post lest anyone in desperate straits gets the wrong idea and tries downing the tincture.
Bogus. The time would be a function of which radioactive materials were used to build the "dirty bomb". Other factors involved as well--weather in particular--dictate how extensively the radioactivity would be spread.
A ground burst is definitely a dirty nuke, but a "crude nuke" built by terrorists would have a higher ratio of radioactive isotopes generated to blast effect, and so is "dirtier" than a more sophisticated weapon. Of course, any such crude bomb would probably ALSO be set off on the ground, so the "dirty effect" would be magnified compared to blast.
At about 2 in the morning (Eastern time), Fox News said that new information had just been received from the government, saying that the current emergency is very serious. They (the gov't) said that we have not seen such a serious threat since the Cuban missile crisis. They said that the most critical period would be within the next 72 hours.
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