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Ashcroft's Warning: Dirty Bomb

Posted on 10/30/2001 4:17:08 PM PST by DrCarl

Am I the only one who heard Sean Hannity, at about 5:40PM EST, stop while on the air and say: "So that's what Ashcroft's warning is. It's a dirty bomb."


TOPICS: Miscellaneous; Your Opinion/Questions
KEYWORDS: dirtybomb
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To: gusopol3
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.

261 posted on 10/30/2001 8:53:33 PM PST by DeSoto
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To: Yup!!
The bomb will be in the Heartland. This is what they said ,isn't it? Yes, I believe that is what they said.

Who is "They"? What exactly was said? What do "they" consider the heartland?

262 posted on 10/30/2001 9:04:39 PM PST by I'm ALL Right!
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To: No Fool; ivoteright
ping...for your reading enjoyment
263 posted on 10/30/2001 9:09:50 PM PST by I'm ALL Right!
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To: DrCarl; OWK; Dog Gone
The next three days present a unique window of opportunity for the terrorists:

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.

264 posted on 10/30/2001 9:21:31 PM PST by Stefan Stackhouse
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To: Stefan Stackhouse
when people of middle eastern people

Make that "people of middle eastern origin".

Sorry, late & blurry-eyed!

265 posted on 10/30/2001 9:24:15 PM PST by Stefan Stackhouse
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To: Pylot
One is a nuclear weapon in which the nuclear explosion is designed not to fully "burn" or spend all of the nuclear material. This leads to fallout that contains unspent radio active particles. These particles will typically have the half life of the material from which they are made. The effect of a weapon like this is to leave the area surrounding the blast contaminated.

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".

266 posted on 10/30/2001 9:56:11 PM PST by Dan Day
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To: dogbyte12
True,... unless they go after the Central California farming area. California grows 50% of this nations produce last I checked. If they blew up a few dirty bombs there, people would refuse to eat anything to come from that area, even though most of it would be safe. That would be devastating economically. All produce in the nation would instantly double in price, there would be shortages that we would have to augment by using more produce from places like Chile and Mexico with laxer enforcement standards.

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..."


267 posted on 10/30/2001 10:06:51 PM PST by Dan Day
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To: 11B3
Thanks P8riot - that was exactly the article I was refering to. Make sense to you that this is a possibility??

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.

268 posted on 10/30/2001 10:22:40 PM PST by Dan Day
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To: I'm ALL Right!
I believe he is refering to the terrorists. And I believe that the in fact said "strike at the heart of America", not the heartland.
269 posted on 10/30/2001 10:24:18 PM PST by freeasinbeer
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To: D Joyce
The "Heartland" very well could have more than one meaning.

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.

270 posted on 10/30/2001 10:25:17 PM PST by Dan Day
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To: FITZ
It would be nice if our government would give us some idea where they think these attacks will occur, many lives could be saved if they would allow us to know things and we could evacuate, at least get our kids out.

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.

271 posted on 10/30/2001 10:33:06 PM PST by Dan Day
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To: HiTech RedNeck
Getting creative -- what about other iodine sources. Such as sweetmeats (animal thyroids). Or bottled tincture of iodine.

NO!!!

Tincture of iodine is poisonous.

272 posted on 10/30/2001 10:44:05 PM PST by Dan Day
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To: TrappedInLiberalHell
Houston is a more logical target than Dallas-Fort Worth because of the industry.
273 posted on 10/30/2001 10:56:03 PM PST by RobbyS
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To: Dan Day
Sorry, I hope anyone reading this is smart enough to note the poison warning on the bottle!

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.

274 posted on 10/30/2001 11:04:38 PM PST by HiTech RedNeck
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To: Admin Moderator
Someone pointed out the obvious -- that tincture of iodine is poisonous. Please yank my post so that nobody will try it.
275 posted on 10/30/2001 11:06:57 PM PST by HiTech RedNeck
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To: Libertarian_4_eva
"If new york city had a dirty bomb explode inside of it the whole city would be closed off for the before mentioned 30,000 years "

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.

276 posted on 10/31/2001 1:57:35 AM PST by Wonder Warthog
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To: Styria
"A dirty nuke is simply a ground burst."

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.

277 posted on 10/31/2001 2:00:58 AM PST by Wonder Warthog
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To: AmericanInTokyo
"No questions asked. Kennedy, Cuban missile crisis."

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.

There's a thread on it here.

278 posted on 10/31/2001 2:17:52 AM PST by Don Joe
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To: Vauss
How would the Isalm terrorists transport this 'dirty' bomb? How would they protect themselves from radiation long enough to deliver the goods?
279 posted on 10/31/2001 2:20:56 AM PST by CWRWinger
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Comment #280 Removed by Moderator


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