Posted on 06/17/2002 5:03:44 AM PDT by dennisw
Radiological attack: 'Manhattan would be uninhabitable for years'
By Geoffrey Lean
16 June 2002
If a "dirty bomb" were to be set off in New York, every building in Manhattan and for miles around might have to be demolished, concludes one of the United States' most distinguished scientific bodies.
The Federation of American Scientists, which cites 52 Nobel prizewinners among its sponsors, says a bomb made using just one piece of radioactive cobalt could make the city uninhabitable for decades, and seriously contaminate one thousand square kilometres of the states of New Jersey, Connecticut and New York.
Three months ago – long before last week's debacle was even a glimmer in Attorney General John Ashcroft's eye – the federation's president, Dr Henry Kelly, warned the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations that the "threat of a malicious radiological attack in the US" was "credible".
He presented the results of a study – carried out by the federation and Princeton University – into what might happen if a bomb containing just a single "pencil" of intensely radioactive cobalt-60 was exploded at the southern tip of Manhattan on a calm day with a slight south-westerly breeze. Plants used to disinfect food by irradiation often contain hundreds of these "pencils", each just a foot long and an inch in diameter.
The danger, as the report makes clear, is not that the bomb would immediately kill people, although deaths would probably result from the force of the explosion. The real threat would come from long-term radioactive contamination, causing hundreds of thousands of fatalities from cancer over decades.
The investigation concluded that Wall Street, Greenwich Village, Times Square, and the swathe of New York stretching up to Central Park that contains most of its skyscrapers would become as contaminated as the no-go area permanently established around Chernobyl. One in 10 people who continued to live in a 300-block area downwind from the bomb would develop cancer. And a huge area stretching 70 miles downwind would be so badly affected that, under US government rules, it would have to be evacuated and the buildings decontaminated or destroyed. In practice, the study says, "demolition may be the only practical solution".
Could it happen? There would probably, as the federation points out, be little difficulty in finding radioactive material. Food-irradiation facilities are poorly guarded – and the world is awash with similar, or even more dangerous, radioactive sources used in industry, medicine and university laboratories. Some two million sites in the US alone are licensed to use radioactive materials, and the government admits that 1,500 sources have gone missing over the past five years. And last year President Bush cut the budget for protecting nuclear waste – and weapons – by 93 per cent.
It would be much harder, says the nuclear consultant John Large, to explode the bomb so that radiation was widely dispersed. The radioactive material would have to be heavily shielded if any terrorist trying to make or use the bomb were not to die within minutes; an X-ray machine typically contains a radioactive source the size of a cod liver oil pill inside shielding as big as a coffee jar.
A successful bomb would have to be designed with great sophistication, first to break open the "coffee jar", then to gradually heat the radioactive source so that it vaporised, and finally to scatter it to the winds.
Also from the Americas section.
Bush 'has authorised CIA to kill Saddam'
A dirty bomb from Pakistan? Or a dirty trick from Washington?
The newspaper, the shopkeeper and the April Fool that went horribly wrong
Andersen guilty in Enron trial
Exit the Dapper Don ? in a sharp suit, naturally
Want me to go over to the anthrax/smallpox/suitcase nuke/cyanide in the water threads, and rustle up a crowd for ya?
Same difference. Biological dose is cumulative for acute harmful effects. If you get a 10,000 rem exposure in a short time from a single source, the lethality is the same as getting a set of ten doses from ten separate sources, each giving you 1,000 rem.
Handling issues are similar. The photon flux from gamma sources in air is a scalar field. If you have 10 sources sitting unshielded in air at 1 foot away, you'll get the same exposure that you would from a single source of 10 times the activity. This neglects self-shielding in the source, but for gamma emiiters like 60Co or 137Cs in a thin cylindical geometry, self-shielding is a second-order effect. Working with separate sources is not necessarily easier than working with a single source. You'd likely need less shielding for individual sources of lower activity, but you'd have that many more handling operations to perform. Its true you could spread the dose out among more people if you had a whole gang of people willing to take a few thousand rems of exposure each, but in the end you'd probably kill a lot of your own people to produce something whose damage potential, while inducing fear among the sheeple, is probably quite limited.
Its hard to imagine this kind of thing being pulled off without access to some fairly high-tech stuff. We're taking about a high-activity hot cell with quite sophisticated manipulators and other apparatus. Not the kind of thing you'd find in your basement or garage. But a national program might have such things. If one is really concerned about this kind of thing, we'd better put some kind of military pressure on rogue states like Iraq and Libya, that have the money and motivation to get these kinds of facilities set up.
For instance, it says "1/10 living downwind will eventually develop cancer". But cancer kills on the order of 1/4 of all Americans, without any increased radiation exposure. Along with heart disease it is the leading cause of eventual natural death. Saying "eventually" someone gets it is like saying "eventually, we are all going to die". True, meant to sound scary, in fact vacuous.
Then there is the comment that under existing US regulations, buildings with that much radiation would have to be demolished. But that only shows that existing regulations are ridiculously tight, due to agitation by nuke fear peddlars like these guys. I went to the University of Chicago. The chemistry building was used for radiation experiments (on radium and what not) back in the 1930s. In the late 1980s or so, government regulations were tightened, and the University was forced to gut the interior of the building (keeping the outer shells) because the tiny levels of residual radiation, above background, were no longer in compliance with government limits. Thousands of students had used that Chemistry building for decades without any adverse results.
Then there is the idea that the stuff would be impossible to clean up short of demolishing everything. This is wildly implausible. Cobalt-60 can only be dangerous because it is seriously radioactive. Seriously radioactive elements are extremely easy to detect - all you need is a geiger counter. The cobalt is not going to worm its way into special nooks and crannies, magically. It does not transfer its radioactivity to surrounding objects, like some demonic haunting. You could easily look for and wash away the stuff. Some low levels might remain, but would be no more dangerous than elevated radium levels in the U Chicago chemisty building.
Furthermore, toward the end they hint (barely) at it being "difficult" to get radioactive cobalt to disperse perfectly. That is a gross understatement. Almost all of it would fall very close to the spot the device was detonated, in rather large bits, where it would be relatively easy to find and clean up.
The dangers of something when perfectly dispersed are like those silly calculations of lethality, where you take a lethal dosage of something and divide by the quantity and conclude "it could kill n people". Without bothering to figure out how exactly the dosage and no more is supposed to get to exactly n people with nothing wasted elsewhere. Which is about like saying, "with one dull knife everyone on earth could be murdered", just ignoring the little practical problem of sticking it into each one of them in sequence.
Of a piece with this sort of thing are the scare mongering stories of the effectiveness of chemical weapons. A Tokyo cult is said to have enough nerve gas to kill everyone on earth 3 times over. As a fact, they killed a dozen people when releasing it in a confined area on a subway - though they did sicken thousands more. Which is nasty enough to be serious about preventing it, without any of the ridiculous scare-mongering exaggeration to mythical doomsday proportions.
These are all very clusmy weapon ideas. They would not kill large numbers of people. (Even in wartime, industrial quantities of chemical agents delivered over years by entire armies cause fewer casualties than ordinary bullets and bombs, by an order of magnitude). They would be a pain to clean up economically, but that is all.
The article at least avoids calling the "dirty nukes" or "poor man's nukes". That is another version of the same exaggeration, playing in people's scientific ignorance and a generalized fear of anything nuclear as supposedly demonic. Dirty nukes just aren't nukes, in all practical terms. There is a true discontinuity between the potential effects of nuclear weapons and all others. In the future, it is potentially possible for highly sophisticated bio weapons to have something like that level of danger, although no existing biological warfare capability on the planet - including the Russians and our own - is yet anywhere near that league.
For the moment, only real nuclear weapons are true weapons of mass destruction as the term is bandied about. All the other types called that are called that purely as exaggerated scare mongering. This article is just another example of such scare mongering.
His chances of getting lung cancer had just become very very high.
There are some investment ideas though -- the people who make whole body dosimeters, and companies that develop no-surgical or minimally-invasive-surgical techniques to remove rad particles from the aveolae of the lungs.
Chelation agents are the indicated means of treating most types in internal contaminants. There are any number of them available, depending on the elemental form of the radionuclide.
Sometimes when I'm debating with anti-nuke kooks they bring up a similar issue in the context of plutonium contamination, the old "one pound of plutonium properly dispersed can give everyone on Earth lung cancer" scare mongering. My response is, sure, but here's a scarier one: a single ejaculation by a normal male contains enough viable sperm to impregnate every fertile female in this country, but the issue here, as with plutonium, is one of distribution. At that point, if anyone else is listening, the kook's arguments are drowned in derisive laughter (as they should be).
Note to Moderator: scientific discussion only, no profanity intended.
Still, I agree with you that chelation-type, dialysis-type cleansings might indeed by useful and economic in such a terrible event.
Because the radioactive particles have a clear signature, one might run blood through a screener an remove the small amount that is radioactive.
Surgery would be a last-resort approach, wherein the danger to the individual's survival was imminent and grave, since surgery of this type carries its own risk, and that has to be weighed against the risks of taking a more measured approach. In cases where you have more time to plan, its generally best to take your time and evaluate your options, although the temptation to do something, often based in irrational fear, is hard to suppress.
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