Posted on 06/29/2002 12:33:16 AM PDT by JohnHuang2
The media elite continues to discover new ''weapons of mass destruction" that Islamic terrorists are "believed" to have got their hands on. Don't let them fool you. The only true WMD is a nuke. Nothing else comes close.
For example, they report that Ralph Nader believes a "McDonald's double cheeseburger is a weapon of mass destruction." Well, if you ingest massive doses of Nader's WMD, you might eventually become fat, dumb and happy. But terrorists don't want you happy. So forget about Big Mac attacks by terrorists.
How about wheat smut? Saddam Hussein produced tons of that WMD. What if he gave it to terrorists? One day your wheat may develop a foul, fishy odor. But, chickens, cows and pigs fed the smutty wheat suffer no ill effects. So, let them eat it. You stick to Big Macs.
Finally, there's the "dirty bomb."
Iraq is the world leader in developing and testing explosively-driven radiological dispersal devices. Their WMD – weighing 3,000-lbs. – dug a radioactive crater, but radioactivity levels fell off rapidly with distance from the crater. Short-term exposure at such levels didn't kill; wouldn't incapacitate; couldn't be seen, smelled or felt. So, the world's experts concluded that dirty bombs would be ineffective.
Nevertheless, the non-experts at the Federation of American Scientists just tried to scare the pants off you soccer moms, anyway. They reckon that if their "dirty bomb" – a "coffee jar" containing about a thousand curies of radiological material, surrounded by high explosive – was set off in New York City, every building in Manhattan might have to be demolished. Furthermore, they reckon that long-lived radioactive contamination would eventually result in hundreds of thousands of deaths from cancer.
"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 vaporized, and finally to scatter it to the winds."
This scary scenario was perhaps inspired by the 1986 Chernobyl accident. The graphite-moderated, water-cooled reactor was being deliberately operated in a zone where the reactor was known to be unstable. The operators lost control, the reactor ran away, melting the core, vaporizing the coolant, splitting it into hydrogen and oxygen gases and setting the graphite moderator on fire. The fire ignited the hydrogen-oxygen gas mixture, which then exploded, blowing the roof off the reactor building.
About a hundred million curies of radioactivity was spread over a wide area by invisible gases and thick black smoke. The fire burned for 10 days. Downwind, Soviet citizens could see the smoke and the sooty "fallout." But there was no terror, no panic. In fact, one of the other power plants at Chernobyl continued to operate throughout the entire ordeal.
Many of those downwind, who were forced to evacuate, didn't want to go. And except for an increase during the first several years after 1986 of thyroid cancer in small children, there has been no significant increase in cancer incidence among the downwind population.
But the FAS apparently scared some of you. So, President Bush has just announced that we will provide $20 million this year to enhance the safeguards and physical security of radiological materials in the former Soviet Union.
Furthermore, we and the Russians – in cooperation with the IAEA – will assist other countries enhance their own radiological safeguards and physical security. There are estimated to be more than 10,000 medical radiotherapy units and 12,000 industrial radiographic units in operation, worldwide.
Estimated? How come we don't know? That brings us to "orphan" radiological materials; the "system" has lost track of them.
Since no one knows where the orphans are, they are unlikely to be stolen by terrorists. Nevertheless, these orphans present a real danger, and President Bush has taken appropriate action.
There have been incidents – in Mexico, Brazil, Turkey – in which thieves stole orphan medical radiotherapy units and sold them as scrap metal. The thieves didn't realize – nor did the authorities – what they were stealing until those few people who had come into direct contact with the concentrated radioactivity started turning up in hospitals.
In the worst incident – in 1987 in Brazil – five persons died within days after exposure and others got life-threatening doses of radiation. But there had been nothing about their exposure to concentrated radiological material to alarm or terrify them. A terrorist's dirty bomb would disperse the radiological materials to the four winds. You, too, would never know that's supposed to terrify you.
Unless, of course, some FAS blabbermouth tells you.
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