Honestly - dirty bombs are ONLY about terror, really. It’s about making a population deathly afraid to go to a large part of a populated city. It doesn’t MATTER if it’s truly dangerous or not. A dirty bomb like that would probably not really killed anyone or have had a negligible impact - a dozen people, maybe. However it would have shut down a large part of a metropolis causing untold economic damage. That’s all it really is - a FEAR weapon as it’d be hard to clean up and people just wouldn’t believe it is ‘gone’. Or they’d be suing the government in perpetuity for any perceived ill effect years down the line...
56 is exactly correct. Even the Iraqis dropped their state-funded dirty bomb program when they concluded it would not be effective as a weapon, except for causing fear to go into downtown areas.
Personally I think the Iraqis underestimated our paranoia about such things. If the MSM told the sheeple that the risk of cancer went up .00001%, that would probably be enough to panic the sheeple into staying away from work, and set the stage for a million lawsuits.