The Bush Admin has offered varying stories on what they thought Jose Padilla was up to. One thing I haven't seen discussed is the amount of damage a "dirty bomb" would cause. As most of you know, a dirty bomb is a conventional explosive coupled with radioactive material so that in theory it would have the impact of it's explosion plus a portion of the radioactive impact of a true nuclear weapon. It would be much simpler to produce than a nuclear explosive and thus be more within the capabilities of non-state terrorists, It certainly would have the capacity to cause panic. But how much lethality would a dirty bomb actually have? The respected Australian Radio National Science Show says "not much if any."
Transcript
here or in MP3 format, about 14 minutes in, from
here.
From the show:
Bob Hunter: Well it's a bomb, an explosive device, which has contained within it some radioactive material. It's not radioactive material which is causing the explosion, it's simply particles of radioactive materials which will be dispersed by the explosion.
Robyn Williams [show host] : Now what we've just heard from Nightmares, the series on SBS, suggests that it's not dangerous particularly at all.
Bob Hunter: All the tests that I've heard about suggest that you couldn't get enough radiation into a reasonable space to affect anyone. Certainly no one would suffer from acute radiation sickness. Some people might absorb some radiation and subsequently have their life expectancy minutely altered, just as they do every day, because we're all subjected to radiation all the time. That's something that most people don't seem to ever come to grips with.
Robyn Williams: So what is the big fuss about?
Bob Hunter: Oh, I think it's just another part of the technique of keeping us worried. You know as long as we keep frightened then the government can keep passing laws to limit our freedom in the guise of protecting us. It's stretched now from the USA to Britain and even more so in Australia.
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Robert Hunter is the Former President of Scientists Against Nuclear Arms and Research Fellow in the Department of Chemistry, University of Sydney.
If my rusty physics is to be trusted... since a dirty bomb is not a true nuclear device, nothing boosts the radioactivity over the original charge (uranium, plutonium, etc.) It's not much different from an explosive packed with any other kind of augmentation, such as the shards of a fragmentation bomb (terminology?) Sure, no one wants to sleep on a pillow of plutonium, but from the point of the explosion, radioactive material expands in 3 dimensions, decreasing in concentration by the cube of the distance. At 100 feet, it's only 1/1000 the concentration it was at 10 feet. Plus everyone's going to be fleeing, decreasing their exposure that much more.
Can anyone flesh this out from their own knowledge or other sources?