- Radioactive material, loosely guarded, makes a cheap
weapon...
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- The cesium was missing. From a hospital in Greensboro,
N.C., someone had pilfered 19 vials of radioactive cesium-137. It was March
1998, and in just weeks the city would host the regional NCAA basketball
finals. Might a terrorist use the stolen material to disrupt the games?
As FBI agents moved in, the U.S. Department of Energy quietly dispatched
its antinuke teams, complete with radiation-detecting vans and helicopter.
For days they scoured the city, but the vials were never found.
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- Officials had good reason to worry-then and now. Back
in 1987, in Goiania, Brazil, a theft of cesium-137 from an abandoned clinic
spread the radioactive metal across an entire neighborhood, killing four,
contaminating 249 others, and forcing the destruction of 85 homes. The
amount of cesium was minute-only 20 grams-but potent. More than 112,000
Goiania residents had to be tested; moon-suited workers hauled away 125,000
drums of contaminated refuse. And that disaster was unintended-scrap-yard
workers had come upon the discarded stuff and passed some of it on to friends
and family.
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- It may have been an accident, but the Goiania disaster
suggests what can happen if such substances fall into the wrong hands.
Osama bin Laden has long harbored nuclear ambitions, intelligence sources
say. His al Qaeda operatives have tried to buy weapons-grade uranium, and
they have sought expertise from Russian and Pakistani nuclear scientists.
Notebooks found in al Qaeda houses in Kabul, Afghanistan, contain data
on building an atomic bomb. While the terror chieftain boasted last month
that he possesses a nuclear weapon, intelligence analysts doubt that al
Qaeda has actually fashioned a fission device. (That success managed to
elude the oil-rich Iraqis, who tried to build one for a good decade.) And
even if bin Laden obtained a Soviet nuke, the weapons require complex arming
codes that are highly secret and are not kept with the bomb. Figuring them
out, says a knowledgeable U.S. official, "would be tough for our own
people to do."
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- Explosive mix. Far easier, experts say, would be for
bin Laden's wily operatives to fashion a crude radiological weapon. "He
is going to build what we call a radiological dispersal device or 'dirty
bomb' and mix it with explosives," predicts Edward Badolato, former
director of security at the Department of Energy. Such a weapon would not
produce a nuclear reaction; rather, radioactive particles, like those stolen
in Goiania or Greensboro, would be scattered by something like TNT. With
these threats in mind, the Department of Energy's elite antinuclear strike
force-the Nuclear Emergency Support Team, or NEST-has "forward deployed"
its members to key cities, U.S. News has learned. In addition, DOE scientists
are modeling the impact of a range of terrorist nuclear attacks on big
U.S. cities: everything from a 10-ton nuclear blast to a dirty bomb.
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- Dirty devices are not unheard of overseas. In 1998, officials
in Chechnya defused a booby-trapped explosive attached to a container of
radioactive material, according to Russian press reports. Three years earlier,
Chechen separatists buried a 30-pound box of radioactive cesium near the
entrance to a busy Moscow park and later threatened to blow up 167 pounds
of the stuff. Nor would a dirty bomb be new to Islamic militants. Some
terrorism experts, including former FBI deputy director Oliver "Buck"
Revell, believe that al Qaeda associate Ramzi Yousef searched for radioactive
waste to add to the explosive mix for the 1993 World Trade Center bomb.
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- Sources for radioactive material are plentiful. Two weeks
ago in Siberia, for example, Russian police arrested two men attempting
to sell radioactive cobalt stolen from an industrial plant. In the United
States there are more than 2 million devices that use radioactive materials.
Large amounts of radioisotopes are used in medicine to fight cancer and
for diagnosing various diseases. They are used by industry for moisture
sensing, to examine pipe welds, and to irradiate food (and now anthrax-tainted
mail). They are in smoke alarms, pacemakers, even exit signs.
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- No terrorist will cause much damage with smoke alarms
and exit signs. But more dangerous radioactive materials are abundant and,
say critics, government regulators have failed to ensure they are not misused.
Since 1986, the NRC has recorded over 1,700 instances in which radioactive
material has been lost or stolen. "Security of radioactive materials
has traditionally been relatively light," says Abel Gonzalez, a top
official at the United Nations' International Atomic Energy Agency. "There
are few security precautions on radiotherapy equipment, and a large source
could be removed quite easily."
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- In the United States today, there are thousands of lost,
stolen, or discarded radioactive sources-dubbed "orphans" by
regulators. No comprehensive registry exists of radioactive devices, but
the NRC estimates that in America one new radioactive source is orphaned
every day. About 50 of them are found by the public each year, along roadsides,
in dumps, and at recycling centers, and many more may be on the way. Fully
a quarter of America's 2 million radioactive devices are no longer needed
or wanted by their owners, says former NRC health physicist Joel Lubenau.
The situation is even worse overseas; former Soviet republics like Georgia
and the region of Chechnya are littered with radioactive garbage, say officials.
"We need to get these orphaned sources off the street," says
Lubenau.
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- The NRC is playing catch-up. Having found in the mid-1980s
that 15 percent of users could not account for their radioactive devices,
the NRC this year ordered that its licensees keep better records. The Environmental
Protection Agency has also begun a pilot project to collect orphaned materials,
but critics call it too little too late. "The genie really is out
of the bottle," says Pennsylvania antinuclear activist Scott Portzline,
who for years has urged federal officials to tighten oversight on the orphans.
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- Good news. While it may be easy to obtain radioactive
materials and to fashion a device with them, therein lies some good news.
Although recent press reports suggest the impact of a dirty bomb would
be disastrous, with thousands killed and downtowns rendered uninhabitable,
scientists say such scenarios are wildly exaggerated. "It is most
likely that only a small area of a few city blocks would be involved,"
concludes a just released report by the National Council on Radiation Protection
and Measurements. Casualties would be low, limited largely to those hurt
by the blast itself and those nearby who ingest radioactive particles.
Most dirty bombs would lack the kind of long-lived elements like plutonium
that a nuclear blast releases. And the isotopes-in most cases heavy metals-would
fall to the ground, where they could be cleaned up with common detergents.
The cleanup would be monitored with Geiger counters. "It would not
harm a lot of people from a human health perspective," says David
Lochbaum, a nuclear engineer at the Union of Concerned Scientists. "But
it would cause a lot of terror."
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- Terror, indeed, appears to be a dirty bomb's greatest
attraction. The image of moon-suited crews with Geiger counters in a big
city downtown is bound to cause panic. The economic costs would also be
considerable. In the end, though, the sheer lethality of radioactive devices
may be what stops terrorists from using them. To create an effective dirty
bomb, one must extract the radioactive material from its shielding, exposing
the terrorists to far worse radiation than their victims would receive.
"That's why we wear dosimeters and use glove boxes and robots,"
says a NEST veteran. "The guy's going to irradiate himself, and we'll
find him dead four days later."
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- http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/011203/usnews/3nukes.htm
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