June 22, 2002	atimes.com

Front Fighting dirty: Radioactive alert By David Isenberg The June 11 revelation of the arrest of US citizen Jose Padilla, also known as Abdullah al Muhajir, for allegedly planning to use a dirty bomb against a US city has revived concerns over use by terrorists of a radiological device (a weapon that dispenses radioactivity but has no fission or fusion reaction), that is, a "dirty nuke". Concern over the possible use of such devices is not new. After the September 11 attacks, the federal Nuclear Emergency Search Team (NEST), a secret unit within the US Department of Energy, was put on a state of high alert. It is operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week in Washington and New York City, monitoring for nuclear-related weapons. Starting in January, the administration quietly ordered the NEST to launch periodic searches for dirty bombs in Washington and other large US cities. Alarmed by reports of al-Qaeda's progress toward obtaining a nuclear device, the George W Bush administration has deployed hundreds of sophisticated sensors to US borders, overseas facilities and key points around the capital since last November. It has placed the Delta Force, the nation's elite commando unit, on a new standby alert to seize control of nuclear materials that the sensors may detect. Even before Padilla's arrest it had been reported that according to Abu Zubadayah, the high-ranking aide to Osama bin Laden captured in March, al-Qaeda has been actively working to detonate such a weapon in a US city. In a past report to Congress, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) noted, "The threat of terrorists using chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear [CBRN] materials appears to be rising - particularly since the 11 September attacks. Several of the 30 designated foreign terrorist organizations and other non-state actors worldwide have expressed interest in CBRN." This was confirmed in the latest annual State Department "Patterns of Global Terrorism" report, which said, "The 11 September confirmed the resolution and capability of terrorists to plan, organize and execute attacks to produce mass casualties, and terrorists increasingly may look to use chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear (CBRN) materials - many of which can cause significant casualties - to rival the events of September 11." The good news is that there is reason to believe that concern over dirty bombs is exaggerated. To produce significant radioactivity over an area of, say, one square mile (about 2.5 square kilometers), the initial concentration within a small bomb would have to be roughly 10 million times as great and would quickly kill the terrorists trying to assemble the material. The radioactivity also creates large amounts of heat energy sufficient to melt most containers. What's more, any such bomb would be easy to detect from a long distance if it emitted gamma rays. The bad news is that although use of a radiological device probably would kill few people, it would spread panic and produce severe economic damage, if only because of the difficulty of cleanup, because the costs of getting the radiation down to legal environmental standards would be very high and the operation could require evacuation of a large section of a major metropolitan area. This is because techniques for dealing with radioactive contamination rely largely on demolition and removal. According to one analysis, if a dirty bomb containing a cobalt food irradiation bar exploded at the southern tip of Manhattan on a day with a light wind blowing toward the northeast, Manhattan as far north as Central Park would be contaminated at levels similar to those in the permanently closed zone around the Chernobyl power plant in Ukraine. More bad news is that unlike nuclear weapons, where acquiring usable nuclear fuel is a significant barrier, those striving to make some kind of radiological weapon will face far less difficulty. For example, some of the hundreds of small radioactive power generators scattered across the Soviet Union decades ago and largely forgotten are missing. The radiothermal generators (RTGs), used by the Soviets to power navigational beacons and communications equipment in remote areas, each contains up to 40,000 curies of highly radioactive strontium or cesium. Even a tiny fraction of a single curie of strontium has a high probability of causing a fatal cancer. Although cesium and strontium cannot be used to make nuclear weapons, the two heavy metals could contaminate large areas if combined with conventional explosives in a radiological weapon or dirty bomb. Western countries are planning a massive search in Georgia for potential dirty bomb materials - highly radioactive and mobile nuclear batteries containing strontium-90, which, it is feared, could be combined with conventional explosives to lethal effect by terrorists. In March, a radiation check of a bus crossing into Russia from Kazakhstan turned up a Russian passenger who had packed at least 10 kilograms of thorium-232 powder in his luggage. Its radiation was "hundreds of times" normal background levels, authorities said. Its origin and destination were not reported. In July 2000, two brothers from Kazakhstan were arrested after purportedly smuggling radium-226 into Russia to sell to Chechens. Chechen separatists in the mid-1990s had threatened to detonate dirty bombs in Moscow, but never did. In Tajikistan, six residents were convicted in April 2000 in the theft of about 1.4kg of uranium mixed with highly radioactive cesium-137 from a uranium-processing plant. It was not reported how enriched - suitable for nuclear weapons - the uranium was. In 1995, a Detroit teenager named David Hahn, trying to become a scout, built a primate breeder reactor and managed to enrich pitchblende, an ore containing uranium, to the point where he raised radiation levels to 9,000 times their natural levels. In the United States, it is estimated that of roughly 2 million small-but-valuable radioactive contraptions used annually, in everything from construction to health care to scientific research, hundreds of them are lost, stolen or even abandoned. Most are never retrieved, and 30,000 are unaccounted for. Hospitals use small quantities of radioactive material, such as cesium-137, in nuclear medicine. Universities use similar materials to conduct scientific research. Food irradiation plants use radiation from cobalt-60 to kill harmful bacteria on food. Natural radioactive uranium isotopes are mined for use in nuclear energy. Terrorists could conceivably acquire uranium from various mines in Africa. Terrorists could also collect spent radioactive fuel from Russian reactors, which have been abandoned in old nuclear submarines, among other places. They could also put something together using various low-level radioactive materials available to anybody, such as the radioactive material in smoke alarms. Despite legislation requiring that it do so, the US Department of Energy (DOE) has not uniformly secured the nation's nuclear waste, which could be used by terrorists to build radiological weapons. According to the department, it already is running 12 years behind schedule. According to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), over the past five years there have been several security lapses involving radioactive materials at US universities, private companies and government agencies. The NRC recorded more than 54 cases of "elevated enforcement actions" related to industrial nuclear materials. In terms of prevention and detection, one recent initiative is that recently the Russian and US governments agreed to set up a joint working group to prevent terrorists from acquiring nuclear substances and prevent them from creating dirty bombs. And Canadian customs agents at border crossings and ports will receive radiation-detection devices by the middle of next month. Canadian officers are working with US agents to try to prevent dirty bombs or nuclear weapons from being smuggled into the United States. (©2002 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact ads@atimes.com for information on our sales and syndication policies.)

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