Jose Padilla threat -- from someone that knows

Just how dangerous was/is alleged, 'dirty bomber' Jose Padilla? The mass media can't and/or won't tell you. Ashcroft can't/won't tell you. We were told that this person back into the US carrying cash, and a plot to detonate a radiological weapon. No one outside of a few hundred people at most, know if this has any basis in reality.

We here at pure bs get our facts from people who know. The corporatist mass media do not have the expertise to tell you how dangerous Padilla potentially was. Nor do most of the agents at the CIA, FBI and ATF. They simply lack the training in nuclear science. Ashcroft as well.

As a subscriber to The Bulletin of The Atomic Scientists, I found a realistic assessment of Mr. Padilla's threat.

Without further ado:

Dirty bomber? Dirty justice

By Lewis Z. Koch

According to John Ashcroft's Justice Department, even U.S. citizens are not entitled to their constitutional right to legal representation.....

......Could he have built a bomb?

The components of a radiological dispersion device, at first glance, may seem obvious and easy to obtain. Building a dirty bomb requires a source of radioactivity, explosives, and someone to put the two together.

Although some materials from hospitals, research universities, and other facilities are radioactive enough to be lethal, it would be very difficult to deliver high doses to more than a few people. (On the other hand, an attack with such materials could create panic and might cause a great deal of economic damage.)

The richest source of radioactivity is spent fuel rods. But spent nuclear rods are not exactly lying around like piles of abandoned automobiles. Terrorists looking to get the "dirt" for a dirty bomb from spent nuclear fuel rods would have to get them from a nuclear facility.

Putting aside the controversy surrounding security at U.S. nuclear power plants, a would-be dirty bomber faces a Herculean task. A spent fuel rod weighs about 28 kilograms, with 36 rods weighing more than a metric ton. Heavy shielding and remote controls are required in their handling, because each rod exposes anyone standing nearby (within a meter) to a lethal dose within seconds. To prevent a quick death from radiation, the thieves would need to encase the rods in a 40-plus-ton, lead-lined shipping cask (18 rods will fit in one cask) and use shielding and remote handling equipment to move the rods at every stage of the operation. After securing the rods in a protective cask, the thieves would need to move them to a location where they could be matched with explosives, then move them to the target site. All that shuttling means the gang would need a specialized truck built to handle the rods and cask. These trucks are, as one can imagine, large, cumbersome, slow-moving, and easily identifiable—not exactly stealthy.

Of course, one can chance the move without the cumbersome shipping cask. That would suggest a scenario of this sort: A group of six people approaches an area where spent-fuel rods are assembled. These rods are two and a half years old. From a distance of 300 meters, gamma rays are beginning to be distributed in enough quantity to become lethal. The group spends 20–30 minutes approaching and absorbs a five-gray dose. The closer they get to the rods, the greater the amount of gamma rays absorbed. Even if they were to cease their operations and flee the scene at this point, they would die of radiation poisoning in a few weeks. If they carried on, they would absorb even more radiation as they gathered the spent rods and placed them in lead-lined concrete containers. To be generous, the group would spend at least another 20–30 minutes in close proximity to the rods, absorbing more lethal gamma rays. Now the bombers would have a week to live. Next, after moving the stolen rods to a safe house (let's estimate two hours' travel time) the rods would have to be uncrated (one hour) and united with the to-be-constructed explosive device. One can be charitable here, but using Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh's record as an example of bomb-construction time (without radioactive materials), it would take more than three hours. [4] Then there would be the time used in wedding the radioactive materials to the explosives. Another hour, perhaps. And finally the time necessary to transport the dirty bomb from point B to its destination, point C. (In McVeigh's case that took three hours.)

Our gang of thieves would have, at the very least, spent almost 10 hours within seven feet of unshielded spent nuclear rods, absorbing, conservatively, 5,000 grays, enough radiation to make them burnt toast.......

.......What would it deliver?

For the sake of argument, let's say Padilla's gang was able to gather the materials and construct the device without killing themselves. How powerful—how destructive—would such a bomb be? The answer depends on who is asked. There is wide disagreement when it comes to describing a dirty bomb's destructive capabilities.

For instance, Bruce G. Blair, president of the Center for Defense Information, told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on October 21, 2001: "Detonation of a dynamite-laden casket of spent fuel from a power plant would not kill quite as many people as died on September 11. . . . But if it happened in Manhattan, you could expect 2,000 deaths and thousands more suffering from radiation poisoning."

No, not exactly.

What Blair failed to calculate is that the intensity of the dynamite explosive would scatter the radioactivity over a wide area, lessening by a significant degree its potential lethality. Furthermore, in an urban environment like New York City, many people in the blast area would be protected from radiation by the shielding of the buildings and the offices in which they live and work. They would receive a much lower dose of radioactivity than those walking down the street near the explosion. And people on the streets outside the immediate blast zone would be exposed to a very small dose of dissipating radiation, made even more diffuse by the explosion itself.

Richard Garwin, an expert on nuclear weapons and nuclear power, has been a member of the scientific advisory group to the Joint Chiefs' Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff and was a member of the Rumsfeld commission that assessed the ballistic missile threat to the United States. In his essay "The Many Threats of Terror," Garwin describes the estimated consequences of a hypothetical explosion of one kilogram of plutonium in Munich, Germany: "The average population density of Munich is about 4,300 people per square kilometer. The study estimated that 12 cancers would occur per milligram of inhaled plutonium. Under the pessimistic assumption that very still air would cause the radioactive cloud to hover over the city for 12 hours, about 120 deaths from cancer would eventually be anticipated. (This would be in addition to the 400,000 people in the city who would likely die of cancer from natural causes.)"

Garwin cites a 1983 report by Sandia National Laboratories' California branch (located at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) on the results of a hypothetical explosive attack on a shipping cask containing spent nuclear fuel. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission indicated that for the most densely populated area studied (as many as 200,000 persons per square mile), at evening rush hour on a business day there would be no immediate fatalities and fewer than three fatalities from latent cancer. The scenario projected a six-inch diameter hole releasing three grams of radioactive fuel as aerosol—fine particles wafted in the air. As with the hypothetical example for Munich, more harmful consequences could be achieved by using conventional explosives in a sports stadium.......

Here we have a mulitude of errors of fact. All accepted because they were spoken by someone of alleged authority. This logical fallacy is known as: Argumentum Ad Verecundiam. Because we or others belive that a person is an authority on X, if said person declares X(situation) to be true, then it must be so.

Also, Argumentum Ad Populum, or appealing to the gallery(people), and Argumentum Ad Numerum..I like to call this the argument from 'conventional wisdom.' Just because many people believe something to true, does not make it so..In fact, it is likely to be demonstrably false, or lacking in evidence to warrant this belief.

The astute observer will note that I too, am guilty of guilty of Argumentum Ad Vercundiam, and while I believe that the above article details the real difficulties of obtaining material(s) and effectively delivering those assembled materials to a target, I am still open to other interpretations.

Do yourself a favor, and flip through a copy of The Bulletin. It's not a nuclear science manual, but a (super)critical(ha ha) -- look at issues that face us today.

Of additional interest:

Tune in on Monday, December 29, at 8:00 pm ET, 7:00 pm CT
The story of the Bulletins famous Doomsday Clock is told in a new, one-hour special program on the History Channel. The program examines the events behind the setting of the hands of the clock--from its first appearance on the magazineÂ’s cover in 1947 to the most recent resetting in February 2002.