The point that the Iraq war has consumed resources better spent on real problems is absolutely correct; however, it is important to keep in mind that the Bush Administration used radiophobia as one of their excuses to start the Iraq war–and that those scare tactics were completely unsubstantiated.
A terrorist is not going to manufacture a nuclear weapon, period. You can’t make these things with materials from the hardware store, and the potential proliferators concerned are having problems with making nail bombs go off. Weapons-grade uranium is worth securing from essentially everyone, but a program to account for it should not have to compete for resources with a similar one for separated plutonium or even weapons-grade plutonium, as the chance of a terrorist making a weapon with plutonium is nil. Spent fuel from reactors, incidentally, is not worth stealing; it would probably kill the thieves if they could even get to it, which in practice would require an entire invading army–and the only way they could use it would be in a radiological dispersion device (dirty bomb), which would cause widespread panic but no real damage: highly-radioactive materials decay quickly and long-lived materials aren’t very radioactive. The only reason anyone would consider it is the terror it would cause as a result of decades of anti-nuclear scaremongering.
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Filed under Practical Problems, Proliferation, Security and Terrorism
Posted on March 31, 2007 by Stewart Peterson |
I’ve always said a terrorist has too many high-value soft targets that can be hit with low tech means to choose from to bother with ‘dirty bombs’ or nuclear powerplants.
Such an attack might be an antinuclear wet-dream, but terrorists recognize that such actions would not yield results commiserate with the effort and cost of carrying it off. Economic targets have no real interest to them; they are looking for a body-count.
They’re looking for a body count–and they’re looking for headlines. Anything nuclear gets headlines, and the body count speculations appear from anti-nuclear groups. The anti-nuclear groups really do all their work for them.
And if the attack results in the shutdown of nuclear power plants in favor of oil-fired facilities, all the better for them.
WE have to keep in mind that the nuclear debate, while important to us and our opponents, doesn’t keep the rest of the world up at night. I suspect that your average terrorist rarely thinks about it at all. Why go to the trouble when you can accomplish so much more with a series of car-bombs with less effort and less expense.
Of course people don’t ordinarily think about dirty bombs. But an attack with one would put that issue prominently into the public consciousness, set off a whole new wave of radiophobia, and start many new urban myths. From a terrorist’s perspective, a car bomb in the United States would be big news, but it wouldn’t be in Iraq or Israel. When they stop getting headlines with their current methods, they might go to more exotic ones–look at the recent use of chemical weapons in Iraq, for example.