Once every few weeks, people who want to portray depleted uranium as the most dangerous substance on the face of the Earth trot out a document from the Manhattan Project stating that uranium could be aerosolized and used as a radiological weapon.
This happened recently, and doesn’t have anything to do with what we know about uranium’s radiotoxicity today. It doesn’t prove any conspiracy theories and doesn’t make uranium magically increase its radioactivity when aerosolized.
For the record.
Filed under Applications, Conspiracy, Non Sequitur
Posted on June 3, 2007 by Stewart Peterson |
yeah, I’ve seen this before. I thought that this document was related to the idea of using radioactive fission byproducts as a weapon - not the original raw uranium. Either way, it was rejected as not being very effective, but there was an idea at one time that perhaps even without a nuclear bomb the byproducts of a reactor could be radioactive enough to be weaponized.
Fission products, of course, would be much more effective, and the document’s specific mention of beta rays should be a clue, but uranium is radioactive and can be aerosolized, so there are parts of the document that can be taken out of context.
Neither would work very well, as you know, and uranium wouldn’t even be noticed. If you’re looking for an immediate effect, take two subcritical halves of a plutonium sphere and surround them with neutron reflectors, except for a small hole, aimed at the enemy, and place the two spheres together.
Or you could build 10,000 20mm autocannons at the same price. It’s a waste of money and would obviously cause unnecessary suffering.