AW: ABC Tests U.S. Border Security

["Franz Schoenhofer" <franz.schoenhofer@CHELLO.AT>]

-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----

Von: owner-radsafe@list.vanderbilt.edu

[mailto:owner-radsafe@list.vanderbilt.edu]Im Auftrag von maury

Gesendet: Dienstag, 10. September 2002 19:15

An: Kim D. Merritt

Cc: radsafe@list.vanderbilt.edu; Todd Brautigam

Betreff: Re: ABC Tests U.S. Border Security





Great jumpin' butterballs!!! Who'd ever have imagined strapping nails or

ball bearings onto a bomb?



-------------------------------------------



Sorry, I cannot distinguish, whether your comment on nails in a bomb is

cynical or not. The fact is, that several such bombs spreading nails, were

exploded in Paris about ten years ago, killing several persons and wounding

many more. They were deposited in garbage bins in places where a lot of

people went by during rush hours. This has resulted in closing the Paris

garbage bins by welding locks on them. When I during a stop-over in Paris

wanted to leave my luggage at the Charles deGaulle airport for a day there

was no place to leave it, because they had been closed and all the automatic

lockers were closed because bombs had been exploded there also. Maybe I

should mention that North African terrorists were suspected and convinced,

but they were not necessarily islamic fundamentalists, if I remember

correctly.



Let me draw the conclusion in comparison to a so called "radiologically

dirty bomb": Nails you can buy by the tens of thousands in any "Do it

yourself" market, without being suspected to be a terrorist. Radioactive

solutions like I-131 or Tc-99m are relatively difficult to obtain and it

takes much more sophisticated logistics compared with nails. The

difficulties to obtain fission products is by orders of magnitude larger and

to obtain spent fuel is more difficult by even several more orders of

magnitude, not to talk about the difficulty to spread uranium-dioxide or

uranium-carbide fuel so that it could be inhaled and harm somebody. And

where to obtain plutonium?



>From the point of efficiency something like the Paris nail bombs are by fare

more effective than any radiological bomb would be. There are immediate

deaths, not really by the explosive, but by the injuries due to the nails.

Exploding a radiological bomb would probably kill some people in the

immediate vicinity by the explosion, but the radionuclides will have not

only no immediate, but hardly any long term effects.



Why are people in the USA "not" afraid of a nail bomb, which is so much more

easy to make and to deliver - but they are afraid of the risk of several

magnitudes lower of a "radiological bomb"?



Nobody in Europe discusses the effects of "dirty bombs", not even the lowest

level boulevard newspapers.



Food for thoughts.



Franz





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