[ RadSafe ] 'Dirty War': HBO Film Shows How London Went Down in Smoke

Tue Feb 8 16:28:43 CET 2005

[Anyone see this move? Comments?]

CQ HOMELAND SECURITY - WEAPONS
Jan. 21, 2005 - 9:47 p.m.

'Dirty War': HBO Film Shows How London Went Down in Smoke
By Sean Madigan, CQ Staff

A white van idles curbside at London's Liverpool Street Station. Up front sit two radical Islamic terrorists. In the back, a package of explosives the size of a central air-conditioning unit is laced with a radioactive powder, cesium-137.

In a searing flash of light the van blows up, sending clouds of black radioactive flakes across the heart of London's financial district. More than 300 people are killed. Invisible, deadly gamma rays bombard thousands of panic-stricken pedestrians. Rescue workers are overwhelmed. And in the end, three and a half square miles of some of central London's most valuable real estate is rendered uninhabitable for perhaps 30 years, an economic blow of incalculable consequence.

Fiction? Experts say the docudrama "Dirty War," airing on HBO Monday night and several times thereafter, is all too real.

"It really nailed it," said Stephen E. Flynn, a former Coast Guard commander who is now a security expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. "I couldn't have wanted a better training film."

Others agree.

"A 'dirty bomb' will happen as soon as terrorists feel like doing it," said Matthew Bunn, a senior research associate for the Project on Managing the Atom at Harvard University's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. "This kind of thing is quite plausible. It depends a lot on the details."

In the movie, the terrorists smuggle the radioactive material into England from Bulgaria, encased in lead canisters and sunk in large cans of cooking oil. One expert said they could just as easily have bought the cesium in England.

Using a bomb as a dispersion device is one of the cruder, more rudimentary options for spreading the dangerous materials, according to the experts, who say there are better, more efficient methods. They declined to offer a tutorial.

Gamma rays, meanwhile, come from cesium and strontium. Plutonium is even harder to detect, even if it passes through a radiation detector at a border or port, where only a tiny fraction of cargo is inspected. If any of the elements were shielded behind lead in a cargo container filled with steel, they would be virtually impossible to detect.

Even though many experts say the kind of device depicted in "Dirty War" is more of a "weapon of mass disruption" than mass destruction, it can pack a wallop far beyond its immediate impact.
Billions Up in Smoke 
"The economic impact on a major metropolitan area from a successful [dirty bomb] attack is likely to equal and perhaps exceed that" of the September 2001 al Qaeda attacks in New York, Peter D. Zimmerman and Cheryl Loeb concluded in a January 2004 report for the Center for Technology and National Security Policy at the National Defense University.

"The estimated cost to return the lower Manhattan area to the condition prior to the September terrorist attacks was in excess of $30 billion."

In the movie, cesium-137 contaminates prime London real estate, throwing the U.K. economy into a tailspin. "Dirty War" does not go beyond vague suggestions of London's grim future, but the reality is that nuclear decontamination efforts for dense, urban areas are untested. A material like cesium attaches to building materials such as masonry and marble and is difficult to clean. Experts say perhaps the most feasible cleanup method would be to bulldoze the area and scour the soil.

In the short term, "economic activity in the area stops. Nobody's going to come to work, nobody's going to be allowed to come to work," Zimmerman said in an interview.

According to an April 2004 Congressional Research Service report, the Federation of American Scientists calculated that a small amount of cesium-137 detonated at the National Gallery of Art on the Washington Mall would cover 40 blocks of the downtown area, including the White House, the U.S. Capitol, the Supreme Court building and the Library of Congress, depending on the weather and drift pattern. Almost certainly, the area would have to be "abandoned for decades," the study said.

"You are talking about a very expensive and annoying mess," Bunn said. "You are not talking about incinerating the heart of a city, a modern-day Hiroshima."

Daniel Percival directed the $5 million film, which he co-wrote with Lizzie Mickery. He started the project in January 2003, with a team of researchers examining the various terrorist threats and how the British government was prepared to handle them.

"The dirty bomb just kept coming back in our research," Percival said in a telephone interview from London.

Details on the government's preparedness, meanwhile, were hard to come by because the British government had wrapped its response plans in secrecy - just like in the film. Percival said much of his information was gathered either from American officials or "under the table" from British officials.

Semper Non Paratus

The movie challenges the notion that the British government is prepared for a radiation hit. It portrays first responders lacking the necessary equipment, muddled or confusing communication during the crisis, and politicians telling the public they are prepared while in private worrying about readiness themselves.

U.K. officials were cool to "Dirty War" when it debuted there in September, Percival said.

"They weren't very happy. They've been definitely quiet on the issue of 'Dirty War,'" he said. He said sources inside the government warned him that the movie would be attacked if the facts were not airtight.

But "they didn't come after us," Percival said. "We got it right. No one attacked us on the basis of our facts."

Over here, the Council on Foreign Relations has put on two advance
screenings of "Dirty War" - one in New York and another at the French Embassy in Washington, on Jan. 18 - for experts in the field. Flynn said he is working on putting together a screening for members of Congress and plans to send copies to big-city mayors and governors.

Flynn said the movie will be a bit easier for American officials to swallow because it is set in London instead of an American locale they know.

"It's almost M.A.S.H.-like," he said. "You couldn't talk about Vietnam in Vietnam, but you could talk about Vietnam in Korea."

"Dirty War" will be shown at 9 p.m. Monday night and will be rebroadcast at 9 p.m. Jan. 27, 12:20 a.m. Jan. 30, and 11:30 p.m. Feb. 2.

It also runs on HBO2 at 8 p.m. on Jan 25 and 11 a.m. on Jan. 31.