Dirty bomb

The term dirty bomb is most often used to refer to a Radiological Dispersal Device (RDD), a radiological weapon which combines radioactive material with conventional explosives. Though an RDD is designed to disperse radioactive material over a large area, the conventional explosive would likely have more immediate lethal effect than the radioactive material. At levels created from most probable sources, not enough radiation would be present to cause severe illness or death. A test explosion and subsequent calculations done by the United States Department of Energy found that assuming nothing is done to clean up the affected area and everyone stays in the affected area for 1 year, the radiation exposure would be "fairly high". However, recent analysis of the Chernobyl fallout seems to show that many people are hardly affected over 5 years and more.

Because a terrorist dirty bomb is unlikely to cause many deaths as a result of the conventional explosives, many do not consider this to be a weapon of mass destruction. Its purpose would presumably be to create psychological, not physical, harm through ignorance, mass panic, and terror. Additionally, decontamination of the affected area might require considerable time and expense, rendering affected areas partly unusable and causing some economic damage.

During the 1960s it is thought that the UK Ministry of Defence evaluated RDDs, deciding that a far better effect was achievable by simply using more high explosive in place of the radioactives. In addition, any form of weapon designed to provoke any kind of biological damage short of killing a person outright is banned under the Geneva Protocols, making the development, deployment and use by any state illegal.

Other uses of the term

The term has also been used historically to refer to certain types of nuclear weapons. Due to the inefficiency of early nuclear weapons (such as "Fat Man" and "Little Boy"), 2% or less of the nuclear material would be consumed during the explosion. Thus, they tended to disperse large amounts of unused fissile material (and the products of fission, which are on average even more dangerous) in the form of nuclear fallout. During the 1950s, there was considerable debate over whether "clean" bombs could be produced and these were often contrasted with "dirty" bombs. "Clean" bombs were often a stated goal and scientists and administrators said that high-efficiency nuclear weapon design could create explosions which generated almost all of their energy in the form of nuclear fusion, which does not create harmful fission products.

Incidents

In 1996, rebels from Chechnya planted, but did not detonate, an RDD in Moscow's Izmailovo Park. The bomb consisted of dynamite and caesium-137 removed from cancer treatment equipment. Reporters were tipped off about its location and it was defused. [1] [2]

But the Castle Bravo accident of 1954, in which a thermonuclear weapon produced a large amount of fallout which was dispersed among many human populations, suggested that this was not what was actually being used in modern thermonuclear weapons, which derive around half of their yield from a final fission stage. While some proposed producing "clean" weapons, other theorists noted that one could make a nuclear weapon intentionally "dirty" by "salting" it with a material (see: Salted bomb and its subtype, cobalt bomb) which would generate large amounts of long-lasting fallout when irradiated by the weapon core. In the post-Cold War age, this usage of the term has largely fallen out of use.

Dirty bombs in fiction

• Dirty War, a 2004 BBC TV movie, features the detonation of a dirty bomb next to Liverpool Street tube station in Central London
• Babylon Rising: The Europa Conspiracy includes a fictional plot to detonate a dirty bomb over the George Washington Bridge
• In the TV show NUMB3RS there is an episode where a group of people steal a nuclear waste truck and threaten to turn it into a dirty bomb

References

• Adam Curtis's The Power of Nightmares, Part III -- Video/Transcript at Information Clearing House

External links

• U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Factsheet on Dirty Bombs
• Council on Foreign Relations, Terrorism Q&A: Dirty Bombs
• U.S. Dep't of Labor Occupational Safety & Health Administration, Radiological Dispersal Devices / Dirty Bombs
• American Institute of Physics, "Dirty Bombs" Much More Likely to Create Fear than Cause Cancer
• Federation of American Scientists, Dirty bomb threat analysis
• Health Physics Society, Factsheet
• Health Physics Society, January 2004 study, Dirty Bombs Could Cause Devastating Economic Damage
• CNN, Explosion, not radiation, "dirty bomb's" worst fallout
• PBS, NOVA, Dirty Bomb [3]This Web site was produced for PBS Online by WGBH.Web site © 1996-2003 WGBH Educational Foundation
• Lost and stolen nuclear materials in the US Three Mile Island Alert decribes the problem

See also

• Area denial weapons
• Nuclear war
• Nuclear weapon
• Radiation hormesis
• Radiation poisoning
• Nuclear terrorism
• Nuclear weapon design