Oh ****, Al Qaeda making dirty bomb

[simonpro]

Yes but terrorists never blockaded the fuel pumps. Most people are sheep and will panic and the slighest thing out of the norm.

The intelligence of a crowd is the IQ of it's stupidest member divided by two.
Considering that the UK has people who read the Daily Star this makes the intelligence of a big group of people very low indeed..
Also, I wonder if we can get the media classified as a terrorist group. They've cumulatively caused more panic, problems and terror over the last 20 years than any terrorist group has.

 

[movieman]

We're talking about an enormous amount of radioactive material here.

To be fair, enough to give a worker 1 rad per day would prevent the use of that area of the city for a long time until it could be cleaned up. Even 0.01 rad per day would be beyond normal safety limits (I believe it's around 3 rads a year for non-nuclear workers), though not fatal.

But I agree, if you built a bomb large enough to spread radioactive material to expose a human to 1 rad per day over a square mile of a city, you'd get a fatal dose in a few minutes if you stood next to the bomb. You couldn't even shield it because the shielding material would damp down the explosion so the radioactive material wouldn't spread; though I guess you could carry it in a shielded box and take it out just before blowing it up.

Overall, the whole idea of a 'dirty bomb' seems like another MI5 fantasy to me; I'd rather that bin Laden was wasting his time trying to make it work than doing something effective instead.