WI: 9/11 Is Radioactive

What if the 9/11 attacks using four hijacked airliners for suicide missions on landmarks in New York City and Washington DC, Al Qaeda gets ahold of nuclear fiscal material and releases it in the form of a dirty bomb using conventional explosives instead. How does the Bush Administration respond to this type of attack in 2001?

redlightning said:

What if the 9/11 attacks using four hijacked airliners for suicide missions on landmarks in New York City and Washington DC, Al Qaeda gets ahold of nuclear fiscal material and releases it in the form of a dirty bomb using conventional explosives instead. How does the Bush Administration respond to this type of attack in 2001?

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Kabul gets some instant sunrise.

Is this supposed to be in addition to or instead of the airliners? And how much material are we talking about, and how nasty? I mean, there's a pretty wide range here.

In any event, the outcome will depend a lot on how the government responds. Most RDD's will not generate enough radiation to produce acute radiation sickness unless you spend a lot of time in the center of the dispersal zone.

QuoProQuid said:

The first question is going to be, "Where did al-Qaeda get enough nuclear material to build a working nuclear bomb?"

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If I'm understanding the OP correctly, he's thinking in terms of an RDD, a Radiological Dispersion Device, not an actual nuke. (Although, let me note, you don't need either fissile or "fiscal" material for an RDD; any radioactive will do.)

Assuming its dirty bomb rather than a working device, the AEC & others are going to be very busy analyzing the nuclides in the mix. You can often identify the exact reactor that produced a given mix, even ones that are the same have minor variations. Very shortly the source of the materiel is known. Very bad things happen shortly thereafter.

sloreck said:

Assuming its dirty bomb rather than a working device, the AEC & others are going to be very busy analyzing the nuclides in the mix. You can often identify the exact reactor that produced a given mix, even ones that are the same have minor variations. Very shortly the source of the materiel is known. Very bad things happen shortly thereafter.

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That is assuming it is reactor material. Not all potential dirty bomb material comes from a nuclear reactor.

ObssesedNuker said:

That is assuming it is reactor material. Not all potential dirty bomb material comes from a nuclear reactor.

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Yeah, medical isotopes seems like a more likely choice. Easier to get hold of, and in many cases higher radioactivity per mass.

(Okay, technically most medical isotopes "come from a reactor", but still.)

alexcoppo said:

The problem of a dirty bomb (which shows that it is a DHS wet dream/convinient boogieman, not a real menace) is to assemble enough radioactive material and carry it to the target while remaining undetected.

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Also without poisoning yourself in the process. That's what makes it impractical as a way of causing radiation casualties: any source hot enough to do that is hot enough to fry you while you're putting it together.

redlightning said:

Al Qaeda gets ahold of nuclear fiscal material and releases it in the form of a dirty bomb using conventional explosives instead

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Given New York is apparently being bombed with budgets and financial reports from the nuclear industry I think the main response is confusion.

Asnys said:

Also without poisoning yourself in the process. That's what makes it impractical as a way of causing radiation casualties: any source hot enough to do that is hot enough to fry you while you're putting it together.

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Remember though, these are people who are willing to commit suicide, so that's not much of an issue.

It is if your dead before you get to the airport, of if you are quarantined at the airport because they consider you too sick to fly

Yeah, if you're going to go down that route then you'd use Sarin or Anthrax or something in the Subway.

Alex Richards said:

Yeah, if you're going to go down that route then you'd use Sarin or Anthrax or something in the Subway.

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Here's a scenario: On any given weekend in any given football stadium, a janitor pushes his broom and barrel along of the concourses some hours before the game. He quietly exchanges one or more of the fire extinguishers along the hall with units that are filled with Sarin and equipped with a detonator and a timer set to go off at around half-time, when thousands of fans are looking for snacks or heading to a restroom. Assuming all operates correctly, several thousand people are caught in nerve-gas filled corridors, and the "janitor" is on a plane going back home.

(I personally heard this one from a man intimately involved in counter-terrorism)

If you think that OTL response was harsh, you haven't seen anything yet. America is going to want BLOOD.

CDurham said:

It is if your dead before you get to the airport, of if you are quarantined at the airport because they consider you too sick to fly

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So one guy builds the bomb, another transports it. Mind you, for a dirty bomb I think a bomb would be more viable than flying into a building, particularly if you could set it off in say Grand Central station.

MattII said:

So one guy builds the bomb, another transports it.

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Even that may not be enough...

If you want your RDD to cause radiation casualties, it needs to be really hot, even after it's dispersed. You typically need to absorb 1,000 mSv before even the vulnerable start showing acute symptoms; 2,000 mSv is what you need before a majority will show symptoms. How long is it going to take to evacuate the site after the bomb goes off? Ten minutes? Let's be generous and call it an hour. So your material needs to have a 2,000 mSv/hr dose rate, even after it's widely dispersed by the explosion. Its dose rate is going to be at least an order of magnitude higher pre-dispersal. That's enough to cause death in 100% of people within fifteen minutes.

You can shield the device, of course, but that shielding is going to be heavy. You saw the pics upthread. And good luck getting this sucker, shielded or not, onto an airplane, even pre-9/11.

All in all, while it's not quite impossible to make this work, it's pretty tough.

Like I said, putting it on an aircraft probably isn't ideal anyway, putting it somewhere else, say a railway station will be much better, especially it's a well-travelled area.

I agree that dirty bomb per se not as workable as people think. Getting hands on enough stuff (which isotope not that key) is difficult. If one gets plutonium, say intercepting shipment going to be recycled (yes I know how hard that is) you can create a situation where a fair number of people get contaminated breathing in Pu, or otherwise ingesting it condemning them to various cancers in some ways worse than relatively quick death and more "terror" walking around with that stuff in them.

Frankly terrorists can't take fissile material and build a bomb - the level of engineering/machining etc even if you have blueprints and are willing to kill workers because of inadequate shielding is beyond the capability of a terror group. Of course building one that is relatively small with decent yield even harder, and there is the shielding issue.

I won't post it here, but let me just say at one point worked up a way to create a ton of casualties using nerve gas, no suicide guys needed good odds of perpetrators escaping scot free. Lets just say imagine lots of sarin or similar along 4-6 blocks of 5th Ave in NYC near Rock Center the day after Thanksgiving - that area seriously crowded with tourists/families/shoppers. Major panic lots of dead (and those high percent upper class) & you'll have to rip up 5th ave to decon since the nerve gas will be absorbed in asphalt.

MattII said:

So one guy builds the bomb, another transports it. Mind you, for a dirty bomb I think a bomb would be more viable than flying into a building, particularly if you could set it off in say Grand Central station.

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Grand Central is too airy and lightly-traveled.

Penn Station, OTOH, would be a death trap.

Crop duster + anthrax + Central Park.

Alternatively, they could buy a rural property outside NYC & Washington D.C. and build their own cruise missiles on site, to launch into the cities. Think V1 or even those launched from Gaza at Israel. New Zealander Bruce Simpson pointed the ease with which this could be done in this 2002 article.

http://aardvark.co.nz/pjet/cruise.shtml

It got him into a world of trouble with both the NZ and US governments.