Dirty Bombs? Not Again!
Once again, politicians are warning of the incredible danger posed by “dirty” bombs. Even the name is carefully designed to engender fear and disapproval - but not too much. The problem is, there is rarely if ever any actual evidence that people are trying to build such a weapon - and there are much better things to do with radioactive material than disperse it with explosives.
Drop it down a well, for example; that’s what I would do, were I a terrorist with a bunch of radioactive material. (Happily, I’m neither a terrorist, nor do I have any radioactive material.) Sure, it’s not terribly flashy or exciting, and is far too lacking in melodrama to ever be the subject of a made-for-TV movie, but it would cause no end of problems in a small area, and cause a lot of fear elsewhere - and that is the whole point of terrorism, isn’t it? Strange that you never hear about federal initiatives to protect our aquifers; the geospatial information about wells is fairly tightly controlled, but most wells are protected by nothing more than a $10 padlock, and it isn’t as if they’re hard to find - they’re everywhere. And the location of wells hasn’t always been controlled; back in 1999, you could buy - and I did, for $12 - an “atlas” of the Twin Cities metro area, one map of which shows the precise location of all the hundreds of wells - and which aquifers they tap.
Now, there’s not a whole lot we can realistically do to protect against risks to the country’s water sources, though I’m sure some bright if underfunded people are working on the problem. Then again, neither is there much you can do against a dirty bomb - but the threat is more exciting, and the risk easier to sum up in a sound bite, so that is the concern du jour. Hopefully, we never come to regret that appalling short-sightedness…
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