I have often mentioned "dirty bombs" in my blog posts. In a dirty bomb, radioactive materials are packed around a core of conventional explosives. The idea is that when the bomb explodes, the blast will spread the radioactive material over a wide area. The extent of the area covered will depend on the type and amount of conventional explosives in the core. The danger will be related to how much of a particular radioactive isotope or isotopes are in the shell around the core. Radioactive isotopes vary in the type and amount of radiation they emit and how long they emit radiation. A dirty bomb exploded in the core of a major metropolitan area could cause chaos and cost billions of dollars.
Although dirty bombs do not require much in the way of technical expertise and there is a lot of radioactive material around the world that is poorly secured, so far no one has built and exploded a dirty bomb. There have been plenty of stories of thieves and smugglers trying to sell stolen radioactive isotopes to terrorists. Moldavia in Easter Europe appears to be a marketplace for such transactions. Sting operations there over several years involving some U.S. law enforcement people uncovered attempts by Middle Eastern buyers to purchase radioactive materials for Al Queda and ISIS.
Last year there was an incident in Belgium that brought this concern back into the headlines. Belgium police discovered that a Belgian scientist who worked a plant that produced a lot of radioisotopes for global use was under surveillance by a Mohamed Bakkali. Bakkali was arrested last November for his part in the terrorist shootings in Paris. Tapes of the surveillance of the Belgian scientist and his family were found in Bakkali's home. A spokesman for Belgium's Federal Agency for Nuclear Control said that they feared that the intent was to kidnap the scientist or a member of his family to gain access to radioisotopes in order to make a dirty bomb.
U.S. authorities and analysts believe that a dirty bomb attack is virtually inevitable. An internal U.S. Department of Energy report suggested that a single individual with little expertise might be able to construct a dirty bomb. The ease of the creation of such a bomb makes it very difficult to insure that it does not happen. Detonation of such a bomb would cause such a panic that law enforcement would be overwhelmed which might provide cover for other terrorist activities in the same area.
So, the question is, why has it not happened? I believe that one of the reasons lies in the fact that, although such a bomb could wreck havoc in a major city, the actual damage would be minor and it would take years for health problems to manifest. Terrorists tend to want something that is spectacular and results in a lot of immediate deaths and as much destruction as possible. Dirty bombs just aren't spectacular enough. And, while playing around with conventional explosives is certainly dangerous, handling nuclear materials can result in injury and death for the terrorists themselves. So the idea of a dirty bomb may seem attractive to terrorists but, actually, it does not seem to be attractive enough to any terrorists to create one.
