Dirty bomb movie

Tonight, the Kennedy School screened HBO's "Dirty War."

The movie is well-done and certainly provocative. If you haven't seen it yet, I'd recommend watching soon. The users at imdb.com give it only 6.6 out of 10, but I'd probably rate it about 7.5.

After the screening, a heavy-hitting panel of Graham Allison, Rand Beers, and Richard Clarke discussed the movie's terrorism scenario. In the film a set of terror cells plan and successfully implement a dirty bomb attack on London.

All three called the film quite realistic.

Indeed, some of the remarks were, well, scary.

Allison, a professor in the Government Department and former Assistant Secretary of State in the Clinton Administration, said that a dirty bomb attack is "long overdue." He finds it hard to explain why an attack has not already happened.

Gulp.

Allison also said that he worries "very much" about a smallpox attack and "most" about an actual nuclear bomb.

Beers, who was a foreign policy advisor to John Kerry (and as recently as 2002 was Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Combating Terrorism), raised a lot of good questions. Is the US ready to deal with this threat from terrorists? How much should the US spend to counter terror? Who has the power to regulate threats such as transportation of deadly chemicals?

And Beers declared that the US will never be able to answer the question, "How much is enough?" in terms of anti-terror effort and spending.

As for potential tradeoffs between human rights and anti-terror, Beers said that such questions would be decided by public dialogue.

I hope he's right. Clarke pointed out that we need to have these debates now, before the next attack.

Clarke, who was the top anti-terror guy on the National Security Council on 9/11, was his usual pessimistic self. Washington DC, as of two years ago, had only 2 decontamination units. In the HBO film, London has 10, which can each decontaminate 200 people per hour...but several hundred thousand people might be exposed to radiation in a dirty bomb attack.

Do the math; it isn't good: at 200 people "processed" per hour, it would take 1250 hours (52 days) to decontaminate a quarter of a million people.

Clarke also claimed that the US has made no effort to establish minimim essential conditions for security. In other words, we don't even know what would be required to provide safety.

And while Clarke acknowledged that there's no way to know for sure, the number of jihadists has likely increased "significantly" over the past two years.

Bottom line since 9/11: more terrorists, poor preparation for their attacks, and many worst-case scenarios are quite realistic -- if not likely.


Editing note: I fixed the math typo above. With 2 decontamination machines (handling 400 people per hour), a quarter million people could be "processed" in 26 days. With 10 machines, it would take a bit more than 5 days.

Dirty Bombs

There is an AP news story in today's San Jose Mercury News on the "very significant" risks of so-called "dirty bombs." Here are the opening paragraphs:

Federal investigators have documented 1,300 cases of lost, stolen or abandoned radioactive material inside the United States over the past five years and have concluded there is a significant risk that terrorists could cobble enough together for a dirty bomb.

Studies by the Energy Department's Los Alamos laboratory and the General Accounting Office found significant holes in the nation's security net that could take years to close, even after improvements by regulators since Sept. 11, 2001.

"The world of radiological sources developed prior to recent concerns about terrorism, and many of the sources are either unsecured or provided, at best, with an industrial level of security," the Los Alamos lab concluded two months ago in a report that was reviewed by The Associated Press.

Before everyone enters panic mode, note that there is good news buried in the story:

Nuclear Regulatory Commission spokeswoman Beth Hayden said the agency recognizes the potential dangers of such materials and al-Qaida's interest in them - "there are millions of sources," she said. But she added most of the 1,300 lost radiological sources were subsequently recovered and the public should keep the threat in perspective.

"The ones that have been lost and not recovered, I'm told, if you put them all together, it would not add up to one highly radioactive source," Hayden said. "These are low-level sources."

Similarly, the Deseret News (apparently a Utah paper) reported recently about some findings delivered at the American Society for Therapeutic Radiology and Oncology (ASTRO) meeting. Here are the most important paragraphs:

Wednesday, radiation oncologists meeting in Salt Lake City debunked what they called "myths" about dirty bomb damage.

The American Society for Therapeutic Radiology and Oncology (ASTRO) members have, since the terrorist attacks, been examining danger radiation exposure might pose. And it's not, they say, what has been generally presented.

Radiation from dirty bombs would not be apt to contaminate and eventually kill people in a large geographic area.

"The conventional explosive itself will probably do more damage than the radiation that's tagged to the bomb," said ASTRO spokeswoman Nancy Daly, who is also a nurse with a master's degree in public health and nursing. "That's not to say there are not people who would be exposed and of concern, but more people will have life-threatening injuries from whatever the device is that explodes."

On the other hand, if you want to be scared, the Washington Times (again!) reported in mid-October that an al Qaeda operative was nosing around McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada looking for materials to build a dirty bomb. Apparently, several al Qaeda operatives have been spotted this past year or so in Hamilton and the US thinks there's a terrorist cell there.

The real "dirty bomb" materials of great concern, I'm afraid, are in lightly guarded rooms in Russia.