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Comment by whack | Hacker News Reader

TBH, I don't fear nuclear war with a nation like Russia or China anytime soon. Neither country has a deathwish or a desire to end the world. What does really scare me is the possibility of a terrorist attack involving nukes. A dirty bomb that goes off anywhere in the downtown of a major city. I'm glad that this hasn't happened in the past 10 years, but that isn't a very long time. Given the pace of technology, and the inevitable slipups that will happen, the cynic in me thinks it's only a matter of time.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/10/opinion/a-nuclear-9-11.htm...

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Can't cite any papers by I have read somewhere that a "dirty bomb" is not really possible or would affect only a very small area.

The point of a dirty bomb is less so the actual effects of the radiation, and moreso the impression it gives and the fear it generates. The public is not easily reassured that an area that's been deliberately contaminated with radioactive particles has been sufficiently cleaned up to return. It's the doubt and uncertainty that really counts.

And they are quite doable as weapons - it just takes some careful preparation and handling, and access to some mildly expensive materials.

> it just takes some careful preparation and handling, and access to some mildly expensive materials.

I'm not even sure that's necessary, if all you want to do is create terror...?

For instance, read about David Hahn (aka, the "Nuclear Boy Scout") who recently passed away (of what, they don't say):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hahn

He managed to contaminate his neighborhood using almost nothing but smoke detector components. How difficult would it be to collect smoke detector parts? You can easily find them used for cheap or free at garage sales and thrift stores. If there were a concerted effort to acquire the parts using only cash, it wouldn't take very long to gather up enough of the material...

...at that point, you just need the delivery device, and we all know that isn't difficult to procure or produce (all the parts can be easily bought at Walmart).

TBH, I'm surprised it hasn't happened yet; as a terrorist weapon, it wouldn't matter that it didn't cause mass death via radiation poisoning (not in the near term at least), but that it has the perception to do so. At the very least, it would make people less likely to visit the "hot zone" left over afterward (in a financially important city area it might lead to economic problems).

Whatever I have read is that it's really very difficult to first obtain enough radioactive material and then to spread it out. The same is true for biological weapons. Even if you have a very dangerous virus you still have to contaminate a large enough number of people.

Much easier to buy guns and shoot people or run a truck into a crowd.

Getting the material is not that difficult for a determined group. Truly dangerous isotopes like caesium-137 or strontium-90 are both used for medical and other applications, and have both been accidentally released from non-military sources after having been forgotten in scrapyards, then causing fatalities. They also have considerable half-lives, about 30 years, so you can't just wait a few months for it to decay out of an area. Dispersing them is also not that hard, and you don't even necessarily have to use an explosive. You could do an indoors release of a powder, or a release of a water-soluble salt into a pond or a fountain, or what have you.

Of course, other motivations, like the panic generated by a physical attack, may be more important to someone choosing methods.

Well, nuclear terrorism isn't something easy to do.

Yes, the amount of complexity of preparation terrorists are able to get away with today is amusing. But grabbing a nuclear bomb is in a completely different mark, and successfully launching one is still a completely different level of complexity.

This isn't meant to exhibit a personal paranoia, but is it reasonable to keep the prospect of terrorism more in scope if we allow for hacking efforts that would exploit security vulnerabilities in existing systems? Gut feel (no basis, though) is that it may be more likely to take that approach than the steal-materials-and-build-and-launch one.

All it takes is a coup of a nuclear-armed nation, and the barrier to entry on that project keeps dropping as states with a recent history of fanatic-deposes-weaker-fanatic coups join the club.

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