[A-List] US imperialism: strategy of tension

["Keaney Michael" <Michael.Keaney@xxxxxx>]

Surge feared in toxic materials
IAN BRUCE
The Herald, 12 June 2002

AMERICAN intelligence agencies fear that al Qaeda terrorists might be
able to steal or buy radioactive material for a crude "radbomb" inside
the United States to avoid trying to smuggle material past the new
detectors being rushed into service at ports and airports round the
country.

The National Intelligence Council says thousands of private companies
and universities use highly toxic caesium, strontium, cobalt, and
americium isotopes to treat cancer patients, sterilise equipment,
irradiate food against harmful bacteria, and inspect welding seams. The
quantities range from minute traces of americium in home smoke detectors
to foot-long rods of cobalt used in food processing plants.

US firms have lost track of almost 1500 radioactive parts since 1996.
More than half were never recovered.

Most items which might be used to create a "dirty" bomb by spreading
contamination in a crowded city are vulnerable to either theft or black
market sale, and few hospitals or food plants are secure enough to
withstand an attack by armed and determined terrorists.

A "significant" quantity of lethal caesium turned up in a scrap metal
plant in North Carolina in March after being "accidentally discarded".
Three other gauges containing the same isotope were later found in a
Maryland dump.

Henry Kelly, director of the Federation of American Scientists, says the
North Carolina find contained enough caesium "to contaminate a swathe
about one-mile long covering an area of 40 city blocks if terrorists
milled the caesium into fine particles and dispersed it using 10lb of
high explosive".

He added that if such a device were detonated in Washington's national
art gallery, the zone affected by lethal radiation would include the
Capitol, the Supreme Court, and the library of Congress. The buildings
"might have to be abandoned for decades".

In 1998, thieves stole 19 tubes of medical caesium from a hospital in
Greensboro, North Carolina. Despite a police dragnet which included
aircraft fitted with radiation sensors, not a single tube has been
recovered.

The arrest of an American citizen, who was charged two days ago with
membership of al Qaeda and planning to build and detonate a "dirty" bomb
in the US, has concentrated government thinking about the domestic
threat.

The Bush administration has ordered three national laboratories to
launch crash programmes for the production of detectors capable of
picking up emissions from even small quantities of nuclear material at
long range.