One Terrorist Bush didn't prevent

[Partha]

Fortunately, the terrorist's wife was on the job.

http://www.splcenter.org/blog/wp-conten ... 021109.pdf

[Klast Brell]

Sad. Did you see how rich the guy was?
I'm surprised this guy was able to accumulate all that shit without raising a bazillion red flags.

[Partha]

What? DU is absolutely harmless, our own government says so. The other stuff? Capitalism at work, m'man. He had the cash, they had the product.

[Fobbon Lazyfoot]

Not the most inventive bomb ideas, honestly. Theres a billion trillion things out there that can kill a lot of people at once, radiation has a good scare factor but not the best kill ratio.

Doesn't embar work with chemical toxins for a living? I'm curious to see what an expert would come up with as far as effective chemical terrorism.

[Taxious]

I won a question on this in trivia last night, thx2u!

[Arathena]

Dimethyl Mercury.
Hydrogen Floride.
Trip to the pool supply store and home depot would probably yield chlorine gas with some work.

DU is a terrible choice. Heavy metal takes a long time to do toxin damage, and can be treated. It is not very radioactive. You could sit on a brick of it and get more from a CRT. It is poisonous. But not OMGWTFBBQ poisonous.

[Embar Angylwrath]

Depleted urnaium and Th-232 are preety harmless. Th-232 is naturally occuring, its in the dirt your kids play in, decays very very slowly, and produces an alpha particle (not an issue unless you've eaten or inhaled the material) and some gamma radiation. But since the decay rate is so slow, the energy and particles coming off the stuff are low and not really of much concern unless you eat the stuff.

Arathena picked a particularly nasty class of chemical... organomercurics. Some of those (dimethylmercury) can kill with just a drop on the skin. And the way that particular compound works is horrible.. it slowly kill parts of the brain, turning it into something that, at post-mortem, looks like swiss cheese.

Dimethylmercury can cross boundaries like gloves in a second or two, so nothing short of full "moonsuit" containment is safe when working with it in an uncontrolled environment, like in a dirty-bomb scenario. If mixed with a transdermal accelerator (gets it through the skin quicker) like dimethyl sulfoxide, any area contaminated with this stuff would be too dangerous for humans to inhabit.

The good news is that this stuff is sooooo toxic, that any dumbshit trying to make a dirty bomb out of it would probably kill himself in the process. But if they were successful, they'd kill a lot of people, and render large areas downwind of the explosion unihabitable.

[Ddrak]

You guys are thinking too much like chemists and not enough like terrorists. DU is a great idea because it's way cheaper and safer to use than organomercurics, and the media panic would still be strong enough for the place to become off limits for years. Every cancer in the area for a couple of decades would be put down to the DU. No parent would want their kids living there. The whole thing would build up to a frenzy fast enough that it really wouldn't matter you could ingest a brick of it and have more worries about the extra weight than the actual stuff.

Dd

[Arathena]

You guys are thinking too much like chemists and not enough like terrorists. DU is a great idea because it's way cheaper and safer to use than organomercurics, and the media panic would still be strong enough for the place to become off limits for years. Every cancer in the area for a couple of decades would be put down to the DU. No parent would want their kids living there. The whole thing would build up to a frenzy fast enough that it really wouldn't matter you could ingest a brick of it and have more worries about the extra weight than the actual stuff.

Dd

A fair point, but this stuff isn't like the DU where you get some cancer that gets blamed on it for years. We're talking about making places off limits for years because you touch the wrong surface and die. Stuff which you can carry home to your family by accident and kill them, too. Depending on solubility vs suspension, it could even propagate through the water table.

As for the lingering effects of the fear of radiation... Well.. Hiroshima and Nagasaki are still inhabited. And hell, Waltz Mill is a pretty nice place these days.

[Freecare Spiritwise]

What's the one the Russians used to kill that reporter? Supposedly only several reactors in the world that can produce it. Very nasty and effective but it was easily traced back to them ... Hmmm trying to remember where I saw it - Dateline I think...

[Arathena]

What's the one the Russians used to kill that reporter? Supposedly only several reactors in the world that can produce it. Very nasty and effective but it was easily traced back to them ... Hmmm trying to remember where I saw it - Dateline I think...

Polonium-210. Nasty stuff, but you have to sell your soul to Mother Russia to get it.

[Embar Angylwrath]

You guys are thinking too much like chemists and not enough like terrorists. DU is a great idea because it's way cheaper and safer to use than organomercurics, and the media panic would still be strong enough for the place to become off limits for years. Every cancer in the area for a couple of decades would be put down to the DU. No parent would want their kids living there. The whole thing would build up to a frenzy fast enough that it really wouldn't matter you could ingest a brick of it and have more worries about the extra weight than the actual stuff.

Dd

Arathena already addressed part of this.

Another point is that making dimethyl mercury isn't very difficult. You can start with relatively benign metallic mercury and easily convert it to dimethyl mercury. And since 100% purity isn't really what a terrorist is looking for, I can envision a few automated processes that would make the dimethyl mercury, drop it into suspension in dimethyl sulfoxide, and then aersolize it. Set a few of these contraptions in places like parks or near schools, (leave it in an abandoned ice cream truck), and a terrorist could target and kill hundreds if not thousands of children. I think that would be a pretty effective act of terror, more visceral and heart stopping than just a DU dirty bomb.

[Harlowe]

Isn't dioxin a favorite of Russia as well? I remember it from the Yushchenko deal.

[Klast Brell]

DU is a terrible choice. Heavy metal takes a long time to do toxin damage, and can be treated. It is not very radioactive. You could sit on a brick of it and get more from a CRT. It is poisonous. But not OMGWTFBBQ poisonous.

Ass a terror weapon it does not need to be very lethal. A bomb blows the dust over a suburban neighborhood. Powder falls on 100 houses. Sure. The people can leave. But given the current mentality of fear and litigation, you can bet your ass that the whole area would be declared a loss. The homes, and all the possessions inside would be seen as toxic radioactive hazards. people who know better would say bulldoze the houses and truck it all to the dump. But the paranoid citizens would freak. Not in my back yard! It would be a political hot potato for decades to come. Cancer rates for the affected population may be only a fraction of a percent higher than average, but irrational fear would still rule. For decades to come any time someone from that area got cancer or something else they would blame it on the DU and there would be no real way to prove whether it was the DU or not. And lets not even get in to 9-11 style legislative over reaction.

[Klast Brell]

Posted too soon without reading what others wrote.

To summarize my above post: What Dd said.