TechnoChitlins

Dirty Bombs

Wretchard over at the Belmont Club has an interesting post on last weekend's search for a suspected 'dirty bomb' in Las Vegas- bq. On Dec. 29 in Las Vegas, the searchers got their first and only radiation "spike," at a rented storage facility near downtown. The finding sent a jolt of tension through the nation's security apparatus; the White House was notified. The experts rechecked the reading with a more precise machine that told them that inside the cinderblock storage unit was radium, a radioactive material used in medical equipment and on watch dials. As rare snow fell on the city that early morning, FBI agents secured the industrial neighborhood around the site, and a small army of agents and scientists converged on the business. Soon the renter of the storage closet in question, a homeless man, happened on the odd scene and asked the officers not to cut his padlock. He supplied the key. The scientists sent in a robot to snag a duffel bag in which the man had been storing a cigar-size radium pellet -- which is used to treat uterine cancer -- since he found the shiny stainless-steel object three years before. Not knowing what the object was, he had wrapped it in his nighttime pillow. Whoa. Oooh-kay, radium is just laying around for the picking up. That's very comforting. We're in a different war now, with World War 2 overtones on a 21st century symphony- bq. One is struck by the similarity between the radiation detection strategems now in place and the acoustic detectors used in antisubmarine warfare during the Cold War. Like the passive acoustic detectors of that era, radiation detectors can be deployed in unattended arrays and linked by a network to a central processing computer to permit the localization and prosecution of targets. Vans with detectors and even personnel on foot with handheld equipment stand in for the destroyers and helos in the ASW model. The problem is essentially the same: passively detecting a mobile and invisible target against background noise over an entire planet. And so it goes. It puts me in mind of an old movie called 'The Enemy Below', where a German sub Captain and an American destroyer captain spar it out- both capable, both motivated, and both firm in their belief that their cause is just. We are living that movie all over America today. Posted by maestro at January 7, 2004 07:05 PM | TrackBack