WASHINGTON — Undercover investigators posing as corporate bosses got a Nuclear Regulatory Commission license to buy radiological material that could be used in a so-called dirty bomb, according to a government report released Wednesday.

Senators and Government Accountability Office (GAO) investigators say their nine-month probe of NRC licensing practices revealed loopholes that could give terrorists easy access to cesium-137 and other dangerous materials that could be used...

en.wikipedia.org...
Two metal scavengers broke into an abandoned radiotherapy clinic and removed a teletherapy source capsule containing powdered cesium-137 with an activity of 50 TBq. They brought it home to one of the men to take it apart and sell it as scrap metal. Later that day both men were showing acute signs of radiation illness with vomiting and one of the men had a swollen hand and diarrhea. A few days later one of the men punctured the 1 mm thick window of the capsule, allowing the powder to leak out and when realizing the powder glowed blue in the dark, brought it back home to his family and friends to show it off. After 2 weeks of spread by contact contamination causing an increasing number of adverse health effects, the correct diagnosis of acute radiation sickness was made at a hospital and proper precautions could be put into procedure. By this time a total of 249 people were contaminated, 151 exhibited both external and internal contamination of which 20 people were seriously ill and 5 people died [7].

A new study by the Canadian government predicts that the explosion of even a small dirty bomb in downtown Toronto could result in a rush on the city’s medical facilities and an economic toll of more than $23 billion.

The disclosure comes just months after the Canadian Security Intelligence Service said a dirty bomb assault in that country was "overdue.”

"In an alarming display of fearmongering, former Republican Senator Rick Santorum has suggested that a series of 'unfortunate events,' namely terrorist attacks, will occur within the next year and change American citizen's perception of the war.

"Santorum went on to clearly imply that terror attacks will occur inside America which will alter the body politic and lead to a reversal of the anti-war sentiment now dominating the country."
Huh?

Originally posted by wenfieldsecret
sorry for all the postings of c-135 reconnaissance photos....but i live near offutt....and i'm a big fan....

check this out....i was driving by today...and i was like...this looks like a combat sent...then i looked again and noticed no pod under the nose....and i was like...in my couple years here...i've never seen it....turns out it's wc-135...used for picking up traces of nuclear elements in the air....
it's never here...in fact the site where i found the foto of the exact plane...(1 there's only 1, 2 the tail number is almost distinctive)...was written in japanese or chinese...i'm not sure which....

www004.upp.so-net.ne.jp...

Air sampling missions were routinely conducted over the Far East, Indian Ocean, Bay of Bengal, Mediterranean Sea, the Polar regions, and off the coasts of South America and Africa. The WC-135W played a major role in tracking radioactive debris from the Soviet Union’s Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster. Currently the air-sampling mission supports the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963, which prohibits any nation from above ground nuclear weapons testing. The WC-135W is currently the only aircraft in the inventory conducting air-sampling operations.

By this time, David Hahn was 17, and he decided to stop fooling around. He mixed his radium with his americium and aluminium, wrapped it in aluminium foil, and then wrapped the whole mess in his thorium and uranium - of course, all held together with gaffer tape. Finally he had success - the bizarre ball got more radioactive every day. Perhaps too much success - he could pick up the radioactivity 5 houses away. He panicked, and began to dismantle his creation.

At 2.40 am on the 31st of August, 1994, the local police were called because a young man was doing something suspicious near a car. David told the police to be careful of his toolbox, because it was radioactive. Soon some men in ventilated white moon suits were chopping up his radioactive shed with chainsaws, and stuffing the parts into thirty nine 200-litre sealed drums which they took away to a nuclear waste repository. The clean-up cost about $120,000 - but it did protect the 40,000 nearby inhabitants from harm.

NARRATOR: We can't claim we haven't been warned. In 1995, Muslim rebels from Chechnya directed a TV reporter to a park in central Moscow. The package she found contained a small amount of explosives and something else: Cesium-137, a radioactive isotope. This was the first known appearance of what has become a household word: a dirty bomb.

JOHN ASHCROFT (Attorney General, United States of America): ...an unfolding terrorist plot to attack the United States by exploding a radioactive dirty bomb.

VINCE CANNISTRARO (Ex-Chief, Central Intelligence Agency Counterterrorism): A so-called "dirty bomb" is basically just a conventional explosive with a radioactive core to it. You're going to broadcast the radioactivity over the area of the conventional explosive.

In Al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan, there were discovered a number of documents dealing with the methodology of putting together the most deadly kind of dirty bomb imaginable.

Originally posted by UM_Gazz


Al Qaeda could set up a phony company, gone through the NRC and obtained all the radioactive material they need.

Or, perhaps worse, they already have?

So it could be relatively easy to enter the country, obtain radioactive materials, explosives, and eventually set off a radiological bomb.

Anyone surprised by this news?

While we are busy at war with terrorism, it seems that some security issues at home need urgent attention. Unless one wants to make such an attack scenario possible.

www.usatoday.com
(visit the link for the full news article)