Don’t Worry About ISIS’ Dirty Bomb. It’s Nothing Serious
ISIS, IS, Islamic State, whatever they’re calling themselves this week, claim to have enough uranium to make a dirty bomb. Which they probably do: but it would be a pretty useless dirty bomb if truth be told. They’re simply not got enough material of any sort of power or problem for a bomb to make any difference to anything.
Islamic State fanatics claim to have constructed a dirty bomb after stealing 40kg of uranium from an Iraqi university.
Militants boasted of the device on social media, with one even commenting on the destruction such a bomb would wreak in London, four months after the chemical was reported missing from Mosul University.
Among extremists making online threats to the West is British explosives expert Hamayun Tariq, who fled his home in Dudley, West Midlands, for the Middle East in 2012.
Yeah, well, that uranium is not the sort of stuff you make a nuclear bomb out of. Which is why they’re talking about a dirty bomb of course. But it’s not going to be much use as a dirty bomb either. There’s just not that much radioactivity there. The stuff they’ve got is actually the stuff that was used all over Europe as a tile and pottery glaze before WWII. And no, the bathroom tiles in your old house are not going to kill you and nor would a dirty bomb with this amount of this type of uranium do any harm (after the actual explosion itself of course).
Quite seriously, if they set this off in Oxford Street then after the area had been washed down (or it had rained perhaps) you’d not be able to tell that it had gone off. There’s more uranium in the tarmac on the street than there is in this supposed bomb.
Posted: 1st, December 2014 | In: Money Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
