Scrubbing 'dirty bombs': explosive hype.

• Author: Doherty, Brian
• Position: Citings - Brief article

SINCE 9/11, politicians and pundits have repeatedly warned that terrorists who can't get their mitts on a fully functioning nuclear device could still spread radioactive death with a "dirty bomb," a conventional explosive combined with radioactive material. Such a weapon, they claim, would scatter the material far and wide, rendering a large area unlivable and turning rescue efforts into suicide missions.

The results of tests involving controlled dirty bomb explosions, reported at a February meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, cast doubt on this scary scenario. Physicist Fred Harper of Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque, who led the experiments, said even first responders on the scene of a dirty bomb attack probably would not need full radiation suits. The tests indicated that most of the radio active material would attach to large fragments of debris and end up on the ground, not in...