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Originally Posted by Tri-ring
No but I do know seeing the victims that nuclear fall out is worst than the actual blast.
What you and the article fail to adimit is the mid/long term damage through long term exposure to radioactive particles lodged into people's lungs and or blood stream.
I do believe that there is a standard amount of radiation humans and considered hazardous exeeding that certain level.
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The effect of nuclear fallout is going to be nothing like that of a dirty bomb. To start with, we're talking about vastly different amounts of radioactive material involved and the size of the respective explosions is nothing alike (to say the least!). On top of that, part of the reason why there were so many casualties from the Nagasaki and Hiroshima fallouts is because the Japanese had no idea of the dangers involved - this is supported by the fact that able-bodied adults died disproportionately from this cause. And if you read over the article, it actually does talk a little about the dangers of ingesting some of the radioactive dust, but the concentrations are so low that there's little threat attendant to it. This position is consistently repeated by just about any source I've ever come accross concerning dirty bombs, so unless you've got something more concrete than speculation, it's hard to take such claims as all that credible.
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Originally Posted by Tri-ring
Actually it is not at all far-fetched as you claim since crop dusting is the norm.
You just mix radioactive dust into the pesticide/fertilizer and have the un-witting crop dusters do the rest.
You maybe able to quarentine some but the facility will be deemed hazardous, the crop land that had been dusted will be needed to be shut down due to radioactive contamination with the top soil needed to be replaced and as a result the US corn market will plumet like a rock.
It will make the mad cow fiasco look like a mild case of the flu compared to this if it happens.
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The reasons why I said that this is a far-fetched idea isn't because crop dusting isn't widely used. It's because it's a plan with:
- many points of failure
- high risk of detection in the execution stage
- high risk of detection in the distribution stage
- limited gains
Moreover, there's all sorts of toxins which would be far superior for such purposes. Heck, for that matter, it's totally unrealistic to affect more than a couple of adjacent farms, so even the damage would be kept to tiny areas. This is a complete non-threat - the only reason it gets any play is because it's good for an uninformed scare (and even most of those involve more useful agents like anthrax).
The reason the mad cow scenario was so problematic was because nobody knew how widespread it was and because testing for it was both expensive and difficult to perform. Geiger counters are nowhere nearly so difficult to use.