Anthrax Bombs

[Tim May]

At 8:37 AM -0700 10/8/97, Bill Frantz wrote:
>At 3:01 AM -0700 10/8/97, Peter Trei wrote:
>>I don't know if it's comforting or worrying knowing that these
>>devices degrade - any in the hands of terrorists have a limited
>>time that they are a threat, but that fact may pressure a terrorist
>>to 'use it or lose it'.
>
>What I have heard about these suitcase nukes is that they yield about 1-2
>kilotons.  I know of no technical reason for them to be thermonuclear
>devices.  As such, the decay of tritium would not seem to affect them.
>(They will still need a source of neutrons, which might go bad faster than
>the plutonium/U235.)
>
>I feel very little comfort.

I'd fear an "anthrax bomb" a lot more than a 2 KT suitcase nuke. (If I
lived in a crowded target zone, aka a soft target, which I don't.)

(As is well-known, or should be, folks survived Hiroshima and Nagasaki as
close as 400 meters from ground zero. And they were both roughly 20 KT
nukes. Inasmuch as the blast effects scale as the cube root of megatonnage,
a 2 KT blast might be expected to be survivable as close as a few hundred
meters or even less. Of course, some will die even out at a 1000 meters,
but not many.)

By comparison, anthrax bacillus is relatively easy to manufacture, and
aerosol dispersion could kill hundreds of thousands or more before even
being detected. Aerosolized dispersion in Washington or Manhattan could be
a far worse human and infrastructure disaster than a suitcase nuke.

I expect this sort of attack to occur fairly soon.

(The Aum Shinretsu cult in Japan was working with such things, including
Sarin, a nerve toxin. Some of the sites knocked out in Iraq were CBW sites.)

P.S. I used to work a lot with radioisotopes. Pu-239 has a long half-life,
as noted here by others, and is not going to decay significantly in human
times. But poising and neutron-stealing can render nukes duds in just a few
years. However, battlefield nukes are typically made with some design
choices which minimize the routine maintenance/refurbishing which the main
MIRV nukes need. My understanding is that most of the NDT (nuclear
demolition) devices have a shelf-life of up to a decade or so.

Anthrax is a whole lot cheaper.

--Tim May

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