ON September 13, 1987, two scrap metal scavengers broke into an abandoned radiotherapy clinic in the Brazilian city of Goiania. They broke open a machine containing a radioactive material, cesium chloride, and took a pile of scrap away by wheelbarrow.
By the end of the day, both men were vomiting and one had diarrhoea. They sold their scrap to a junkyard dealer. He began showing the "glowing blue powder" to family and friends. By the time the danger had been identified and contained, five people had died, 28 had suffered radiation burns, 249 were contaminated, and 112,000 people had to be tested for radiation.
This was, unwittingly, the Western worldâs first experience with a "dirty bomb", albeit a small and accidental one, and the message was dark. A recently published study, Dirty Bombs: The Threat Revisited, written by two scientists from the National Defence University in Washington, concludes: "Many experts believe an RDD [radiological dispersion device] is an economic weapon capable of inflicting devastating damage on the US. This paper is in full agreement with that assessment ..."
The report states that a well-placed RDD would ruin the heart of a major city. It could contaminate several hectares, requiring contaminated buildings to be razed and the debris and topsoil removed. A bomb isnât even necessary. Radiation could be released through smoke or aerosol, an attack unnoticed until after it had happened.
And the ingredients are available on the open market. "By far the most likely route for terrorist acquisition of intermediate quantities of radioactive material is open and legal purchase from a legitimate supplier," the report concludes. "Given the relatively weak and lax laws and regulations surrounding the storage, sale and shipment of radiological source material, coupled with the vast number of orphaned and unprotected sources located throughout Russia and former Soviet states, a determined and well-financed group easily could obtain even quite large sources openly."
Determined and well-financed sources have indeed been busy. In The New Yorker of March 8 the investigative reporter Seymour Hersh quotes a former senior American intelligence officialâs dismay at the lenient treatment of A.Q. Khan, the scientist who built Pakistanâs nuclear program and the man most culpable for the illegal spread of nuclear weapons technology: "Khan was willing to sell blueprints, centrifuges and the latest in weaponry. He was the worst nuclear-arms proliferator in the world and heâs been pardoned - with not a squeak from the White House."
Hersh describe a nuclear black market centred on Pakistan, implicating Pakistani intelligence, with main distribution points in Malaysia and the free-trade zone in Dubai. He quotes an unnamed official from the International Atomic Energy Agency: "I was absolutely struck by what the Libyans were able to buy. Whatâs on the black market is absolutely horrendous.
"IAEA inspectors, to their dismay, even found in Libya precise blueprints for the design and construction of a [450 kilogram] nuclear weapon. âItâs a sweet little bomb, put together by engineers who know how to assemble a weapon,â an official in Vienna told me. âNo question it will work ... Itâs too big and too heavy for a Scud, but itâll go into a family car. Itâs a terroristâs dream."â
Robert Gallucci, a former UN weapons inspector, told Hersh: "Bad as it is with Iran, North Korea and Libya having nuclear weapons material, the worst part is that they could transfer it to a non-state group. Thatâs the biggest concern. Thatâs the scariest thing about all this - that Pakistan could work with the worst terrorist groups on earth to build nuclear weapons. The most dangerous country for the United States now is Pakistan, and second is Iran."
And letâs not forget the thirst for huge conventional bombs. Last Tuesday, 700 British police and MI5 intelligence officers mounted a sweep, codenamed Crevis, which picked up eight men and half a tonne of ammonium nitrate, the same fertiliser used in the bomb attacks in Bali. All were radical Muslims. Seven of the eight came from Pakistani immigrant families.
Two days before the raid an eminent analyst of the Islamic world, Professor Fouad Ajami, of Johns Hopkins University, writing for The Wall Street Journal, addressed the issue of why Muslims born in the liberal West would wage war and mass murder on the liberal West: "In the 1980s, terrible civil wars were fought in Arab and Islamic countries ... Defeated opponents took to the road: from Hamburg and London and Copenhagen, the battle was now joined. If accounts were to be settled with rulers back home, the work of subversion would be done from Europe. Muslim brotherhoods sprouted all over the continent. There were welfare subsidies in the new surroundings, money, constitutional protections and rules of asylum to fight the old struggle ..."
So many immigrants escaped, legally and illegally, from the economic stagnation of the Arab world that 15 million Muslims now live in Western Europe. Cultural fault-lines have opened up. Ajami writes: "Political-religious radicals savoured the space afforded them by Western civil society. But they resented the logic of assimilation ... You would have thought that the pluralism and tumult of this open European world would spawn a version of the faith to match it. But precisely the opposite happened ...
"Europe is host to a war between order and its enemies, fuelled by demography: 40 per cent of the Arab world is under 14. Demographers tell us that the fertility replacement rate is 2.1 children per woman. Europe is frightfully below this level ... Fertility rates in the Islamic world are altogether different: 3.2 in Algeria, 3.4 in Egypt and Morocco, 5.2 in Iraq and 6.1 in Saudi Arabia. This is Europeâs neighbourhood, and its contemporary fate."
The velocity of murder is increasing. On Saturday came reports from Spain that an al-Qaeda plot to bomb a high-speed train between Madrid and Seville, packed with Easter pilgrims, had been foiled by mere chance.
The Cold War has been replaced by a hot war. The murder and intimidation of "infidels" has become an end in itself. In this war, Iraq is a sideshow. The main front is the race for a dirty bomb, and the monumental amount of blackmail that comes attached.
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