Dr. Conca reports that shortly after the terrorist attacks in Brussels last week, news outlets associated media reported that the perpetrators, the El Bakraoui brothers, were planning to target a Belgium nuclear facility as well, including videotaping of a top nuclear scientist and surveillance of the nuclear facility itself. And that they had plans to make a dirty bomb. CBS national security analyst, Juan Zarate, said that this lends itself to concerns that ISIS is adapting very quickly, looking for key vulnerabilities, and even potentially considering how to use dirty bombs ... weapons of mass destruction?
But how worried should we be about this nuclear slant? Answer ...Not any more than a large car bomb. These brothers could not have assembled a real dirty bomb and were most likely polishing their brand to impress other terrorists. There are important reasons that this type of attack has yet to be carried out successfully. First, nuclear power plants are militarily hardened facilities with several layers of physical and armed security, as described by the Nuclear Energy Institute, that make them extremely difficult to attack with anything but an actual military. This is why terrorist targets are softer and include airports, open markets, sporting events and metro stations. Second, a dirty bomb is not a weapon of mass destruction at all. It is a weapon of mass disruption, a term coined by the pre-eminent weapons expert, Sig Hecker. Again, a dirty bomb is not a nuclear weapon or an atomic weapon.
Reporters, even experts on national security, can be forgiven for not knowing the technicals about this strange type of weapon. But like the public, terrorists know that merely including the words nuclear or radioactivity raises the fear level to fever pitch. To be clear, it is the irrational fear of radiation that makes a dirty bomb such an effective weapon of terror. Dirty bombs have nothing to do with nuclear power or nuclear weapons. Read on for details ...
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