NOCOBALT-4-FOOD

Are we safe? (Be sure to read New York Times column immediately following Washington Post article)

The following Washington Post article states what would happen if 1,000 to 10,000 curies of radioactive material were detonated (it could be far worse than 9/11) yet nuclear food irradiators are licensed by the NRC for at least one million curies of cobalt-60.

After reading this Washington Post article please be sure to click here and read our own Homeland Security Website under heading "Sources of Radioactive material" to learn what they have to say about food irradiators as a risk for use in dirty bombs.

http://www.nationalterroralert.com/readyguide/dirtybomb.htm

As Public Citizen says food irradiation is an unnecessary technology. Why are they putting us at risk??? One of the illogical rationale for radiating meat stems from the feeding and care of animals at "factory farms". Click here for more info http://www.themeatrix.com Sanitation rather than irradiation should be our goal !!!

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Study Raises Projection For 'Dirty Bomb' Toll

By Joby Warrick
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, January 13, 2004; Page A02

A well-executed "dirty bomb" attack on a U.S. city could expose hundreds of people to potentially lethal amounts of radiation, researchers said yesterday in a Pentagon-funded study that sharply raises estimates of the human toll from such an attack.

The study also predicts massive financial losses -- perhaps greater than those caused by the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks -- if a large dirty bomb were set off in the heart of New York or Washington. A dirty bomb uses conventional explosives or other means to spread radiation.

"The threat of a radiological attack on the United States is real, and terrorists have a broad palette of [radiological] isotopes to choose from," says the study by the Center for Technology and National Security Policy at the National Defense University. "It could cause tens to hundreds of fatalities under the right circumstances, and is essentially certain to cause great panic and enormous economic losses."

The year-long study concludes that a dirty bomb attack is "unlikely to cause mass casualties," such as would be expected if terrorists detonated a nuclear bomb or unleashed chemical or biological weapons. But it urges U.S. agencies to rethink the widely held assumption that human casualties in such an attack would be minimal. Previous studies have predicted that few if any immediate casualties would result from radiation exposure in a dirty bomb attack.

The report calls on policymakers to take a number of steps to prepare for an attack, including stockpiling medicines to treat surviving victims.

"It is possible to kill a fair number of people and to sicken a lot more, such that you begin to stress the health care system," said Peter D. Zimmerman, a nuclear physicist who wrote the report with analyst Cheryl Loeb. "But it is also possible to make RDDs [radiological dispersion devices] less attractive to terrorists by becoming better prepared for dealing with them."

A dirty bomb has never been used in a terrorist attack, but several terrorist groups, including al Qaeda, have professed an interest in building one. Experts say dirty bombs are attractive to terrorists because they are technologically simple, yet capable of generating widespread fear and economic chaos. All that is needed is a quantity of radioactive material -- such as widely available cesium or cobalt -- and an explosive or other means of dispersal.

The economic impact of such an attack could be devastating, concludes the study, published by the Pentagon's premier education and research institution. A moderately sized device containing between 1,000 and 10,000 units of radioactivity, called curies, could contaminate an area the size of the Mall in Washington, requiring a cleanup that could last for years.

Even a small dirty bomb would force lengthy evacuations of homes and businesses for extensive decontamination, saddling property owners with enormous costs that would not be covered by standard business and homeowners' insurance. Buildings -- even skyscrapers -- that had massive contamination would have to be torn down and trucked away, the report says.

"An RDD is first of all an economic weapon," the study says. "Cost estimates to restore lower Manhattan after the September 2001 attack range up to $40 billion plus loss of economic activity. The consequences of a large or super RDD might well be more costly."

The researchers derived estimates of human casualties from extensive studies of radiation accidents, including one in 1987 in Goiania, Brazil. In that case, workers ruptured a capsule of highly radioactive cesium after they discovered it inside an abandoned radiotherapy machine. Within weeks, 249 people suffered serious radiation injuries and five died. Many of the serious injuries came from internal exposure to tiny amounts of cesium that the victims ate or inhaled. "While the amounts ingested seem extremely small," the report says, "they were more than adequate to cause death or acute radiation sickness."

Such harmful affects can be ameliorated through medical treatment, but treatment is possible only if the victims are aware that they've been exposed, the study says. It notes that many of the most troubling scenarios involve the quiet dispersal of contaminants -- with no explosions that announce the crime.

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Here we go again. First the Washington Post now the New York Times. Please be sure to read the last paragraph about a nuclear food irradiator. Keep in mind some nuclear food irradiators have approximately 50 sticks of cobalt-60. Again we ask the question "Are We Safe?" and why is this unnecessary risk being taken with the lives of so many people? Food irradiation is an unnecessary technology!

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Op-Ed Columnist: A Nuclear 9/11

March 10, 2004
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

The New York Times

A 10-kiloton nuclear bomb (a pipsqueak in weapons terms) is
smuggled into Manhattan and explodes at Grand Central. Some
500,000 people are killed, and the U.S. suffers $1 trillion
in direct economic damage.

That scenario, cited in a report last year from the John F.
Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, could be a glimpse
of our future. We urgently need to control nuclear
materials to forestall that threat, but in this war on
proliferation, we're now slipping backward. President Bush
(after ignoring the issue before 9/11) now forcefully says
the right things - but still doesn't do enough.

"We're losing the war on proliferation," Andrew F.
Krepinevich Jr., a military expert and executive director
of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, says
bluntly.

Until recently, nuclear trends looked encouraging.
President Kennedy and others in the early 1960's expected
dozens of countries to develop atomic weapons quickly, but
in fact controls largely worked. Even now, only eight
nations definitely possess nuclear weapons.

And there's more good news. While I believe that the
invasion of Iraq was a mistake, at least Saddam Hussein
won't be making warheads soon. Likewise, partly thanks to
Mr. Bush's saber-rattling, Libya is abandoning its weapons
program.

But all in all, the risks of a nuclear 9/11 are increasing.
"I wouldn't be at all surprised if nuclear weapons are used
over the next 15 or 20 years," said Bruce Blair, president
of the Center for Defense Information, "first and foremost
by a terrorist group that gets its hands on a Russian
nuclear weapon or a Pakistani nuclear weapon."

One of our biggest setbacks is in North Korea. Thanks to
the ineptitude of hard-liners in Mr. Bush's administration,
and their refusal to engage in meaningful negotiations,
North Korea is going all-out to make warheads. It may have
just made six new nuclear weapons. Then there's Iran, which
has sought nuclear weapons since the days of the shah, and
whose nuclear program seems to have public support. "I'm
not sure there is a way to get an Iranian government to
give it up," a senior American official said.

Finally, there's the real rogue nation of proliferation,
Pakistan. We know that Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Islamist
father of Pakistan's bomb, peddled materials to Libya and
North Korea, and we don't know who else.

"It may be that A. Q. Khan & Associates already have passed
bomb-grade nuclear fuel to the Qaeda, and we are in for the
worst," warns Paul Leventhal, founding president of the
Nuclear Control Institute.

It's mystifying that the administration hasn't leaned on
Pakistan to make Dr. Khan available for interrogation to
ensure that his network is entirely closed. Several experts
on Pakistan told me they believe that the administration
has been so restrained because its top priority isn't
combating nuclear proliferation - it's getting President
Pervez Musharraf's help in arresting Osama bin Laden before
the November election.

Another puzzle is why an administration that spends
hundreds of billions of dollars in Iraq doesn't try harder
to secure uranium and plutonium in Russia and elsewhere.
The bipartisan program to secure weapons of mass
destruction is starved for funds - but Mr. Bush is
proposing a $41 million cut in "cooperative threat
reduction" with Russia.

"We're at this crucial point," warns Joseph Cirincione of
the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "And how we
handle these situations in the next couple of years will
tell us whether the nuclear threat shrinks or explodes.
Perhaps literally."

The steps that are needed, like negotiating seriously with
North Korea and securing sites in Russia, aren't as
dramatic as bombing Baghdad. But unless we act more
aggressively, we will get a wake-up call from a nuclear
explosion or, more likely, a "dirty bomb" that uses
radioactive materials routinely lying around hospitals and
factories. To clarify the stakes, here's a scenario from
the Federation of American Scientists for a modest
terrorist incident:

A stick of cobalt, an inch thick and a foot long, is taken
from among hundreds of such sticks at a food irradiation
plant. It is blown up with just 10 pounds of explosives in
a "dirty bomb" at the lower tip of Manhattan, with a
one-mile-per-hour breeze blowing. Some 1,000 square
kilometers in three states is contaminated, and some areas
of New York City become uninhabitable for decades.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/10/opinion/10KRIS.html?ex=1080203251&ei=1&en=34c8a3d84ffec196