- 6/24/2025
In this important film, Nova goes beyond the alarming headlines to answer critical questions: How easy is it to make a dirty bomb, and how does it differ from a conventional nuclear bomb? What would happen if terrorists were to explode a dirty bomb in the middle of London or Washington, DC? How dangerous is the fallout from a dirty bomb? What are the long-term effects and how well do we really understand them? And how can lives be saved if one explodes?
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TVTranscript
00:00We can't claim we haven't been warned.
00:13In 1995, Muslim rebels from Chechnya directed a TV reporter to a park in central Moscow.
00:22The package she found contained a small amount of explosives and something else.
00:30Cesium-137, a radioactive isotope.
00:35This was the first known appearance of what has become a household word, a dirty bomb.
00:44An unfolding terrorist plot to attack the United States by exploding a radioactive dirty bomb.
00:52A so-called dirty bomb is basically just a conventional explosive with a radioactive core to it.
01:00You're going to broadcast the radioactivity over the area of the conventional explosive.
01:06In Al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan, there were discovered a number of documents dealing with the methodology of putting together the most deadly kind of dirty bomb imaginable.
01:20What would happen if terrorists were to explode a dirty bomb in the center of a major city?
01:27The typical wind speed is about 10 kilometers an hour, and that's roughly how quickly the particles are going to move.
01:56Just blocks away, people would go about their business unaware of the real danger, invisible and odorless, floating on the wind.
02:07Radioactive material will be deposited on the ground, inside of buildings, on cars that might move around, on people's clothing.
02:14For anyone who remains in the area, any health effects could take decades to appear.
02:20Up to about 200 meters from the blast, if the area were not decontaminated, the risk of cancer would increase by 1 in 10.
02:29Now, the Environmental Protection Agency mandates that contaminated areas be cleaned up so that there is a risk of, at most, 1 in 10,000.
02:40I imagine that there would be a very strong debate in the aftermath of a radiological terrorist attack to determine what area would have to be decontaminated.
02:50Is it a block, 2 blocks, 5 blocks, 10 blocks, at what point do people, even if the government says they are safe, do they feel that it's safe to return?
03:01Mass destruction? Or mass disruption?
03:04Mass destruction? How much of a threat does a dirty bomb really pose?
03:10It seems ridiculous to think that we might demolish or abandon chunks of a city, but in some cases, that will become our preferred approach.
03:24We know terrorists can destroy our buildings.
03:27With a dirty bomb, could they force us to do it?
03:37Dirty Bomb, up next on NOVA.
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04:57The dirty bomb is perhaps the least understood of all terrorist weapons.
05:14We have all heard of it, but few of us know what it would do, or what it wouldn't.
05:20It's often called the poor man's nuclear weapon, but that's misleading.
05:28A dirty bomb is not a nuclear weapon, but it is a real threat.
05:32It is a weapon that could wreak havoc in ways far beyond its physical consequences, and that makes it an ideal terrorist weapon.
05:45The aim of a real nuclear bomb is mass destruction.
05:54Just one can destroy an entire city, as the world saw in Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II.
06:01It took enormous scientific expertise, as well as specially refined uranium and plutonium, for the U.S. to build these early bombs.
06:15Only a handful of countries have managed to follow suit.
06:18A nuclear bomb is still difficult and expensive to build, but a dirty bomb is not.
06:27In many ways, it is low-tech, and that is one of the most concerning things.
06:31The dirty bomb really is not a major technical challenge.
06:37That's because a dirty bomb is just ordinary explosives, mixed with something radioactive.
06:44There is no technological secret to making a dirty bomb.
06:47It just requires the knowledge of making a conventional bomb.
06:51All you need to do to make it a dirty bomb is to add some kind of radioactive material.
06:58The technical term for a dirty bomb is radiological dispersal device.
07:04It disperses radioactivity, invisible, frightening, and misunderstood.
07:10There are many reasons why people are frightened of radiation.
07:13We know it's very harmful, and yet we can't see it, we can't smell it, and we can't feel it.
07:19For terrorists, it is that fear of radiation that makes a dirty bomb so attractive.
07:25In the spring of 2002, the word dirty bomb burst into headlines around the world.
07:37We have disrupted an unfolding terrorist plot to attack the United States by exploding a radioactive dirty bomb.
07:46Jose Padilla is an American citizen, a former Latino gang member who converted to Islam and joined Al-Qaeda.
07:58Jose Padilla apparently went to Al-Qaeda and said, look, give me some money and I'll carry out an operation for you, including a dirty bomb.
08:06Al-Qaeda said, okay, fine, and they gave him $10,000.
08:11It was one of the kinds of operations that Al-Qaeda has been known for in the past, kind of a venture capital seeding operation.
08:20The FBI received a tip-off from a captured Al-Qaeda member and was waiting when Jose Padilla landed in Chicago carrying $10,000 in cash.
08:29Accused of being an enemy combatant, Padilla was placed in a Navy brig without trial.
08:37No evidence against him has been presented in court.
08:41Some question whether Padilla did more than talk about dirty bombs.
08:47But there is other evidence that Al-Qaeda is getting ready to act.
08:59In the fall of 2001, as American-led forces took control of Afghanistan, a discovery was made.
09:12Inside a building once used by Al-Qaeda were some papers.
09:17They contained research on a new weapon of terror.
09:21One of these documents spells out in very great detail how to make a dirty bomb.
09:27The understanding was basically at a fairly advanced physics level.
09:33It is a pretty well thought out scenario on how to make the most deadly kind of dirty bomb imaginable.
09:41British intelligence recently reported that Al-Qaeda might have gone beyond the planning stage to actually build a dirty bomb in 1999.
09:50Sources revealed that Osama bin Laden's top priority was to develop a weapon of mass destruction.
09:58The Taliban provided him with the medical isotopes needed for a radiological bomb.
10:03And that Al-Qaeda built a nuclear laboratory where they worked on a dirty bomb.
10:07No one knows where it went, or how powerful it might be.
10:16A dirty bomb can be tiny, maybe a single stick of dynamite.
10:23It's the radioactive heart, not the explosive, that matters most.
10:27Radioactivity comes from inside nature's tiniest building blocks.
10:36Some atoms of some elements are unstable, and that's where the danger lies.
10:42Every single atom can be thought of as a tiny solar system.
10:47Electrons orbit a nucleus made up of protons and neutrons.
10:51Because protons all carry a positive electrical charge, they repel each other.
10:58In most atoms, there are enough neutrally charged neutrons to balance them out and hold the atom together.
11:05But a radioactive atom is unbalanced.
11:09It will throw off or absorb particles until stability is achieved.
11:14Those subatomic particles and powerful rays of energy given off in the process are called radiation.
11:24Some radiation, such as gamma rays and x-rays, can pass right through solid substances, including the human body.
11:34If radiation pierces living tissue with enough energy,
11:39it can knock loose electrons from the molecules that make up our bodies.
11:42This ionization can trigger all sorts of damage to cells and to DNA,
11:49the software that controls cells.
11:53If the parts of DNA that controls cell division become corrupted,
11:58the cell might mutate and multiply out of control, like these skin cancer cells.
12:05A potentially deadly malignant tumor is born.
12:08Much of what we know about the health effects of radiation
12:14comes from studying the atomic blasts in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
12:20Those who survived suffered an elevated incidence of leukemia,
12:25breast and other cancers years later.
12:27But most of them had been exposed to very high doses of radiation.
12:40What about low levels of radiation, as might come from a dirty bomb?
12:46Some say that any radiation, even tiny amounts, can cause cancer.
12:51Radiation is a very strange thing because, potentially, a very small amount of radiation
12:57could lead to changes that, for example, could trigger cancer in the long term.
13:02All you really need for a disease such as cancer is for one cell to go wrong.
13:06But other scientists disagree.
13:12And the epidemiology of cancer is tricky, because cancer has so many causes.
13:18It may take decades for cancer to appear,
13:21and then the probability that the cancer was caused by radiation instead of something else
13:26is so low that you just can't definitively say
13:28that this man's leukemia was caused by his occupational exposure to radiation,
13:32while this woman's leukemia was something that would have happened anyhow.
13:35There is no doubt that radiation can cause cancer.
13:40The doubt is what level of radiation it takes to cause cancer.
13:45The scientific community, in some respects, is kind of all over the map.
13:49A few scientists would say there's a so-called hormesis effect,
13:52which means that for low levels of radiation, it's good for your health.
13:56So you have one extreme to another.
14:02The risks of low-level radiation are fiercely debated.
14:05But there's no question that high levels are dangerous.
14:10So could terrorists get a powerful enough radioactive source to build an effective weapon?
14:15Dr. Abel Gonzalez is the world's first line of defense against the dirty bomb.
14:34As head of radiation security at the International Atomic Energy Agency,
14:41a bureau of the United Nations located in Austria,
14:45his task is to monitor all types of radioactive material around the globe.
14:51It is a much harder job than tracking weapons-grade material like plutonium.
14:56and uranium.
14:57Following Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there was a big effort in the world
15:02to keep nuclear materials like plutonium and uranium very, very well under control.
15:10This has not happened with radioactive material, with low-grade material.
15:16It was not felt that this was needed.
15:20Everybody knew that you could not do a nuclear weapon with that.
15:24But therefore, why to have that control?
15:26In December 2001, Gonzalez received troubling news.
15:38A situation had arisen that would ultimately show just how real the threat of a dirty bomb might be.
15:44I received a telephone call from the head of my emergency unit, saying to me,
15:50look, something is going on in Georgia.
15:56Reports from this remote corner of the former Soviet empire said that two men were in the hospital,
16:02with terrible radiation burns.
16:05They had spent a night deep in the Georgian forest, beside some small, warm, metal canisters.
16:12That was the first flush that we got.
16:18That could be a serious problem of sources.
16:22Unlike cancer, which takes years to develop,
16:26radiation sickness appears within hours after exposure to extremely high doses.
16:31Radiation sickness has a number of features.
16:34Hair loss, sickness, vomiting.
16:36And this is really because the cells in various organs in your body
16:40have sustained very high levels of radiation, damaging the DNA and other components of the cell
16:45to such a degree that those cells are actually dying.
16:48And if radiation sickness is bad enough, that leads to you dying as a human being.
16:55What could have caused such injuries?
16:56Any source strong enough to produce radiation sickness like this must be very strong indeed.
17:05I was convinced that my people either have drank too much vodka or that they have made a mistake,
17:11for we were absolutely convinced that it was impossible that a source of such an amount of activity
17:17would exist.
17:19An international task force was assembled to find out what had burned the woodcutters,
17:26and to recover the radioactive sources before they could fall into the wrong hands.
17:32The sources exist in regions of real political instability where we know that terrorist organizations operate.
17:40That really leads us to try to secure those as quickly as we can.
17:46The two woodsmen said that they had encountered the metal canisters on a remote mountaintop,
17:51accessible only by a narrow dirt track.
18:00The task force located the objects.
18:03They were lodged behind some rocks.
18:05Radiation detectors indicated that the cylinders contained concentrated strontium-90,
18:11which emits beta radiation.
18:16Beta radiation is a spray of fast-moving electrons
18:19that can pass through thin layers of material, including skin.
18:24When beta particles interact with matter, they generate an intense heat.
18:29Strontium-90 metal has been known to ignite spontaneously.
18:35The metal cylinders were hot enough to melt snow,
18:38and small wonder, because each one contained a substantial percentage of all the strontium
18:44spewed out across Europe during the Chernobyl accident.
18:48For me that was shocking, because I knew the amount of contamination that the Chernobyl accident
18:57has created.
18:58The explosion of Chernobyl's nuclear power plant released huge amounts of strontium-90, iodine-131,
19:07and other radioisotopes, forcing the permanent evacuation of hundreds of square miles in the Ukraine.
19:15Scientists are still trying to calculate the full public health impact,
19:19especially far away from the initial blast, where radiation levels were low.
19:25We have good data that a number of children, maybe most 2,000 children,
19:30developed thyroid cancer as a result of Chernobyl.
19:33But then when you try to look at how many leukemia cases arose from Chernobyl,
19:42it's still unclear how many there are.
19:44It happened in 1986, so it could take several more years, another decade or so,
19:50for some of these leukemia cases to show up.
19:52Strontium-90
20:02To protect the recovery crew from direct exposure to this strontium-90,
20:07scientists calculated that no worker should spend more than 40 seconds near the canisters.
20:12When the whistle blows, a replacement is sent in.
20:27It took 25 men working in these short shifts to secure the deadly canisters inside a lead-lined
20:34drum.
20:35For me, it was very nervous times until my people called me and said, the source is secure.
20:52Back in Vienna, Dr. Gonzalez scoured scientific literature, trying to find information about
20:58these powerful radioactive canisters.
21:02In an obscure Soviet manual dated 1983, he found plans for a kind of generator that
21:08could run for decades without refueling.
21:12Placed in remote locations, these canisters could power lighthouses and navigational beacons
21:18for airplanes.
21:20They were fueled by pure strontium-90, producing an internal temperature of over 800 degrees
21:27and converting that heat into electricity.
21:30This was open in a Pandora box.
21:34What is all this about?
21:36How many we have of these?
21:38From where we can get information?
21:40It quickly became clear that the Soviets had built thousands of these generators.
21:46It meant the ingredients for a dirty bomb were all over the former Soviet Union.
21:56Atomic agency inspectors turned up other strange devices.
22:01Mounted on trucks, these objects were part of a vast and forgotten attempt to make Soviet
22:07farming more productive.
22:09Blasting seeds with radiation stopped them from germinating, allowing them to be stored longer.
22:15The substance that produced the radioactivity in these devices was cesium chloride.
22:21This material does not exist on Earth naturally.
22:25Humans create it in nuclear reactions.
22:27Nuclear reactors produce a lot of cesium-137.
22:33That's a particularly dangerous material.
22:35It poses an external health hazard.
22:37It has a radioactive half-life of some 30 years, so it's around for a long period of time.
22:43Cesium-137 emits gamma rays, packets of pure energy traveling at the speed of light,
22:49even through clothes and skin.
22:54And for anyone building a dirty bomb, cesium chloride has one other especially attractive feature.
23:04Cesium chloride is really a talc powder, like a talc powder, very, very, very dispersant.
23:12Powdery material is exactly what a terrorist intent on contaminating a large area would want.
23:19You know what happens in your home if you open a talc powder box?
23:28After a few hours, you will have talc all over your home.
23:36UN investigators have established that the former Soviet Union is littered with forgotten cesium chloride.
23:43Unfortunately, no one knows whether any of it has already fallen into the wrong hands.
24:01So how much damage could a bomb using Soviet cesium chloride actually do?
24:05To find out, a team of scientists has devised a hypothetical dirty bomb scenario.
24:15The fact is that we have to consider our technical threshold here is much lower.
24:20You can decide it is.
24:21It's the kind of challenge that we can be.
24:23What are the explosion problems?
24:24It's the kind of challenge that we can be.
24:25It's the kind of challenge that we can be.
24:26Enviros is a British consulting firm that assesses environmental risks for governments
24:31and nuclear industries around the world.
24:34They have put together a model for a fictional explosion.
24:38The results were cross-checked by American experts.
24:43Typical wind speed is about 10 kilometers now.
24:45In this fictional scenario, the dirty bomb contains 10 pounds of plastic explosives
24:58and 74,000 gigabecarels of cesium chloride.
25:04That's the contents of just one Soviet seed irradiating device.
25:09Just a handful of powder, but highly concentrated.
25:12The target?
25:17Trafalgar Square, the traditional heart of London.
25:27The terrorists are driving the van.
25:30They're already suffering from the effects of radiation sickness.
25:33They didn't bother to shield themselves while handling the cesium that went into the bomb.
25:37But if we know one thing about al-Qaeda, it's that the fear of death is no deterrent.
25:46When a group is willing to die handling this kind of material,
25:49then there really aren't any limits on their ability to carry out a nightmare scenario.
26:04The blast could kill perhaps 10 people immediately, including the terrorists.
26:25But the true threat of a dirty bomb lies in what would happen next.
26:34The simple buoyancy of the air that's been heated by an explosion may carry the radioactive material
26:39perhaps tens of meters up into the air.
26:41If we're talking about wind speeds of meters per second, five meters per second perhaps,
26:56then to go 100 meters, that's 20 seconds.
26:58To go a kilometer, that's only a minute or so.
27:00Within two minutes, the radioactive plume has traveled about 10 blocks,
27:07past government buildings to the prime minister's house.
27:11In another minute, it will cross the Thames River.
27:15It will take just half an hour for the cloud to reach London suburbs, six miles east.
27:20We've got contaminated air moving across a section of London, and in general,
27:27nobody would be aware that that contamination was there.
27:31As the smoke cools, specks of dust and ash would lose their buoyancy and fall.
27:37The cesium chloride would bind with moisture in the air and with the falling particles.
27:43People on the ground would be unaware of the gathering danger around them.
27:46The good news is that there would be few immediate health problems.
27:53The radioactivity in this hypothetical dirty bomb would disperse so quickly
27:57that no one is likely to get a strong dose.
28:01Any radiation sickness, vomiting, burns, hair loss, like those Georgian woodcutters, is highly unlikely.
28:09Instead, Londoners will face a different problem, a long-term one.
28:15The radioactive contamination in varying degrees within their city.
28:21Particles will lodge between paving stones.
28:25Tiny amounts of cesium will remain in the grass and soil.
28:34Unless it's cleaned up, this radioactivity will stay in place for decades.
28:38The levels would be highest right at ground zero.
28:47Within 200 yards of the blast, radioactive contamination would reach 160 millisieverts per year.
28:54We are really talking about very significant increases in radiation here.
28:58This is 80 times the normal background level of radiation.
29:02When calculating the risks of radiation, scientists take as their starting point
29:07the natural background radiation we receive every day.
29:11From cosmic rays, from trace uranium under our feet, from potassium in the food we eat.
29:19Right now, I've got my radiation meter turned on,
29:23and I'm just holding this out in air because it's measuring all of the radiation that's in this room from natural sources.
29:29Some of that is potassium 40 from the potassium in our bodies.
29:33One one-hundredth of a percent of potassium is naturally radioactive.
29:36That's the second largest source of background radiation for any of us.
29:40Radiation and radioactivity are part of our environment.
29:43We evolved to live with it.
29:44Our bodies have natural defenses against radiation,
29:49but most scientists agree that levels 80 times higher than normal could easily overwhelm them.
29:56There is little controversy about levels of radiation this high.
30:00If the contaminated area is not cleaned up,
30:03anyone who stays could receive added damage to their DNA.
30:07The problem that would arise would be that in the longer term,
30:11these people would have an increased risk of cancer due to that radiation exposure.
30:19Every day spent in the target area could mean more DNA damage and more risk of cancer.
30:26A very important thing to bear in mind about cancer is that it's a disease that evolves over time.
30:32And in order for a cell in your body to become fully cancerous,
30:35it's got to accumulate multiple mutations.
30:39Low levels of radiation over a considerable period of time
30:43can slowly, gradually cause those mutations to take place.
30:47Using a standard formula, it is estimated that radiation levels of 80 times background
30:54could lead to one case of cancer for every seven people who continued to live and work here.
31:00If the contamination were heavy enough,
31:02there might be a cancer time bomb ticking away in Trafalgar Square.
31:07And I think it would be very difficult to justify individuals being exposed to that kind of
31:12additional risk on a day-to-day basis.
31:17Under these circumstances, it's quite clear that the contamination would have to be cleaned up.
31:23Cleaning up radioactive contamination is possible, but not easy.
31:27Abel Gonzalez watched the process first-hand 15 years ago.
31:41Brazilian scrap merchants stole a metal box from a hospital and got more than they bargained for.
31:48It contained a small amount of highly concentrated cesium chloride.
31:54When they captured the source and the powder got out, then the contamination problem started.
32:04The radioactive dust was tracked throughout Guayana.
32:09Nearly 200 people were exposed.
32:11Four would die, including a four-year-old girl who ate a sandwich after playing with the blue powder.
32:21She was buried in a lead coffin in a grave sealed in concrete.
32:25Pavements, squares, shops and bars needed to be scrubbed and scraped.
32:39Contaminated soil had to be dug up and carted away.
32:44Some homes that couldn't be cleaned were taken away piece by piece.
32:50Decontamination took six months.
32:52But cleaning up the city created a whole new problem.
32:57You don't get rid of radioactivity.
32:59You just transfer it to a different material.
33:02So whatever it was transferred to, whether it would be water or some kind of a cloth,
33:08would have to be disposed of still in the way we dispose of radioactive waste.
33:14The Brazilian cleanup generated 6,500 cubic yards of radioactive rubbish.
33:20The radioactive material that created the 5,000 cubic meters of waste was a capsule of this size, a few centimeters.
33:31Multiply this mess by a thousand or two to get an idea of what would happen after an intentional release in London.
33:38A dirty bomb incident using the same radioactive material would produce a much larger contaminated area and a much larger amount of waste simply because in the Guyana case there wasn't even the intent to spread the material widely.
33:54In the dirty bomb, that would be precisely the point.
33:59Our hypothetical dirty bomb would spew radioactive contamination over many square miles, far beyond Trafalgar Square.
34:07But as we move away from ground zero, the caesium particles from the dirty bomb would be more dispersed, and the radiation levels lower.
34:18Three miles from the blast, radiation levels would fall to just 50% above normal background.
34:25There is serious disagreement whether radiation levels this low would cause any health problems,
34:31and about how massive a cleanup effort would be warranted.
34:35Right now we just do not have definitive data to tell whether or not small levels of radiation are harmful, harmless, or beneficial.
34:44In the absence of that information, I think that it's maybe not good policy to be trying to reduce radiation levels to meet a risk when we don't even know where the starting point is.
34:55But current international safety standards are designed to save lives at any cost.
35:02They are based on the cautious assumption that even tiny amounts of radiation can cause cancer.
35:09Those standards would require much of London to be decontaminated.
35:14And that's not all.
35:16In some cases, either the cost or the technical barriers will be prohibitive to decontaminating an area.
35:25And if people aren't willing to accept the radioactivity in that area, the only feasible option will be to abandon that space.
35:39It seems ridiculous to think that we might demolish or abandon chunks of a city.
35:45But in some cases, it may simply be that that will become our choice.
35:51That will become our preferred approach.
35:53In the aftermath of a dirty bomb attack on television the next day, it's going to be non-stop contentious debate.
36:06You're going to have scientists and experts on both sides of the issue.
36:11One side is saying that if it's low-level contamination, we might not have to actually tear down buildings as maybe the guidelines would recommend us doing.
36:21And other people are going to say, yes, we've got to follow these strict guidelines.
36:25We need to tear down the buildings.
36:27And you're going to have people in between trying to sort this out, trying to weigh the cost versus the benefits.
36:32In the United States, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is one of the agencies that sets the guidelines.
36:40The reality is I think there has to be some balance of costs and benefits.
36:45And I think you could set some guidelines for the decision.
36:48But I think it would be inevitable that in the real world situation that you'd have to have some flexibility to exist to the conditions as you find them.
36:59If you were to discover that the costs to reach a particular cleanup level were truly extraordinary,
37:05you may well conclude, well, we'll explore some other option.
37:09But let's imagine a dirty bomb event occurs, say, tomorrow, and then the government says,
37:14well, now we're going to change the guidelines.
37:17And I can imagine the public would cry foul and saying, wait a minute, you're moving the goalpost on us.
37:22And now you're saying, oh, no, no, you know, we don't want to spend that kind of money actually cleaning things up.
37:28One thing we need to do is to have this debate now before there's any kind of dirty bomb event to see if we can perhaps reach some consensus.
37:36I don't know if consensus is possible at this stage, but I think a debate, a dialogue is always healthy.
37:42We have found it very hard to have rational discussions about nuclear materials.
37:50Demoralizing, divisive debates in the aftermath of a dirty bomb will only work to the terrorists' advantage.
37:57Perhaps the best way to keep this scenario from becoming reality is to keep radioactive material out of the hands of those who mean us harm.
38:10The American government is starting to work on the problem.
38:14U.S. borders are watched more closely now than last year.
38:19Ships are being searched.
38:21And sophisticated detection equipment is being installed in some ports and other entry points.
38:28But not all radioactive material comes from outside the country.
38:34There's plenty of it right here.
38:35It's not just Russia, let's put it that way.
38:39I mean, we certainly have responsibilities and problems in our backyard.
38:48812, I'm Britt Whitmire, and you're listening to the Murphy in the Morning Show on 107.5 KCL.
38:54In March 1998, the people of Greensboro, North Carolina, woke up to what they thought was a perfectly normal spring day.
39:0143 Greensboro, 43 Winston-Salem, it's 44 at High Point.
39:06Tim Rice, CEO of a general hospital here, set off for work with a busy schedule of meetings ahead of him.
39:15But it got busier than he ever could have imagined.
39:17I got interrupted from this meeting that I was in, and so I knew it was something important.
39:25One of my physician colleagues said, Tim, the cesium's missing.
39:29And I kind of had to sit there and scratch my head and thought, what is the cesium?
39:32What do we use it for?
39:34Is this a real big deal?
39:35And as I could hear in his voice, he was very concerned and very disturbed.
39:40And that was my first inkling that I've got a problem here.
39:43And from there on, things started to really roll quickly.
39:46The missing cesium was inside 19 tiny metal containers called brachtherapy needles.
39:54These needles are inserted into tumors.
39:57Because doctors know that radiation can kill cells, they focus its destructive power directly onto cancer cells.
40:06The amount of radioactivity involved certainly was significant.
40:1122 giga becquerel has the potential to give someone a fairly substantial radiation exposure.
40:20We were trying not to frighten people, but we were walking around the facilities with Geiger counters.
40:31We were going room by room through the basements, through the crawl spaces, just everywhere we could think of that it could be.
40:39We surveyed the main sewer lines running out of the hospital, and then we began to branch out from there.
40:48Department of Energy helicopters were called in.
40:51They employed special devices capable of sensing tiny amounts of radioactivity, even inside buildings or cars.
41:00We had the aerial monitoring flying low, checking out the remainder of the city, the wastewater treatment plants, the landfills.
41:10We had everything but boats.
41:15The Greensboro Hospital's cesium needles were never recovered.
41:20But the experience has led to an entirely new attitude towards security.
41:25At the time of this theft, and I'm saying theft because I presume that's what it was,
41:31we were securing this in order to protect employees or anyone from inadvertently being exposed to this radioactive material.
41:37After that point, we completely changed our mentality about all of our nuclear substances
41:43and secured them in a fashion to protect anyone from being able to steal them.
41:47Today, people ask me, where is it and how is it stored? I won't tell them.
41:51The missing Brack therapy needles from Moses Cone Hospital have joined 30,000 other items on a list of radiation sources now lost inside the U.S.
42:02One of the paradoxes in this situation we find ourselves in now is that we're surrounded by these sources.
42:11We need them. You can't take an x-ray without radiation.
42:15Ironically, we're relying on radiation more now, a result of increased security.
42:21One source is the x-ray tubes used to screen luggage at airports, but these only generate radiation when they're plugged in.
42:28Because radiation can destroy microbes, the U.S. Postal Service is now employing gamma rays to kill anthrax
42:34and other dangerous biological weapons that might be lurking in the mail.
42:40This same technology has already been used for killing germs in many consumer items.
42:46Many states now have radiation facilities for sterilizing products, whether it's a Band-Aid, whether it's food.
42:53We're becoming, if anything, more dependent on these things in our daily lives.
42:57It's estimated in the United States alone there are some two million radioactive sources.
43:02We need to realize that only a small fraction of those, maybe on order of a couple hundred thousand,
43:08would actually present high security risk.
43:12Local and federal authorities are now trying harder to track radioactive material that might pose a dirty bomb threat.
43:19New instruments are being employed to detect radioactivity inside trucks on the nation's highways.
43:27Detection devices have also been quietly installed at certain entry points into our major cities.
43:33We found in talking to doctors around New York City that they're starting to hear stories from cancer patients
43:37who had treatments that involved radiation implantation, that kind of thing.
43:41So they're slightly radioactive, slightly, ever so slightly.
43:44And there was a car stopped coming in through one of the tunnels into the city just a month ago
43:49because the police detected radiation in the car and it was a woman who had recently had a cancer treatment.
43:55We're watching.
43:56The police are monitoring tunnels for traces of radioactivity.
44:01Detectors are also installed in many scrapyards.
44:05That's how authorities found this industrial gauge that had been thrown in the trash.
44:11They are used in industrial settings for measuring densities of materials
44:16or levels of liquids or other materials in tanks
44:21for determining whether or not the right number of cans is in a case, those sorts of things.
44:28Such gauges commonly contain cesium chloride powder.
44:32But 1,000 times less than a Soviet seed irradiating device.
44:42How much damage could such a small amount of radioactive material cause?
44:48Our scientists have constructed another hypothetical scenario to find out.
44:55In this fictional scenario, the terrorists simply mix the small amount of cesium
44:59found inside the industrial gauge with powder from a store-bought firework.
45:07The target is Washington DC's Metro,
45:12used by half a million commuters every day.
45:14There is a small flash beside the track in one of the tunnels as the mixture ignites.
45:34Almost immediately, a highly effective dispersal mechanism is at work.
45:38The trains.
45:46They push radioactive particles down the track towards commuters.
45:50There won't be any immediate signs that the dispersal of radioactive materials has occurred.
45:59We can't see or hear or taste them.
46:05But the cesium particles would quietly continue to spread.
46:08Radioactive dust would enter subway cars as the doors open.
46:19People could track them on their feet, underneath their shoes.
46:24Trains could move them actively between stations.
46:27While some particles would be carried on to the next stop,
46:36others would move out of the station via the Metro's ventilation system.
46:42How much of a health threat would this pose?
46:44The typical commuter would receive twice the background dose they get in the course of an average year,
46:55but only for a short period, an average of 15 minutes.
47:00That translates into a small increase in their cancer risk, just one in 4,000 by standard conservative estimates.
47:07Individual riders are unlikely to be affected, even if the material remains there for several hours without being disclosed,
47:15simply because any one person doesn't spend all that much time in the station.
47:21But it might be worse for the staff.
47:25After an eight-hour shift, their cancer risk could rise by one in a hundred.
47:31They would have to be carefully monitored, and I'm sure they'd actually want to be monitored for a considerable period afterwards.
47:38Scientists agree that these health risks are manageable,
47:42but the psychological factor may be another story.
47:48The authorities said they were urgently trying to establish the scope of the scale of radioactive contamination.
47:53Senate staffers who travel into the city by Metro through a further dirty bomb attack.
47:58The authorities echo the stay put, don't panic message.
48:01When news of the attack breaks, people in Washington, D.C. would be desperate
48:05to know the extent of the contamination.
48:08The news media comes on and says, a small device has exploded in Washington.
48:13What is the reaction of the populace? How do you control that? What do you say to them?
48:17Do you say a lot? Do you say very little?
48:19Officials stressed the need for calm.
48:21I think initially, people would get the hell out. Emergency workers would have to deal with the
48:26real peril from just panic. And that's something that presumably, hopefully,
48:33city emergency planners are working on right now, is how do you deal with that?
48:37You probably have more deaths due to traffic accidents than you would from ionizing radiation.
48:46It could be hard for authorities to provide answers as fast as people want.
48:52Contamination could be patchy, high in some parts of the metro, low in others,
48:57making it difficult to be sure immediately how serious the attack had been.
49:02It may be unclear for perhaps some period of time exactly what the radioactivity was,
49:09how much there was of it.
49:12And that short period of uncertainty could be enough to fuel our fears.
49:17The purpose of a dirty bomb will be to terrorize people. And the reason why people will be terrorized
49:24will be because they think that an incredibly small amount of radiation can give you cancer.
49:28I don't know that many people would make the distinctions between a small radioactive source
49:34and a larger radioactive source. Those distinctions may be totally lost on the population. So for that
49:40reason, even the smallest of radioactive sources, if used in a dirty bomb scenario, could be very disruptive.
49:49The cesium chloride released in Brazil was an amount similar to that in our subway scenario,
50:00enough to fill a cigarette lighter. But crowds of fearful residents took to the streets.
50:06This became a soup of panic. More than 100,000 people, 10 percent of the city's population,
50:18filled a stadium and demanded radiation screening.
50:21Everybody want to be monitored. Even if you say to them, don't worry, you were very far away,
50:28there is no chance. No, no, I want to be monitored.
50:31Apparently, the press kind of inflamed some fears. They convinced some of the public that the water
50:38supplies were perhaps contaminated. Turns out they likely were not. So that led to even more people
50:44wanting to be monitored. It turned out that only 200 people had been exposed. But hospitals and
50:51clinics were still swamped. American experts are now trying to draw lessons from Brazil to help us
51:00prepare for the repercussions of even a small dirty bomb.
51:0410 percent of the city's population demanded screening for exposure to radiation.
51:13Those kinds of things are likely to overwhelm our public health system. If 10 percent of Washington
51:20shows up at the hospital, you've got some things to confront.
51:26Current U.S. regulations would require a thorough decontamination of metro stations, tunnels,
51:31and trains to make them safe for employees and to calm public fears.
51:38We would shut down the subway in order to carry out the cleanup. And that would result in massive
51:44inconveniences and economic losses. Tourism could be affected. Trade could be affected.
51:51The losses could drive into the tens or hundreds of billions of dollars.
51:57Maybe this is the real threat from a dirty bomb. It may hurt few, if any. If cleaned up,
52:05it may not cause a single case of cancer. It is not a weapon of mass destruction. But it would still
52:13frighten us and cost us lots of money. And that makes it an attractive tool of terror.
52:19Radiological terrorism can leverage public fear of radiation to take what would normally be
52:27considered a very small amount of radioactive material, something not all that dangerous,
52:32and turn it into a weapon that can have massive psychological and economic impact.
52:39A dirty bomb is, above all, a psychological weapon. But can we use that knowledge to avoid panic,
52:49and to plan for the attack that may lie in our future?
52:53One of the important things that I recognize in this job at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission
52:59is the reality that people are afraid of things nuclear. That means that we have to make an effort
53:07to deal with the reality that the public has those concerns, and try to make sure that our processes
53:13are as open as possible, and that the reasons for our decisions are made available to the public,
53:19so that there isn't a concern that decisions that are adversely affect people are made behind closed doors.
53:25We, as a society, should be trying to educate each other. And the more we can kind of go through that
53:31thought exercise now, the better off we'll be when something happens. And inevitably something will happen,
53:39whether it's radiological, biological, chemical, something will happen.
53:45What is the U.S. doing to protect itself against this threat? On NOVA's website,
54:04hear what one of the nation's leading experts on nuclear terrorism has to say
54:08to order this show or any other NOVA program for $19.95 plus shipping and handling,
54:37call WGBH Boston Video at 1-800-255-9424.
54:56NOVA is a production of WGBH Boston.
54:59major funding for NOVA is provided by the Park Foundation, dedicated to education and quality television.
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55:45And by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you.
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