The Village Voice Week of December 12 - 18, 2001
Did Radiation Sickness Kill That Man?
Dirty Bombs, Dying Mules
by James Ridgeway
Washington has traded its fears about a suitcase nuke for worries over "dirty bombs," conventional explosives spiked with radioactive material. Citing its own analysis, the Israel-based Debka.com said in late November that the Pakistani man who was arrested and died in a New Jersey jail had been working as a mule-carrying the makings of a dirty bomb-when he came down with radiation sickness. The telltale mark, according to the intelligence Web site, was gingivitis.
Debka also reported that another man thought to be a nuclear mule was arrested while crossing from Jordan into Israel, with the same symptoms as Mohammed Butt.
Dade Moeller, a former Harvard professor and radiation expert, says gingivitis could have resulted from acute exposure, the kind "Japanese bombing victims" faced. However, he cautioned, Butt would have had other symptoms like vomiting, diarrhea, hair loss, and, most importantly, burns.
Chuck Davis of the New Jersey attorney general's office says no marks were found on Butt's body, so the medical examiner never looked into the possibility of radiation exposure. The man died of a heart attack, Davis says.
Moeller thinks mules would be in danger if they were carrying enough radioactive material to construct a dirty bomb. "I would fear for them," he says. He cites an example from Brazil, where kids got their hands on a highly radioactive capsule originally used for medical purposes. "The children played with the powder because they thought it was pretty," he says. Some of them stashed the stuff in their pockets; several subsequently died.
Some military experts believe a dirty bomb is just around the corner. The International Atomic Energy Commission reports Russia alone has stopped over 600 different attempts to smuggle nuclear material since 1998. In October, The Weekly Standard cited a 1999 Air Command and Staff College report which characterizes dirty bombs as a "credible threat" and predicts that "a radiological terrorist attack will probably occur in the near future."
Yet dirty bombs seem surprisingly ineffective, at least in theory. "Terrorists could use conventional weapons and cause the same amount of damage," said Fred Wehling of the Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. "The fear factor is actually much greater than the potential damage."
Most people aren't taking dirty bombs seriously, but this faulty sense of security is itself a danger, especially to first responders. "Most medical personnel, firemen, and policemen would not be able to tell if they were dealing with a dirty bomb," Wehling explains.
Patrick Garrett, a defense analyst with GlobalSecurity.org, says the U.S. is really the only country with a history of using dirty weapons. During the Gulf War, the armed forces used depleted-uranium bullets. The uranium in these tank shells was not weapons-grade, but it is hard enough that the shells "cut through tanks' armor like butter," Garrett says. The long-term impact is unknown, but Garrett guesses that "whoever survived probably has to deal with cancer."
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