“Dirty Bomb” Could Be Disastrous, NYPD Official Says

By Jon Fox
Global Security Newswire

MIAMI — Antiterrorism strategists, including those in the White House, have wrongly tended to write off the consequences of a radiological “dirty bomb” attack as insignificant, a former homeland security adviser to President George W. Bush said yesterday (see GSN, June 12).

Richard Falkenrath, who now heads the New York City Police Department’s counterterrorism division, said the detonation of even a relatively simple and small dirty bomb in a dense city could be a “nightmare scenario.”

Terrorists are far more likely to obtain and use a radiological weapon than an improvised nuclear device, which Falkenrath said would produce the “highest consequence attack we can imagine” but remains a low probability threat.

Materials for a radiological dispersal device — a conventional bomb mixed with radioactive material — “are far more accessible.  The weapon is far simpler to construct,” Falkenrath said, speaking at an international conference on the Global Initiative to Combat Nuclear Terrorism (see GSN, July 17, 2006).  “These have a much higher probability of occurring in an American city.”

Still, Falkenrath said his former colleagues at Harvard University and at the White House have tended to discount the threat of such an attack.

They have argued that a conventional explosion is unlikely to cause many casualties and the physical effects of the radiation on the surrounding population could likely be managed.  “So goes the reasoning,” he said, countering that such thinking misses the problem associated with dirty bombs.

“This is a potentially catastrophic threat even if the immediate death count is comparable to a conventional explosive,” Falkenrath said.  The real threat of a dirty bomb is “area denial through contamination.”

Not much radiation would be needed to render an urban area uninhabitable based on government assessments, he said.

“Those thresholds are rather low,” he said.  “You add on top of that the public perception, the fear engendered by radiation and anything that will make a Geiger counter tick and you have the potential to essentially lose a city block or lose a transit hub.”

In the aftermath, it might not be as a simple as hosing down the sidewalk and decontaminating the area.  Of the nine radiological materials generally considered of concern for use in dirty bombs, at least one can bond with concrete and other building materials.

Cesium 137, a radioactive alkali metal used in industry and medicine, could form chemical bonds with the infrastructure of the city itself.  “You can’t just rinse it off.  You have to tear it down and rebuild it,” Falkenrath said.

Given the density of New York and the limited redundancy in its transit system, losing one block or one link in the network, a tunnel for instance, could be devastating even if there is no loss of life.

“If we lose one of them, if it is uninhabitable and we have to wall it off and rebuild it, it is a nightmare scenario for us,” he said.  “We don’t have the luxury of writing off the higher probability, lower consequence threats as Washington occasionally will.”

While criticizing the intense focus on Capitol Hill on scanning shipping containers for radiation, Falkenrath called for Congress to preserve funding for a pilot program designed to surround New York City with the same detection technology being deployed at U.S. ports.

The White House’s proposed fiscal 2008 budget called for the Securing the Cities initiative to receive $40 million in funding to continue exploring the possibility of deploying radiation detection equipment in and around urban areas (see GSN, April 2).

A preliminary spending plan approved by the House Appropriations Homeland Subcommittee, however, cuts that funding in half.

“It would be real shame if Congress shortchanged this promising initiative and New York City again,” Falkenrath said.

In New York, a deployed network of radiation detectors could alert officials to a van or a truck carrying a nuclear or radiological device, a delivery system that Falkenrath sees as more likely than a metal shipping crate being off-loaded on Staten Island.

In a van or a truck, “it’s real easy to have plenty of payload, it blends into the background perfectly and you’re not off-site … at an industrial complex.  You’re right downtown where everyone works,” he said.  “That’s the delivery vehicle we’re worried about most.”

Rather than focusing on detecting radiation in trucks or vans on city streets, or worrying about general aviation planes carrying devices or small seagoing vessels, “it seems to me Washington and the United States broadly is fixated on one particular delivery system for reasons I don’t fully understand,” Falkenrath said.  “They seem fixated on international shipping containers, and I don’t know why.”

Such a delivery vehicle is not particularly attractive from a terrorist point of view, he said (see GSN, May 25).

Back to top
About Newswire  |  Contact National Journal  |  Re-Use Guidelines © Copyright 2008 by National Journal Group, Inc. The material in this section is produced independently for NTI by National Journal Group, Inc. Any reproduction or retransmission, in whole or in part, is a violation of federal law and is strictly prohibited without the consent of the National Journal Group, Inc. All rights reserved.