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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   15561 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 7, 2026

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In the 1990s, a lot of smart people were 100% convinced that there would be a rogue nuclear dirty bomb attack in the next decade. The reasoning was something like:

  1. Huge amounts of enriched nuclear material and even many entire nuclear warheads including those on easily-relocated mobile launchers have just gone missing since the fall of the USSR. Nobody knows where many of them are, they vanished, state authority in a lot of remote [former] parts of the Soviet empire is limited or entirely absent.

  2. Terrorists, primarily although not exclusively Islamist, are often quite well funded. Meanwhile, a lot of people who are in practice in charge of these nuclear stocks at the end of the Cold War are poor, unpaid (often for months/years due to the state and economic collapse) and don’t really care who they sell them to.

  3. Making a dirty bomb and transferring it to a city center is relatively easy once you have the material. Certainly it would not be beyond known terrorist skill sets for many Islamist orgs, Al Qaeda, the IRA, Basque separatists and various others who were capable of delivering powerful bombs to urban centers.

Interestingly it hasn’t happened yet, although you never know. There is some discussion about why (it’s actually something we’ve discussed here before), but the consensus is usually some handwaving around the US / CIA making a big effort to find and decommission Soviet silos and other nuclear sites in the aftermath of the Cold War. This is true, but it’s very unlikely they got all of them (and indeed I don’t think the consensus is that they did).

It would be fairly easy to steal some old medical or industrial radioisotopes for a dirty bomb; it's certainly happened accidentally plenty of times.

If you wanted to make an actual nuke, there was a window post USSR where a motivated group could have theoretically filched some poorly guarded fissile material from their nuclear cities.

https://archive.ph/pH1j9

When post-Soviet Russia came into being, in 1991, it inherited a sprawling state industry that had provided a full range of nuclear services, including medical science, power generation, and ship propulsion—as well as the world’s largest nuclear-weapons arsenal and, almost coincidentally, the world’s largest inventory of surplus plutonium and HEU, maybe 600 metric tons. The physical plant consisted of several dozen research, production, and storage facilities, and especially of ten fenced and guarded nuclear cities, which housed nearly a million people, yet were nominally so secret that they did not appear on maps. But within a few years the industry was obsolete, unable to adapt to the new Russian economy, and in steep decline. The buildings were in disrepair, and morale was low because people were not being paid enough or on time. Worse, the nuclear stockpiles were apparently being neglected. There were stories of guards abandoning their posts to forage for food, and of sheds containing world-ending supplies of HEU protected by padlock only. The question now, some fifteen years later, is why terrorists or criminals apparently did not then take advantage. One explanation is that they were ignorant, incompetent, and distracted. Another is that the defenses were not as weak as they appeared.

My understanding is the material in a warhead isn't that dangerous and it's mostly the fission products that cause fallout.

More likely materials would probably be the isotopes used for radiotherapy or irradiaton like cobalt 60 and cesium 137

The core physical idea is:

59Co + neutron flux + energy = vaporized 60Co

Cobalt 59 and energy are dirt cheap compared to neutron flux. Cobalt 60 can be manufactured beforehand by placing 59Co in a nuclear reactor for a few months, or it can be generated on-site by surrounding a nuclear warhead with cobalt 59.

The other argument for "why dirty bombs have never been made/deployed" is because they're useless, and a pain. The assembly (and shielding during it) is tricky, and while terrorists may not care about receiving a large radiation dose prior to detonation, they'll probably care that "it is well-documented by all our official agencies that the radioactivity in dirty bombs is unlikely to seriously hurt anyone."

Interestingly it hasn’t happened yet, although you never know.

What is your take on the (conspiracy) theory that Aum Shinrikyo tested a nuke in the Australian outback?

Thanks for this pointer; I hadn't heard of it. To anyone interested: https://www.colorado.edu/today/1997/05/27/mystery-event-australian-outback-nuclear-blast-earthquake-or-meteorite

Before I reached the end I had already guessed meteorite. Surely several orders of magnitude a more convincing explanation than a nuclear weapon.

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