America's North Shore Journal

The Canadians have misplaced some gear. We think. The Canadian Press has compiled a database that suggests that 75 or so pieces of equipment containing radioactive materials have gone missing.

Ed Morrissey is concerned. I am, too, because I suspect the same compilation for the United States would show hundreds missing.

Remember that the FBI cannot keep track of its guns or its computers. I don’t have the intestinal fortitude to recount all the other examples of our government’s inability to retain material and data. I firmly believe it is a problem here, as well as in Canada.

I could construct a radioactive dirty bomb with a couple of visits to a Walmart or K Mart. The materials exist in every such big box in the country. If you don’t know what, then I probably shouldn’t tell you.

A dirty bomb is effective ONLY as a terror tactic. Most people in our society have an inordinate fear of radioactive materials. I saw this first hand when a nuclear waste dump was proposed for the county where I lived in the late 1980′s. You could remove the word radioactive and substitute the word “cooties” and that nine year old childish reaction would be the one you see.

A dirty bomb might kill a few hundred people, most from the blast itself. Very few would / will die from exposure to radioactivity. The costs in time, money and materials that the public’s fear of radioactivity would demand would be catastrophic. The effort and energy wasted on “decontamination” and future monitoring and compensation for every case of the sniffles for anyone even remotely exposed, as well as their children, would be all out of proportion to the actual damage caused by a dirty bomb.

The flaw in the story is that we really don’t know what is really missing. A self-compiled database is only as good as its data. My work on the Stingy List after the Indonesian tsunami as well as my work on several other such databases tells me that. I didn’t document, in the Stingy List, how much private America gave for tsunami relief. I documented the information I could find, and I know that there are errors both of inclusion and omission in that database. The same holds true for the Canadian work.

Ed’s comments lean towards ascribing terrorist motives to the disappearances. I doubt that. While the news story does not spell out what the devices are, some are certainly materials testing machines which are expensive and highly in demand in the third world. A number of the missing devices, whatever they are, are safe – just mislaid. Some have been sold as scrap, maybe overseas, and that’s that.

Our terrorist enemy is building bombs from gasoline, LP gas and cell phones. They really don’t need to go to all the trouble and risk to make a dirty bomb. They can scare us silly with a Jeep 4×4.

Ummm… you do realize that the computer monitor that you’re reading this on is radioactive?