With the Taliban destroyed, Osama bin Laden on the lam and month after month passing without a repetition of Sept. 11, it has gotten easy to be complacent about the terrorist threat. Or it had until Monday, when the Justice Department announced that last month, at O’Hare International Airport, authorities arrested a former Chicago street gang member and suspected Al Qaeda operative who was allegedly involved in a plot to detonate a radioactive “dirty bomb” on American soil.
The notion that you might have stood in line at the metal detector behind one of bin Laden’s henchmen is a powerful reminder that the war against terrorism is still being waged–and for very high stakes.
If the case turns out to be as it’s described by Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft and others, the much-maligned FBI and the CIA deserve credit for making a hugely important save. By these accounts, the scheme was hatched when Jose Padilla (also known as Abdullah al Muhajir) traveled to Afghanistan and Pakistan, where he was trained in explosives and related skills. It was derailed, they say, through the sort of intelligence work that the two agencies have been accused of failing to do to head off the Sept. 11 attacks. FBI Director Robert Mueller says the CIA played a big role in uncovering the plot.
The apparent good news is that our government was able to detect a major terrorist operation and prevent it from being carried out. And with Padilla in custody, he may be persuaded to spill other vital secrets.
The bad news–though it is not really new–is that those enemies are working on a form of nuclear terrorism. A “dirty bomb” is not an atomic device and wouldn’t unleash the sort of devastation suffered by Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But building one would be far easier. It involves wrapping radioactive materials around a conventional bomb, with the goal of dispersing radiation across a large expanse. The number of immediate deaths would not be in the tens or hundreds of thousands, unlike an atomic blast, though the casualties could be considerable.
The real impact, however, would be to expose large numbers of people to dangerous levels of radiation and to extensively contaminate buildings and streets. Some people would suffer an increase in the risk of dying from cancer, and the area affected would be uninhabitable for decades. If one of these explosions took place in a major city, it could sow panic, while causing severe disruption not only to the local economy but the national economy as well.
What can be done to combat this danger? Good intelligence and police work are obviously indispensable. But they can only do so much. The problem is that radioactive material can come from a lot of sources–from hospitals, laboratories, nuclear reactors and even scrap yards. Many of these, at the moment, are not secure facilities. Washington needs to require the guardians of such material to do more to keep it out of the hands of terrorists.
Better detection equipment is needed at ports, harbors and other entry points, as well as greater police vigilance. And in case worst comes to worst, emergency personnel ought to be trained in treating the victims of a dirty bomb attack. This is not the worst terrorist threat Americans face, but it’s scary enough. It demands action commensurate with the harm it could cause.
