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Dirty Business Since September 11 the scare mongering Industry has gone into overdrive. If it isn't terrorist crashing planes, It's some Bio-crazies armed with Anthrax or even smallpox. Then there's the "Dirty Bomb", an explosive device surrounded by radioactive material designed to spread fear and panic through city centers by coating them with fine, hazardous dust. So is the world becoming more dangerous? Are there highly motivated groups out there, Trying to achieve it's aims by killing people in the western-style democracies? Is there a Al-Qaida Monster,Hiding under America's Bed? The media are not the only ones to cash in on the resulting fear. Companies wanting to sell their latest products are happy to perpetuate scare stories. It's Clear Our very own government,and politicians were eager to push through their authoritarian policies and agendas.ie,("the Patriot Act"). Terrorism experts have known for years that people can create nuclear havoc without building an atom bomb. There's a plethora of places to find radioactivity. Your Household smoke detector, and a host of medical and Industrial Equipment, uses americium-241. The gamma rays that sterilize food and check industrial welds come from cobalt-60, while gamma rays from caesium-137 are used in instruments that measure everything from moisture to rock strata. This is all very well until these devices become junk and the radioactive bits get lost. An insane amount of caesium is missing in the former Soviet States. But this is not the only worry: People died in Brazil in 1987 when they found caesium in discarded hospital equipment;Caesium from a medical source turned up in North Carolina in 2002.Discarded Cobalt was found in Uganda in April of 2002. the stuff is everywhere.The US and Russia along with the International Atomic Energy Agency,have started the process to remove the hazardous waste all over the world,Of course,Government and UN agencies have admitted that there's enough missing Caesium-137 and other lethal leftovers around to make dirty bombs. the race is on to find and recover them.The US released 25 million$ of emergency funding to help comb the former Soviet Union,by far the world's richest source of abandoned radioactive material. Experts used to dismiss the possibility that terrorists might try to deploy dirty bombs,which would scatter radioactive material over a large area. No group has ever used one.And apart from the blast itself,Dirty bombs kill relatively few people,although the radiation can cause cancers years later.When the IAEA admitted that an unknown number of lead-lined cases from the former Soviet Union,which each originally contained a massive 130,000 gigabecquerels (GBq) or 3500 curies of caesium-137, are unaccounted for.Built in Moldova in the 1960's,the Soviet cases each hold 40 grams of Caesium.They were housed on trucks and used to irradiate seeds to prevent germination, or induce mutations for crop breeding."After the fall of the Soviet Union,the trucks were taken,"says Abel Gonzales,head of radiation and waste safety at the IAEA.No one knows what happened to the cases.But given caesium-137's half-life of about 30 years,they still contain at least 52,000 GBq each.Worse, the caesium was powdered,making it easier to pack into a dirty bomb than solid material.And there are plenty of other radioactive stashes at large.Vials containing 13,000 GBq of caesium were stolen from Russia in 2001,Officials are still searching for 100 abandoned strontium-powered batteries from Russia,each containing up to 1,500,000 GBq. Michael Levi of the Federation of American Scientists, Worked out how much land would be contaminated by the explosion of a bomb containing 10 kilograms of TNT and a pea-sized 74 GBq of caesium-- the amount in a lost medical gauge that turned up in N. Carolina in 2002.His conclusions,were that airborne caesium would pollute a swathe of city a kilometer and a half long to levels that would produce one extra cancer in every 10,000 people who kept living or working there. At that level,US law requires long--term evacuation or demolition if decontamination is impossible.The psychological and economic impact would be enormous. But just one of the Soviet caesium sources would be enough to make seven bombs of 7400 GBq each--100 times as radioactive.So the hunt is on,Any radioactive material recovered will be locked up. probably in the Mayak nuclear reprocessing center in the Ural Mountains. WebSy't---- (New Scientist,2002./NTI 2007) The acronym Shield : SDI to MDS Popularly Known as Star Wars, the Strategic Defense Initiative was launched By President Ronald Reagan on 23 march 1983. It caught most of his scientific Advisers off guard. The most prominent idea involved deploying beam weapons on satellites. Edward Teller, the Father of the H-bomb, proposed using thermonuclear explosions to "pump" energy into rods of exotic material. Just before they vaporized, these would emit directed X-ray laser beams. That didn't work and so the focus shifted to "hit-to-kill" missiles, some known as "smart rocks" because their goal was to bang into incoming warheads in space. Computer scientists furiously debated the feasibility of writing reliable software to detect incoming warheads or to target counter- weapons at them. The Strategy was revived by George Bush Jr. on may 1st 2001 and renamed the Missile Defense System, aka Son of Star Wars. Bill Clinton had authorized preparatory work, with an anti-missile site in Alaska and missile-detecting radars there and in California, Massachusetts. Thule in Greenland, and Fylingdales in Britain. This System would use Hit-to-kill Missiles. John Pike of the Virginia-based independent defense consultancy GlobalSecurity.org comments: "We're returning to those thrilling Star Wars days of yeteryear-- Space-based weapons, Sea-based weapons, everything-that-isn't nailed-down-at-both-ends weapons. They have basically resurrected almost every program that Reagan proposed and some more his people didn't think of." These include powerful lasers fueled by chemical reactions and mounted on areoplanes or satellites, sea-based missiles to shoot down enemy ballistic missiles in their "launch phase", and "brilliant pebbles"---Semi-autonomous satellites that would try to collide with missiles. So will it all work? Any missiles defense faces a grave problem. An opponent can either launch many more warheads, leading to a new arms race---profitable for some, or simply launch hundreds of decoys with each warhead. These could be as simple as balloons with a thin metallic coating. Either way, It's Clear our government has no intention of Informing the public on the billions of dollars they are dumping into wasteful "Missile Defense" programs that will never come into fruition, anytime soon. ----WebSy't more info: Federation of America Scientist, www.fas.org Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, www.winbmdo.com GOODBYE BAR CODES Invisible holograms could replace bar codes in a bid to combat product counterfeiting. Loughborough University spin-off laser optical Engineering says the idea is to etch holographic codes with an infrared laser directly onto the surface of products, such as computer components or CD's. Invisible to the naked eye, the code can only be read with an infrared scanner that emits the correct frequency of laser light. This means the information is contained in the product itself rather than the packaging, like bar codes. Unlike the holograms on credit cards, people won't have to wonder if they're authentic. OH Say can you see,the stars in the GOP? What about the star' used as a symbol?
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