Cosmic Iguana - Voice of the Evil Doers

You probably missed this when it first came out in 2002 but since then time has proved the accuracy of their usefulness as a scare tactic, at least as far as BushCo is concerned. From SCIENCE NEWS, reposted today by WRH:

The latest post-9/11 disaster scenario making news headlines is the "dirty bomb." The theoretical situation occurs when terrorists get hold of radioactive material from a hospital or food-irradiation plant, attach it to an explosive, and detonate the bomb in an urban area. The explosion spreads the radioactive material all over a city and exposes the population to radiation. Yet according to a health physicist, the biggest health risk from a dirty bomb would not, reassuringly, be cancer, but something more preventable: panic.

A dirty bomb "would probably not lead to many, if any, cancer deaths," says Andrew Karam, radiation safety officer of the University of Rochester in Rochester, NY. But if the public receives unreliable or exaggerated information about dirty bombs, Karam worries that "the use of a radiological weapon would result in many deaths in traffic accidents as people flee the scene, and possibly stress- and anxiety-induced heart attacks."

The radiation dose from a dirty bomb would likely be relatively small, says the Rochester health scientist. Even a potent dirty bomb, consisting of a radioactive cobalt-60 rod used for food irradiation, for example, would deliver an average dose of a few tenths of a rem for people within a half-mile radius, he says. (A rem is a unit of radiation dose.) This compares to the 0.3-0.4 rem average dose per year that a person receives from natural sources... [*]

Yes, we can thank Colin Powell [*], and John Aschcroft who protected us from Jose Padilla, who never even made one [*] and Tom Ridge [*] all of whom contributed to the Bush Reign of Terror War on Terror by contributing to this myth, and then resigned to live happily ever after with their millions.