On Wed, 26 Mar 2003, Ken Brown wrote:
In the unlikely event that the North Koreans wanted to send a nuke to
the USA, they might not need an ICBM. Just bribe or otherwise subvert a
It would be a shipment running some risk of detection, especially given a
hot warhead, which is difficult to shield. IIRC there's been recently some
false alarm raised by a contaminated scrap metal shipment in the US (scrap
metal is usually contaminated by medical and industrial Co 60 sources
processed by mistake, this batch must have been particularly hot).
Seems dubious to me. A gamma ray spectrometer is neeeded anyway, to pull a very weak signal out of background, so the GRS would very clearly be able to distinguish between gammas from Pu-239 and other bomb radioisotopes and gammas from medical and industrial products.
Several weeks ago I speculated on misc.survivalism that the light planes being seen circling slowly and repeatedly over several U.S. cities, especially some near universities, were N.E.S.T. (Nuclear Emergency Search Team) planes using gamma ray spectrometers to look for radioisotopes. Possibly mapping known locations (*) in university and industrial labs, so that differences in locations could later be spotted.
(GPS plus GRS makes for nice Pete Shipley-style "nuke driving" mapper.)
--Tim May
"To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists." --John Ashcroft, U.S. Attorney General
