by James Bone
NEW YORK, a city where it is still rare to have to walk through a metal detector, is gearing up to meet the threat of a radiological “dirty bomb”.
Motorists entering Manhattan through the midtown tunnel now face police officers waving high-tech radiation sensors. Visitors to police headquarters have to walk past bulky radiation detectors at the door. Even unsuspecting deliverymen are at risk of being pulled over by a police car equipped with special monitors. The New York Police Department has begun handing out dozens of pager-sized devices and hopes soon to equip the duty patrol superviser in every precinct.
Already the monitors, first used at last New Year’s Eve celebrations, have been shown to work. Last month an
NYPD counter-terrorism officer chased and stopped a car on the eastern edge of Manhattan after his radiation alarm sounded. The alert proved accurate, but the driver was simply making a legal delivery of fluorodeoxy glucose, a “nuclear medicine” used in diagnosing cancer, to a nearby hospital.
Every fire station in the city is also getting a radiation monitor. Some 300 firemen were trained this month to use the $350 “Radalert” devices, which show readings of alpha, beta, gamma and X-ray radiation.
“It’s all part of increased preparedness for events that could take place,” Nicholas Scoppetta, the fire service Commissioner, explained. “It’s all precautionary.” Similarly, cranes at local ports are being outfitted with radiation detectors to stop terrorists smuggling nuclear material into the area in a shipping container.
Not all precautions are made public. In the aftermath of September 11, the Bush Administration reportedly rushed sophisticated neutron flux detectors and gamma ray sensors to “choke points” in Washington and New York and placed the Delta Force commando unit on standby to seize control of any nuclear material the devices identified.
Members of the Government’s 750-strong Nuclear Emergency Support Team have helicopters and vans known as “Hot Spot Mobile Labs” to search cities for radioactive substances.
A computer simulation created for the New York Daily News by scientists found that a truck bomb laced with 15lb of enriched uranium outside the criminal court building in Lower Manhattan would quickly spread radioactive dust as far afield as Greenwich Village and Brooklyn. While the truck bomb could kill hundreds, the model predicted that only 26 people would die from the radiation. The public, however, remains afraid. One California company has sold hundreds of $149 home radiation detectors since advertising them on television news channels.
Since the arrest of Jose Padilla, the Muslim convert, on suspicion of trying to mount a “dirty bomb” attack, there have been renewed calls for the creation of a national network of radiation monitoring similar to the 178-detector system that operates in France. Eight years ago, the designers of the French system installed a trial unit on top of a US government building in New York’s Greenwich Village for the Department of Energy The department is seeking funding to install another 30 monitors in the city.
Lionel Zuckier, the director of nuclear medicine at the New Jersey Medical School, has proposed linking a system of monitors on the internet to generate a “weather map” of radiation levels. Before September 11, he says, city officials were worried that giving the public access to real-time data could create panic — but now they are ready to take a second look.