dirty bomb

dirty bomb, explosive device designed to scatter radioactive material, hence the adjective dirty. Unlike an atomic bomb’s explosive power, which comes from a nuclear chain reaction, the explosive energy of the dirty bomb comes from ordinary conventional explosives such as dynamite or TNT. When the dirty bomb detonates, it scatters radioactive material that has been placed in close proximity to the explosives.

The dirty bomb is easier and cheaper to build than a nuclear weapon. The radioactive material does not have to be the extremely pure uranium or plutonium found in atomic bombs but could come from any of the many radioactive sources used in medicine and industry.

If a dirty bomb were to explode in a crowded or confined area, people standing nearby might be killed immediately by the explosion. The longer-lasting damage would occur in the area where the radioactive material was dispersed. Depending on the amount of radioactivity present, that area would have to be decontaminated. If that would be too expensive, the affected area would have to be abandoned or even demolished. Many people would likely stay away from the affected area even if the amount of radioactivity was quite low. The dirty bomb, because of its limited death toll but possibly enormous economic and psychological impact, is often called not a “weapon of mass destruction” but a “weapon of mass disruption.”

Security analysts believe that the comparative ease with which the components of a dirty bomb can be obtained make it an attractive option for terrorists or for countries that do not have the resources to build a nuclear weapon. However, the dirty bomb does have significant drawbacks as a weapon. Assembling the bomb requires extensive exposure to radioactive material. To spread over the widest area, the radioactive material would have to be in powder form, but dispersing it over a wide area would mean that the amount of radioactivity at any specific point could be too low to cause any harm.

There have been no recorded instances of a successful dirty bomb attack. Scattering radioactive material as a weapon was first suggested in 1941 by a committee of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences led by physicist Arthur Holly Compton. From 1949 to 1952 the U.S. Army tested explosives designed to disperse radioactive tantalum. In 1987 Iraq tested a bomb filled with radioactive material, but the Iraqi military was dissatisfied with the small amounts of radioactivity produced. In 1995 Chechen secessionists called a Russian television station and claimed that they could build a dirty bomb. As proof, they provided the location of a spot in a Moscow park where they had buried a small amount of radioactive cesium. In 1998 the Russian-backed Chechen intelligence service defused a dirty bomb that had been placed near a railway line in Chechyna; it was believed that Chechen secessionists were responsible for planting it. Jose Padilla, an American who had extensive contact with al-Qaeda, was arrested in 2002 in Chicago on suspicion that he was planning a dirty bomb attack. In August 2004 Dhiren Barot, a British national and al-Qaeda member, was arrested in London for plotting terrorist attacks in the United States and the United Kingdom that would have included the use of a dirty bomb. However, neither Padilla nor Barot had begun assembling the material necessary for a dirty bomb attack. In 2022, during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Russian government accused Ukraine of plotting to detonate a dirty bomb and then blame Russia in a false-flag operation. The Ukrainian government denied the accusation and stated it took the Russian accusation as pointing to the Russians themselves planning a false-flag operation.