samadhisoft.com

– Sometimes I see juxtapositions of two stories in the news that really capture my attention.

– I saw one such juxtaposition this last week.

– First, I saw a story about our surveillance society in the Seattle Times by Danny Westneat in which he wrote:

…while trying to convince the skeptical audience that the point is to root out terrorists, not fish for wrongdoing among the citizenry, deputy chief Joe Giuliano let loose with a tale straight out of “Dr. Strangelove.”

It turns out the feds have been monitoring Interstate 5 for nuclear “dirty bombs.” They do it with radiation detectors so sensitive it led to the following incident.

“Vehicle goes by at 70 miles per hour,” Giuliano told the crowd. “Agent is in the median, a good 80 feet away from the traffic. Signal went off and identified an isotope [in the passing car].”

The agent raced after the car, pulling it over not far from the monitoring spot (near the Bow-Edison exit, 18 miles south of Bellingham). The agent questioned the driver, then did a cursory search of the car, Giuliano said.

Did he find a nuke?

“Turned out to be a cat with cancer that had undergone a radiological treatment three days earlier.”

– Well, that’s impressive, if perhaps a bit scary.

– But then consider the article out in the April 2008 edition of Scientific American Magazine. It’s entitled, “Detecting Nuclear Smuggling“. From it, I’ve lifted the following excerpts:

Existing radiation portal monitors, as well as new advanced spectroscopic portal machines, cannot reliably detect weapons-grade uranium hidden inside shipping containers. They also set off far too many false alarms.

Twice in recent years the two of us helped an ABC News team that smuggled a soda can–size cylinder of depleted uranium through radiation detectors at U.S. ports. The material did not pose a danger to anyone, but it did emit a radiation signature comparable to that of highly enriched uranium (HEU), which can be assembled into a nuclear bomb.

Homeland Security was not fond of the ABC exercises and asserted publicly that if NRDC’s slug of depleted uranium had been HEU, inspectors would have identified and intercepted it. We disagree. Our analyses show that when even lightly shielded with lead and steel, depleted and highly enriched uranium have similarly weak radiation signals and would be equally hard to detect by either generation of monitor.

According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, 275 confirmed incidents involving nuclear material and criminal intent occurred globally between January 1993 and December 2006. Four involved plutonium, but 14 involved HEU. More than 40 countries harbor HEU, with the highest risk of theft being from facilities in Russia, other former Soviet states and Pakistan. And a recent Harvard University study concluded that U.S.-funded security work had not been completed at 45 percent of nuclear sites of concern in countries once part of the Soviet Union.

– So we can detect a cat whose had a radiation treatment for cancer whizzing by at 70 MPH but we can’t find a good sized chunk of Uranium in a cargo container being shipped into the US from the Middle East?

– It does make you wonder.