During the war, they just starved to death, or so the International Atomic Energy Agency has been told. As for the dangerous isotopes that were used on them? Those may well have been stolen and could be irradiating humans accidentally these days. Or worse.
There used to be a whole lot of radioactive material at Tuwaitha. United Nations inspectors identified it, stored it, sealed it. There were roughly 500 tons of uranium, of which about 1.8 tons was low-enriched stuff. There was also cobalt 60 and strontium 90. All in all, the inspectors found some 228 sources of radioactivity.
Then the United States came along. During the war, U.S. troops on the ground didn’t know quite what they were supposed to do at the facility and much of the radioactive material was looted. No one outside the United States government is sure how much–and those inside probably don’t know the precise amount either. The IAEA, the single organization with an inventory and experience on the site, is one of the U.N. agencies that isn’t being allowed back in by the Americans. Nor is the agency being told what the U.S. military on the scene has or has not found–except, privately, that little detail about the dead flies, which were part of an IAEA project.
In the annals of a war ostensibly fought to contain the threat from weapons of mass destruction, this is a very strange turn of events.
Just this week, the Department of Homeland Security ran a five-day exercise called Topoff 2 that started with the explosion in Seattle of a simulated “dirty bomb” theoretically containing the isotope cesium 137. Good choice. There was a lot of that stuff at Tuwaitha (neither the United States nor the U.N. are saying how much), and most or all of it may now be gone.
Cesium, in minute quantities, is fairly common, even in the United States, as part of various electronic gauges and medical devices. It’s used in larger amounts for work in oilfields, where little cylinders of the stuff, gushing gamma rays and handled with great care, are used to determine the density of rock inside the drill holes.
Not least because it’s relatively light and easy to handle, even in protected containers, cesium 137 is often cited as an ideal source of radiation for a terrorist weapon. In fact, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham waxed eloquent on the subject just two months ago during a conference in Vienna–convened at his request–to discuss the growing danger of “radiological dispersion devices.” (Usually that means isotopes blown up with conventional explosives, but the cesium in Iraq was powdered, which means it could be dispersed by the wind. Dirty yes. But no need for a bomb.)
“It is critically important to deny terrorists the radioactive sources they need to construct such weapons,” said Abraham. “The threat requires a determined and comprehensive international response.” Except in Iraq, it would seem. “We must account for and tightly secure these sources wherever they may be,” Abraham said.
Now, let’s just look at that phrase again. The italics on “account” are Abraham’s because, as you may recall, itemizing dangerous weaponlike stuff was what Saddam Hussein and the U.N. inspectors, including those from the IAEA, supposedly had failed to do. “Unaccounted for,” was the damning accusation made again and again before the U.N. and the world by Secretary of State Colin Powell.
As recently as this Thursday, the director of policy planning at the State Department, Richard Haass, said at a press conference in Paris that the reason the United States concluded that U.N. inspections wouldn’t work and that it had to invade Iraq was because there was not enough of an “informational base” for inspectors to find the weapons that Washington knew must be there. The Iraqis didn’t turn over such data willingly, he said, and the U.N.–and the United States–didn’t have it. “We need to put together the record which the Iraqis never provided,” said Haass.
So we went to war because of information we did not have, and now thanks to the looters we may never get it. Such records as did exist–compiled by the U.N. at several hundred sites inspected for nuclear sources, chemical and biological precursors, and so-called dual-use equipment, as well as data on the whereabouts of many of the country’s top scientists–no longer are valid. The U.S. military’s number-crunchers of mass destruction have to work virtually without a baseline.
David Albright, a former U.N. inspector now at Washington’s Institute for Science and International Security, says the Pentagon’s poison-bean counters seem to be approaching the job of looking for weapons on the principle that “Bush said so, Powell said so–let’s find ’em.” And Albright, for one, thinks they may not come up with much. In his experience, the Iraqis during the 1990s had established a clear pattern of destroying anything they thought the inspectors might find, with the idea that Saddam’s scientists could always reconstitute the stuff for him later.
Of course that’s one reason it was worth eliminating Saddam. But the continued presence of inspectors might have achieved the same end. And those scientists still know how to do their jobs, but we no longer know where they are. They, or less-talented types, might also have stolen the stuff they need to make some fearsome new weapons. Stuff like cesium.
Secretary Abraham gave a grim description of the danger the loose nuclear materials pose. After September 11, he said, “We learned that terrorists will strike anywhere, at any time. They will employ technology never intended for use as weapons [his italics, again] to murder thousands of innocent and unsuspecting people in the most shocking and ruthless way … There is nothing they would like better than to cause the panic that the detonation of a radiological dispersion device would create.”
Abraham cited, as almost everyone who talks about this subject inevitably does, the accidental (my italics) dispersal of cesium 137 in Goiania, Brazil, in 1987. It came from an abandoned medical-therapy machine picked up for scrap metal. Only four people died, but 110,000 had to be monitored for radiation exposure, scores of buildings were evacuated and some were demolished. It was the worst nuclear accident in the history of the Western Hemisphere. “I can only imagine how much worse the situation would have been had terrorists dispersed the toxic material rather than innocent, uninformed people,” said Abraham.
A study conducted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington last year suggested a large truck bomb laced with the cesium, if exploded on the Mall near the Air and Space Museum, would contaminate about 20 per cent of downtown D.C. and cause increased cancer and cataract rates to those unfortunates within a few blocks of the blast. Not mass destruction, perhaps, but massive and enduring fear.
Even if the Iraqi cesium (or low-enriched uranium, or strontium, or cobalt) hasn’t fallen into the hands of terrorists or Saddam’s unreconstructed scientists, it could well be making the rounds in the looters’ villages near Tuwaitha and elsewhere. There are, according to the IAEA, about 1,100 sources of radioactivity in Iraq. One site–with 94 sources–is right in the heart of Baghdad. (IAEA officials don’t want to name it for fear looters will go there, too. They say the Americans haven’t told them if it’s secure or not, pillaged or not.) This stuff could slowly be killing Iraqis, or Americans in Iraq, right now. It doesn’t look sinister. Far from it.
Cesium powder looks like pixie dust. Kids just love the way it glows brilliant blue-green in the dark, or even in the shade. Superstitious grown-ups find it magical. In Goiania, according to a 1999 report by the Dallas Morning News, a few children and adults rubbed it on themselves for amusement. Some days later the radiation had burned a hole through one resident’s thigh, ate the skin off another’s hand, and did much worse damage to a man who thought it would stimulate his virility.
Yeah, maybe the dead screwworm flies were lucky. They died quickly.
