Re: NMR combating terrorists

pmlonline@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

> Sam Wormley wrote:
>> What makes you think that there would be a chance to "NMR" the device
>> *before* the perpetratoresourcess it off"?
>
> You scan the device before it enters the plane.

What is this plane of which you speak? If I was trying to bring a nuke into
a country covertly, it would probably go by road, rail or sea!

**LOTS** of shipping containers arriving and leaving every day, and the
ships have well known schedules which they stick to with very good
reliability, put bomb in container, tag if for the appropriate port and set
the timer for the scheduled unloading time, job done.

Seriously, while there are detectors available (Mostly Neutron counters of
various sorts (at least for fissile matter)) most freight probably does not
get examined with this equipment. Furthermore this only addresses fissile
matter, there are lots of potential dirty bomb isotopes that are not easily
detectable thru a few inches of steel.

If it comes to that, just buy a freighter and a cargo of ammonium nitrate,
sail into a inner city harbour and fire a small amount of PETN hidden in
the cargo. Sure its non nuclear, but a thousand tons of ammonium nitrate
will make a decent bang!

Personally, I worry far more about chemical attack then nuclear, it is just
so much easier to pull off and the required precursors can be brought in
the target country, so no border hassle.

Fixating on aircraft as a delivery mechanism does nobody any favours.

Now all of this is well known to **BOTH** the terrorists and the security
services.
You can make this sort of attack difficult by controlling access to the raw
materials, putting stuff on the market deliberately so that you can catch
the buyers (I suspect that **LOTS** of this goes on), and having good
intel.
However that just makes it difficult, and sooner or later if the black hats
keep trying they will pull it off. The security services have to be lucky
every time, the bad guys only have to be lucky **ONCE**.

Personally I cannot help but feel that the suicide bombings are self
limiting (you run out of bombers), and that there are far better places to
spend the resources in terms of lives saved for a given investment.

The public 'security measures' are basically theatre as far as I can see,
they do not seem to me to have anything much to do with stopping terrorist
attacks (not least because they are public and thus open to examination by
the bad guys), the real work is I hope well out of public view.

Just my 5 minute analysis of the situation, which I hope explains why NMR
scanning is not the answer (think of all those steel shipping containers).

Regards, Dan.












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