Please note that all blog posts before 8 April 2007 were automatically imported from LiveJournal. To see the comments and any LiveJournal-specific extras such as polls and user icons, please find the source posting at http://brianenigma.livejournal.com/2001/09/I just had an old fact return to my head. It seems that with a given amount of plutonium–say, a handful–you can do MORE damage and destruction by filing it into a powder and deploying it airborne than you would making a bomb.
All it takes is one grain of that plutonium to get in your lungs…to get into your water supply and down into your bladder…to get in your stomach…and you’re fucked. People were concerned decades ago about the watches that have radium paint to mark the numbers on the dial. That’s a small fraction of a very weak isotope behind metal and leaded glass. Plutonium is many many many times more radioactive. You get a speck of that inside your body, and your body doesn’t know how to get rid of it. It will instead decide it needs to make your hair fall out, your skin to crust, and your bowels shat out inside-out. Cataracts…fingernails falling out…blood seeping out of your eyes, your orifices, your skin…
All this came back to me last night. Shortly thereafter, I started thinking of crop dusters and stockpiles of missing nuclear materials in Russia.
