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Hattip to Jammie Wearing Fool. The above could of course just be an official who fumbled an interview with a reporter eager to turn a routine story into something more, or it could be someone who inadvertently told some very alarming truth:
My bet is he simply fumbled the interview, but this is a reminder of one very sad fact:Â the jihadis only have to succeed once in setting off one wmd here in the US to produce casualties that will likely dwarf what this nation experienced on September 11th.
In the short term dirty bombs of most forms are not likely to produce mass death, rather mass panic is more likely.
In the longer term there are some serious health concerns depending on the type of dirty bomb, and the problem of decontamination of a dirty bomb impacted area would be likely as involved, expensive, and time consuming as the WTC clean up.
Now if there is a true nuclear weapon, that is a much greater threat, but not a very probable one.
Chemical weapons seems to be the WMD most likely to be able to cause both mass death and be obtained by terrorists. Biologicals are less probably but equally or more dangerous.