Fast Draw – Sobering Up Too Late

Fast Draw – Sobering Up Too Late

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Arie Egozi

The world is starting to sober up, but is still a step or more behind. We have mentioned here as early as February the danger of ISIS wanting to create a dirty nuclear bomb.

Militants of the Islamic State (ISIS) are planning to use drones to spray nuclear materials over Western cities as part of a hideous “dirty bomb” terror attack, British Prime Minister David Cameron warned on Friday on the nuclear summit which took place in Washington.

World leaders, having sobered up, following Cameron and the US president Obama, are now throwing simulation “war games” in which ISIS is initiating a nuclear attack against the west, thousands are killed, and the city attacked becoming uninhabitable for many years.

The reality has already hit them. Every serious intelligence expert could have told them about this danger over a year ago.

Almost every serious intelligence agency already knows that ISIS is trying acquire basic drones, such as those that can be purchased freely on the internet on sites such as Amazon, in order to eventually use them to transport radioactive materials to large cities in the West – and to carry out terrible attacks which will leave thousands dead. Cameron warned that the chances of ISIS coming by these materials is “too real”. Videos posted lately even show the Jihadi militants experimenting with using these drones.

In one scenario in the simulation, radioactive materials are taken from a medical facility by “insiders” and sold to extremists via a secret network, when they are smuggled into Britain and other Western countries.

According to various reports, ISIS has probably already managed to obtain about 40 kg of low concentrated uranium from the Mosul university in Iraq after taking control of the city in 2014, but the low level of toxicity lowers its effectiveness and causes more panic than actual damage.

Back in February, I-HLS published that concerns over ISIS building a dirty bomb are growing. In recent months intelligence officials are trying to trace those experiments but it seems that the terrorists are several steps ahead of those trying to prevent this from happening.

Fears have been growing ever since it turned out that Iraq is looking from “extremely dangerous” radioactive materials which were stolen last year, and that there is a concern these would fall in the hands of ISIS to be used as a weapon, claimed a report by the Iraqi ministry of environment.

This dirty bomb is called by many “poor man’s a-bomb”. The name does not do justice to the level of damage this bomb can cause. Experts say that an explosion of such a bomb can cause thousands of direct and secondary casualties due to radiation.

A dirty bomb is a regular bomb made up of normal explosives materials along with some radioactive material. The bomb’s explosion causes the radioactive material to spread across a large radius. The losses, experts say, will be caused by the explosion itself, by the radiation, and by the panic spreading out in the area where such a bomb exploded.

Experts say that it takes only basic knowledge of assembling explosives in order to make a dirty bomb. It can be tiny or huge, made up of several hundreds kg of explosives along several dozen kg of radioactive material. A car such as the one carrying the explosives in New York’s times square can hold “a very powerful” dirty bomb, experts say.

And now the West is starting to realize that combining a dirty bomb with a drone, large or small, is a recipe for disaster.

Welcome to the real world.