The threat posed by terrorists letting off a radioactive bomb is far less than dishonest politicans would have us believe, argues Sandy McNeill

When Gordon Brown recently defended the UK presence in Afghanistan as preventing attacks on British streets many might have felt he was over-hyping the level of threat to justify a dubious policy commitment. For all Brown's faults however his Afghanistan comments are positively reasonable compared to the claims about the nature of extremist threats by his predecessor Mr. Blair or even the more recent Jacqui Smith.

Both Smith and Blair are responsible for a gross distortion of danger of harm from a particular perceived threat: dirty bombs.

As the Times reported earlier this year, Jacqui Smith essentially admitted there is a greater threat of a dirty bomb attack than there was five years ago due to destablised states like Iraq.

If this is true you may be relieved to know that dirty bombs are not nearly as bad they sound. In fact they are nowhere near as dirty as the politics that exploits their public misperception for self-interested gain. Allow me to explain.

The idea of "dirty" or "radiocative" bombs sounds pretty horrific to most people. It raises the image of a mini-mushroom cloud rising over Trafalgar Square, or parts of London being made into radioactive waste zones. When dirty bombs entered the public imagination after the attacks of September 11th media reports encouraged this nightmarish vision.

Something had to be done. What if a suicide bomber set one of these bad boys off in a major British city? How could we live with ourselves for not taking steps to prevent them? Luckily the Blair government's Anti Terrorism Crime and Security Act 2001 had the answers - Indefinite detention of foreign nationals without charge or trial.

This new threat wasn't like IRA car bombs of the past. The scale of "dirty bomb" equipped super-terrorists was so great certain civil liberties had to be put aside for some groups to protect the right of the majority not to be irradiated. However the snag with this was dirty bombs don't really work, or at least not as they are advertised to work.

Dirty bombs, or to give them their technical name Radiological Dispersive Devices (RDDs) aren't really any more harmful than normal bombs. Dr. John Stone, Senior Lecturer in the Department for War Studies, King's College London, is one of a host of experts to identify the most physically dangerous thing about a dirty bomb is the conventional explosive in it.

Stone explained to The Samosa that getting powerful enough radioactive material in large enough quantities to cause some harm would be extremely difficult to achieve. One reason is that this type of very potent substance is extremely tough to get hold of, even for well-financed and committed extremists.

If extremists could get their hands on highly radioactive material it would require very heavy shielding to protect them from its radiation long enough to be deployed. This shielding would weigh so much that it would make such a weapon virtually impractical to transport or deploy.

RDDs made from less radioactive material would be more achievable but also harmless to the point of being useless. As long as there was a fairly prompt clean-up operation of the area effected the lasting physical harm would be minimal. Dr. Stone says, "the differences in terms of life expectancy are marginal".

In fact the most dangerous aspect of an RDD attack would be the public reacting as if it was a serious threat to life. A panicked stampede from an area where an RDD had gone off, crushing people in the process would very likely hurt or kill a lot more people than the bomb. More broadly people might not be willing to work or visit an area where an RDD had gone off due to a misplaced fear of unsafe radiation levels.

In the 2006 trial of Dhiren Barot, called the "Dirty Bomb Plotter" in much of the media, the prosecuting counsel’s comments were in tune with this. As the Guardian reported, Edmund Lawson QC said that according to expert evidence, a dirty bomb would have been unlikely to cause fatalities by itself, but was designed to raise widespread panic and social disruption.

As it was Barot never actually got close to assembling, let alone deploying an RDD. If he had managed to do so any panic or disruption would only have been worse because of those politicians and journalists who had exaggerated the threat of such an attack.

Politicians such as Tony Blair, David Blunkett and Jacqui Smith may not have come up with the most lurid portrayals of how harmful dirty bombs might be, the media have done that job. What they have totally failed to correct is the widespread public misperception of the danger.

It's hard to imagine that these senior politicians themselves are also ignorant about how weak these weapons actually are. Even a semi-competent Whitehall security briefing should tell these politicians Dirty Bombs are only really effective in creating panic. So why have the Smith’s and Blunkett’s of this world kept raising this phantom threat?

Adam Curtis's much-lauded documentary "The Power of Nightmares" provides a compelling possible motivation in this case. Curtis argues that contemporary politicians abandoned providing a positive vision of the future to mobilise political support in the 1990s. Instead they took up a managerial role.

The shocking events of 9/11 gave the political class an opportunity for a new vision. By over-hyping the sense of danger from violent extremism they can gain greater political legitimacy as the valiant protectors of public safety. Curtis calls this “the rise of the politics of fear”.

That may sound like conspiracy-theory guff to some. In the context of the gross exaggeration of the threat posed by dirty bombs it becomes more persuasive. This overstating of dirty bombs power may or may not be done for cynical reasons. What is definite is how irresponsible it is.

Dr Stone says, "when the media, and politicians keep hammering on about dirty bombs they could actually be encouraging the terrorists, who see this as such a source of fear for us.". Government and media who hype up the dirty bomb threat are providing fuel for the public panic that would be the main negative impact of such an attack. They would in effect be helping the bombers.

This misrepresentation also undermines the credibility of those posing to protect the public from the genuine threats to their safety. When it provides legitimacy to dubious security legislation that often creates further alienation and resentment against the security forces it makes such misrepresntation even more irresponsible.

It's dirty politics and those like Smith who do not take a stand and educate the public to the true nature of the threat are doing a dirty job which doesn’t need doing. So whatever other gaffes the Prime Minister makes, let's hope he doesn't engage in the same irresponsible rhetoric Blair and Smith did over phantom dangers like dirty bombs to make himself a robust protector of the British public.

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