Dirty bomb

The term dirty bomb is most often used to refer to a Radiological Dispersal Device (RDD), a radiological weapon which combines radioactive material with conventional explosives. Though an RDD is designed to disperse radioactive material over a large area, the conventional explosive would likely have more immediate lethal effect than the radioactive material. At levels created from most probable sources, not enough radiation would be present to cause severe illness or death. A test explosion and subsequent calculations done by the Department of Energy found that assuming nothing is done to clean up the affected area and everyone stays in the affected area for 1 year, the radiation exposure would be "fairly high".

External links

• National Terror Alert Resource Center, National Terror Alert Fact Sheet
• U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Factsheet on Dirty Bombs
• Council on Foreign Relations, Terrorism Q&A: Dirty Bombs
• U.S. Dep't of Labor Occupational Safety & Health Administration, Radiological Dispersal Devices / Dirty Bombs
• American Institute of Physics, "Dirty Bombs" Much More Likely to Create Fear than Cause Cancer
• Federation of American Scientists, Dirty bomb threat analysis
• Health Physics Society, Factsheet
• Health Physics Society, January 2004 study, Dirty Bombs Could Cause Devastating Economic Damage
• CNN, Explosion, not radiation, "dirty bomb's" worst fallout