Nation states, not only terrorist organizations, consider dirty bombs

the Arab-Israeli relations more generally, is even a deeper question. These important questions, however, have nothing to do with three facts: First, North Korea shipped nuclear materials to Syria; second, not only information gathered by national technical means, but soil and plant samples from around the facilty proved the presence of nuclear materials at the facility; third, the issue is not the ability of Syria to build a nuclear bomb, but its plans to put dirty bombs atop some of its missiles.

Now, talking about dirty bombs and the use of nuclear materials short of full-fledged nuclear weapon, recently released document show that in the early phase of the cold war, the U.S. Army explored the potential for using radioactive poisons to assassinate “important individuals” such as military or civilian leaders. Approved at the highest levels of the U.S. Army in 1948, the effort was a secret part of the military’s pursuit of a “new concept of warfare” using radioactive materials from atomic bombmaking to contaminate swaths of enemy land or to target military bases, factories or troop formations. AP reports that military historians who have researched the broader radiological warfare program said in interviews that they had never before seen evidence that it included pursuit of an assassination weapon. Targeting public figures in such attacks is not unheard of; just last year an unknown assailant used a tiny amount of radioactive polonium-210 to kill Kremlin critic Alexander Litvinenko in London. The heavily censored documents were released as a result of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by the AP in 1995.

The project of using radiological weapons was given final approval in November 1948 and began the following month, just one year after the CIA’s creation in 1947. It appears that the broader effort on offensive uses of radiological warfare apparently died by about 1954, at least in part because of the Defense Department’s conviction that nuclear weapons were a better bet.

The origins of the project lies in the recognition by U.S. scientists that radioactive agents used or created in the manufacturing process of nuclear weapons had lethal potential even short of a full-fledged bomb. The government’s first public report on the bomb project, published in 1945, noted that radioactive fission products from a uranium-fueled reactor could be extracted and used “like a particularly vicious form of poison gas.” AP reports that among the documents released to