Want to make a dirty bomb? (please, tell us you don't.) According to the Government Accountability Office, it's a cinch. The investigative arm of Congress on Wednesday described an undercover GAO operation in which investigators posed as businessmen and, with stunning ease, legally gathered enough radioactive material to make a bomb powerful enough to be classified as a level-3 threat on the International Atomic Energy Agency's scale, which tops out at level-5.
The investigators didn't have to work hard. They merely posed as businessmen from West Virginia (perhaps Mountaineers arouse less suspicion). Armed with nothing more than a P.O. box at Mail Boxes Etc. a phone and a fax, the investigators applied for a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. It was a straightforward process that took less than a month. No in-person interviews. No NRC visits to the sham company to make sure it checked out. Only a minor background check.
Once the investigators had the license, they copied it and started ordering portable moisture density gauges, which contain radioactive material and are used to measure the density of soil, asphalt, concrete and other substances. The investigators ordered 45 gauges, enough to make a fairly serious bomb.
After learning it had been burned in the GAO sting, the NRC owned up to security weaknesses but explained that fashioning moisture gauges into a real bomb is a difficult task requiring enormous expertise. Paraphrased NRC comments from a story in the Washington Post:
Read the complete Post story here. The GAO report will be up on their website at 2 p.m. EST.
