What comes next after the Trump win?

[Loren Pechtel]

Besides, the real danger is the isotopes that are used by the body or mimic things used by the body.

Yeah, most of which are short-lived (eg Iodine-131), or are poorly taken up even when ingested (Strontium-90 and Caesium-137), or have such huge half-lives (ie low activity) that you would need to eat a crap-ton of them to suffer any ill effect.

Take iodine tablets in the immediate aftermath, and avoid eating locally grown produce, and there's not really a problem at all. A dirty bomb in a city - where little food is grown - is a fairly minor problem, as long as people are sensible and don't lose their minds over tiny risks.

So it's a really major problem.

It's the strontium that would concern me the most. And a city basically can't be cleaned up--if they manage to dump a sufficient amount there's nothing to do but leave. They didn't need to leave Fukushima, but that town near Chernobyl wasn't exactly where you would want to be. (Although it's down to reasonable levels by now.)

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I doubt there's much of a market for plutonium.

Have you asked the North Koreans? Or the Iranians? I suspect that there is plenty of demand for weapons grade plutonium. If you can deliver it no-questions-asked to the right location. That's the challenge.

But smuggling sensitive materials (and sensitive information) is a well established black industry. Security services play whack-a-mole, but they can't stop it.

And live to enjoy the proceeds. Trying to sell it sounds like a recipe for suicide.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

And trying to recover the fuel of a solid rocket is pretty risky.

For sure. But storing such rockets for long periods is also risky. At least, the USAF seem to worry about it quite a lot.

Liquid fuels will have been pilfered (or in the case of alcohol based fuels, drunk). Solid fuel rockets will be unstable due to poor maintenance. The warheads will have been stripped of valuable materials - if not the plutonium or the conventional explosives, then certainly the computer chips in the arming, firing, and/or security systems. The engines will be unfit for firing, even if the fuel hasn't been pinched. And everyone involved knows that firing such a weapon at NATO is a death sentence for anyone near to the launch facility - so there's a pretty strong incentive to make sure it can't be done (at least from the launch facility you are staffing), even if you are such an incompetent crook as to be unable to profit from your sabotage.

So long as the silos don't flood the solid fuel should hold up pretty well.

Our warheads you can't strip the security systems without destroying the warhead--they put critical stuff inside the warhead as an anti-tamper. And killing yourself if you don't take enough care in the process.