Weapons of Mass Terror
By Hal Lindsey
For the last few months, Iraq has been urgently searching for radioactive material stolen in that country late last year. Officials there fear that it has fallen into the hands of ISIS. An Iraqi environment ministry memo calls the missing material “highly dangerous.”
Reuters reported, “The material, stored in a protective case the size of a laptop computer, went missing in November from a storage facility near the southern city of Basra belonging to U.S. oilfield services company Weatherford.”
Weatherford uses a process called industrial gamma radiography to test for flaws in materials used for oil and gas pipelines. Because the stolen radioactive substance was inside a case the size of a laptop computer, it’s small enough to be smuggled anywhere.
The radioactive material would not be used for an atomic bomb. They would use it to build a “dirty bomb.” That is a conventional explosive laced with radioactive material that would contaminate an area, kill those close by, and potentially cause cancer in others. It can render an area uninhabitable.
A dirty bomb is purely a weapon of terror. It’s low-tech, easy to make, devastating in its effect, and is considered a weapon of mass destruction. Such material has been “lost” before, and many security analysts worry that ISIS is building up a significant supply in hopes of launching a large radiological attack somewhere in the world.
Radical Islamic terrorists are scouring the globe for every kind of WMD — nuclear, chemical, radiological, and biological.
Over the weekend, authorities in Morocco arrested members of an ISIS cell who were in the late planning stages of a chemical weapons attack in that country. During the raid, Morocco’s Central Bureau of Judicial Investigations found several jars of a chemical fertilizer that contains sulfur, and releases a fatal gas when heated.
Several news accounts mention, but don’t elaborate, on a comment made by M. Elarji, a member of Morocco’s risk management team. Elarji said the raid also uncovered “further chemicals which can create the tetanus toxin.”
Australian foreign minister, Julie Bishop, said in a speech last year, “Apart from some crude and small scale endeavors, the conventional wisdom has been that the terrorist intention to acquire and weaponize chemical agents has been largely aspirational.… The use of chlorine by Daesh (the Arabic term for ISIS), and its recruitment of highly technically trained professionals, including from the west, have revealed far more serious efforts in chemical weapons development.”
According to Wolfgang Rudischhauser, the Director of the Weapons of Mass Destruction Non-Proliferation Centre NATO, “ISIS actually has already acquired the knowledge, and in some cases the human expertise, that would allow it to use CBRN materials as weapons of terror.” (CBRN stands for chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear.)
The New York Times reported this week that Belgian police found surveillance footage of a Belgian nuclear official in the home of Mohamed Bakkali, recently arrested on terrorism charges. They believe Bakkali helped plan the Paris attacks last November. His terror cell was apparently planning to abduct the nuclear official and force him to provide nuclear material to help them build a dirty bomb.
The proliferation of radioactive material in various industries is making it significantly easier for terrorists to come by. Jim Walsh of M.I.T.’s Security Studies Program said, “The world is flooded with highly radioactive material.”
The possibility of terrorists obtaining or building dirty bombs highlights yet another flaw in the Iran nuclear deal. In Iran, scientists create the deadly radioactive material used in dirty bombs, and they do it with the U.S. government’s seal of approval. Even if they were to abide by the agreement and not actually build nuclear bombs, they can still manufacture boatloads of radioactive material.
And Iran remains the number one terrorist state in the world.
Iran might just give such material to terrorists as a way of hurting the Big Satan (America) or the Little Satan (Israel). Also, in an environment where it’s normal to shout “Death to America” at religious services, it’s far more likely that individuals in key positions would look the other way or even actively participate in the terrorist theft of nuclear materials.
Even in the unlikely scenario that Iran never builds an actual atomic or hydrogen bomb, the nuclear deal leaves that nation with the capability to make dirty bombs to their hearts’ content.
The problem with terrorists and terror-sponsoring nations is that they seem to feel no compunction about using any weapon at their disposal, apparently including WMDs. ISIS has already used chemical weapons on the battlefield against both the Kurds, and Iraqi forces.
From the outset, ISIS leaders have publicly said that they were trying to obtain or build all kinds of weapons of mass destruction. They have successfully recruited prized scientists in those fields, and they have large cash reserves if they want to buy the ready-made versions of such weapons.
As Arutz Sheva points out, “ISIS does not display any degree of morality or fear of consequences.”
9-11 shook the world economy, and the terrorists only used airplanes. With WMDs in their hands, radical Islamists could do untold damage across the world.
