Word: bomb
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...problem is that most threats are bogus, and as a senior U.S. intelligence official admits, "you can get bogged down in the detail." Just two weeks ago, another Administration official tells TIME, the threat matrix contained warnings that terrorists might try a major attack, such as a car bomb, against a U.S. military facility in Saudi Arabia or the U.S. embassy in Jakarta, Indonesia. But since then they have received countless reports of new potential threats, a distressing number of them right here at home...
...open secret in the intelligence community that bin Laden and his al-Qaeda organization have long lusted after nukes. The consensus in Washington is that the group does not have a true nuclear-fission device, though it may well have what is known as a radiological weapon or "dirty bomb"--a conventional explosive packed with radioactive debris. Whatever bin Laden's got, he has made any number of attempts to get more. As early as the mid-1990s, intelligence sources tell TIME, bin Laden's agents began cruising the black markets of Europe and Asia looking for pirated Russian warheads...
Simpler still is the so-called dirty bomb. Detonated in a crowded city, a dirty bomb would pack an explosive punch no greater than ordinary ordnance, but the radioactive debris it would scatter could sicken and kill unknown numbers of people and contaminate an unknown stretch of real estate. Because the bomb would require no special skill to build, it's perhaps the most feared of the terrorists' nuclear choices. "They don't kill as many people," says Morton Bremer Maerli, a nuclear-terror expert at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, "but as a weapon of terror, they...
More psychological damage has been caused by truck-bomb scares, anthrax alarms, post office evacuations and so forth than by the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. More people are killed by drunk drivers than by terrorists. More people die from the flu than from anthrax. More people die in airline accidents than in hijacked planes. Get over it, you pathetic cowards, and face reality! It's actually quite nice here. JOHN DODDS San Francisco...
...rumor that raced through Washington last week of an atom bomb someplace in the city being readied for the next terrorist atrocity had a familiar ring...