Political Quotes

“today I am introducing the ``Nuclear and Radiological Terrorism Threat Reduction Act of 2002.'' This is a bill to strengthen the efforts of the world community to gain control over the vast amounts of radioactive materials that, left uncontrolled, could cause economic disruption and sow terror in American cities. In the Senate Foreign Relations Committee's hearing on March 6 of this year, experts testified that an amount of ground up radioactive cobalt-60 the size of the ball in your ball point pen could contaminate an area of Manhattan greater than the footprint of the World Trade Center. The damage and risk would be so great that buildings in the affected area might have to be abandoned, destroyed, and trucked away as radioactive waste. We learned that if a terrorist dispersed a few hundred curies of radioactive material, the resulting public panic could make much of downtown Washington, DC uninhabitable without a difficult and expensive clean-up. Decontamination is a serious and poorly understood problem because many of the radioactive isotopes a terrorist might choose will bind chemically to construction materials such as marble and stone used in our most precious buildings. One curie of radioactive cesium-137, strontium-90, cobalt-60 or iridium-192 poses a significant risk. But sources as strong as several hundred curies are used every day in world-wide commerce.”