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More from the Dark Side of the World of Terror

By The Armorer on October 20, 2003 | | Comments (6)

The last job I held before retiring was as a DOD WMD response planner. We supported large events like the Olympics, Summit of the 8, and did a lot of Y2K planning. We also conducted lots of 'what if' CPX's. My job was as Plans and Training Officer of the WMD cell. I and my compatriots spent a lot of time thinking about evil things to do to generate trouble.

One of my favorite models for a terrorist disaster was Texas City. (If your browser loses it's forward/back buttons, just hit alt-left arrow to come back).


According to Mansoor Hijaz, as reported in NRO, someone else is thinking about it, too.

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6 Comments

By MonkeyPants on October 20, 2003 5:22 PM
Do you know if anyone has ever tried to figure out the energy release fron this disaster? Sounds like a small nuke to me. MonekyPants Imperial Lizardoid Trainer
 
By blaster on October 20, 2003 9:09 PM
The Grand Camp had 880 tons of ammonium nitrate onboard. AN has roughly the explosive power of TNT - somewhat less, so say about 750 tons TNT equivalent - about .75kt. Which is a bigger boom than some of our small nukes (you can find the Davy Crockett in the Arggghhh-ives somewhere, which could have a yield as low as .1 kt) However, as a result of this incident and others, there are considerably more safety restrictions in place on shipping this kind of stuff. I hav a brother-in-law who is an operations manager for a shipping company, and whenever they do an LPG tanker, the whole port shuts down, there are lots of escorts and security checks before it enters the port, and nothing moves until the LPG tanker is docked. Of course that is only in the US and some other major ports. Dunno how things are in the Suez Canal or some of the other bottlenecks Ijaz posits.
 
By blaster on October 20, 2003 10:04 PM
Plus, to me, dirty bomb has always been the knowckout punch for terrorists - read the FAS report on dirty bombs. Ijaz even warns that a dirty bomb might be targeted on those canals. Yeah, that would really mess things up.
 
By radtec on October 23, 2003 9:12 AM
There is so much wrong with articles like these. Just what the hell is; "than twenty-five times the threshold dose for evacuation"? I've been in Health Physics/Radiation Safety for YEARS and I'm supposed to believe there is a "Threshold dose for evacuation"? Please people....don't waste your time reading and taking to heart anything about radiation safety if the EPA has their stamp on it. Cripes.....
 
By Walter E. Wallis on October 27, 2003 2:36 PM
Any householder knows it is prudent to protect against pests, but eventually you have to destroy the nest. People say "We haven't caught bin Laden or Osama" but niether of those is strutting in front of a parade ground of subjects, crowing about their next victory over the Great Satan, either.
 
By Aakash on October 28, 2003 2:59 AM
I just arrived at this weblog for the first time, via a link from the Backcountry Conservative's cool "Perfumed Prince Report." This is not directly of this entry of yours, but I've posted this comment (below) at many weblogs within the past few days, and I will post it here as well. I notice that you have also had several entries on Wesley Clark... Last Thursday night, I posted six new entries at my blog - some of them are on the Iraq war situation. The last of the six, however, points out connections between Wesley Clark & the Clinton administration and Islamic terrorists. The foreign policy of Clinton and Clark was immoral, illegal, and horrific. Clinton was undoubtedly a very, very terrible president, and Clark would likely make a terrible president as well.
 
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