It depends on what kind of damage you're trying to cause. Someone would use different chemicals for trying to kill a lot of people in one place immediately than trying to cause a large economic impact by filling the area with something expensive to eliminate that causes health problems. But the same is true of radioisotopes. The most immediately fatal ones have a short half-life and are only effective at that when concentrated rather than dispersed over a large area.

If you have physical access to something with a high monetary value and you want to mess it up, chemical explosives do just fine and can be made from ordinary household substances.

> Hot fuel rods are very strictly controlled for a reason.

The main legitimate reason is that some existing reactors were purposely designed not to poison the fuel with heavier Plutonium isotopes in a way that makes it unsuitable for producing weapons, because the countries wanted to use them for that, but that can be solved in newer designs by doing the opposite. The main political reason is media fear mongering and decades of Russian propaganda designed to keep people buying Russian gas. Which you can kill as many people with as you can with a fuel rod, but half the population has it piped into their homes.

Good point re: non-proliferation. Hot fuel is definitely dangerous in more than one way. Even if the hot fuel could not be refined for weapons, it still wouldn't be something you could just buy or get though eh?

The issue is chemicals tend to be less dense and energy intense. And instill a lot less fear (usually). Many are heavily regulated too though, and some are getting more and more so.

For instance, can you name a chemical that will be any MORE expensive to clean off something you want to keep than a mixed radionucleotide soup? Even HF or FOOF should be way easier. Maybe methyl mercury?

Especially since (as Castle Bravo demonstrated), some of this stuff is essentially impossible to remove due to how chemically reactive it is. Some of the soup is going to want to bond like glue to everything, and is also pretty hot too - but not hot enough to be gone in a year or two.

To your point, there are definitely chemicals that can cause more actual immediate physical harm (probably), like phosgene. Or methyl mercury. Or a number of easily synthesizable chemical explosives.

But I'm not sure they would cause less fear than exploding a bunch of mixed 'hot' radionuclides in a crowded area. Probably because it wouldn't be predictable or immediately obvious who and how many would die. And there would be some pretty nasty looking video/photos of those who did.

To my original point - none of these are Sharks with Lasers on their head improbable, either way. And if someone wanted to instill as much fear and uncertainty as possible (like a terrorist), using the scariest method to the public as possible is going to be on their list.

So, worth making sure there are decent security precautions that actually get monitored/enforced, so someone doesn't just walk off with some hot rods at some point and cause a huge mess.

You won't find me arguing about propaganda and ideology though. Near as I can tell, that's killed more humans than anything else - and will continue to do so.

Also worth burning various media offices to the ground probably, but good luck getting any group of people to agree on whose eh?

> Even if the hot fuel could not be refined for weapons, it still wouldn't be something you could just buy or get though eh?

Eh. Nuclear reactors are expensive because of regulatory requirements, not physics. It's not that hard to get natural uranium. If you're a criminal who just wants fission byproducts and doesn't care about NRC approval, you could make one without too much trouble. If you had some basic knowledge you might not even kill yourself.

> For instance, can you name a chemical that will be any MORE expensive to clean off something you want to keep than a mixed radionucleotide soup? Even HF or FOOF should be way easier.

HF or FOOF might not be that easy to remove now that the thing you're trying to clean it off of has been dissolved by acid or vaporized in the resulting explosion. It is in general hard to clean something after it has ceased to exist.

> But I'm not sure they would cause less fear than exploding a bunch of mixed 'hot' radionuclides in a crowded area.

I hate to quote FDR so maybe we should use the example of the English during The Troubles.

If you allow yourself to be terrorized, you let the terrorists win. People are afraid because the media and politicians tell them to be afraid because they're manipulating you just as much as the terrorists are, for their own purposes. Anyone caught doing this should be regarded as committing an act of betrayal and condemned as a coward attempting to capitalize on a tragedy.

> Also worth burning various media offices to the ground probably, but good luck getting any group of people to agree on whose eh?

You don't actually have to burn down their offices. Just stop watching them and at scale they'll fail.

Okay, but at the point you're refining your own Uranium and building your own breeder reactor, you're also at the point you're likely making your own intermediate (or even intercontinental) range ballistic missiles no?

And then you're more visible/have more of a footprint, and it's a lot harder to get under the radar.

And perhaps you'd even have something more useful to do with your life - or at least you'd have something you'd be hesitant to lose in retaliation.

Same as if you're able to build your own airplanes, you don't need to hijack any. But also, if you can hijack an airplane to do what you want to do - why bother going to the effort of building your own?

And as for the other points - I've never been worried about Hamas or personally cared to watch Fox News - and it's been decades. I also stopped reading/watching any general news several years ago.

So why are they not only still there, but have caused a lot of damage since? And made a lot of money?

No man is an island. And no matter how mentally healthy someone in Stalingrad was, they were still in for a world of hurt between '42 and the '60's, eh?

And if you refuse to use a tool against someone who will not hesitate to use it against you, guess what tool they'll eventually end up using all the time?

> Okay, but at the point you're refining your own Uranium and building your own breeder reactor, you're also at the point you're likely making your own intermediate (or even intercontinental) range ballistic missiles no?

Gosh no. Rocket science is legitimately hard to the point that it's a cliche. Getting some elements to do physics together when you don't care about regulatory requirements is pretty much just a matter of putting them near each other and hoping you used enough shielding that it won't kill you.

> So why are they not only still there, but have caused a lot of damage since? And made a lot of money?

Because other people watched them, of course. Everyone has to do their part by turning off the fear-mongering talking heads. You can't stop other people from doing it, but you can stop doing it yourself, and so could they.

> And if you refuse to use a tool against someone who will not hesitate to use it against you, guess what tool they'll eventually end up using all the time?

The one that makes everyone hate them.

It is not possible to defeat evil by doing evil. You only become that which is to be defeated.

Uh huh. Yet, every nuclear power was at exactly at that point right at the same time, and had roughly the same success level (working reactors and rockets).

And the Nazi’s were destroyed by…. Hugs?

And not firebombing, machine gunning, etc. most of Western Europe?

Let me know when you care about reality more than the illusion.

Some things, it's an existential threat - and existential threats like that tend to only be resolvable with by death or complete subjugation of one side or the other.

And then the United States, having won the war using Hugs, disbanded the military industrial complex and threw the One Ring into the volcano, which is why the country is now so beloved in places like Iran and South America.

Notice how we were talking about terrorists and you had to switch to WWII to actually find an existential threat, and yet once you normalize these measures they become routine. Even the term "national security" was meant to imply this -- something critical to the security of the nation, that could cause it to fall to an enemy. How is this applicable to the War on Terror? Was the United States ever at risk of surrendering to bin Laden and disbanding Congress in favor of a Caliphate? It was not, and yet "national security" was the justification for every evil act committed in the name of fighting evil.

If you're weaker than someone else and you can win without fighting dirty, you're clever. If you're stronger than someone else and you can't win without fighting dirty, you deserve to lose.

Impressive way of dodging every point, while maybe agreeing with me while pretending you didn’t, and spinning up a giant strawman?

Bin Laden initiated 9/11 on his own, destroyed a huge center piece of the US financial system and terrorized the entire country.

Were the responses justified, or useful?

What does that have to do with my point that hugs solve none of these actual real world problems?

Do you think that if the US had gone ‘oh, sorry yeah you have a point - our bad’ that things would have worked out better?

And I don’t see how that has anything to do with the risk that someone might also make a dirty bomb - you know, the conversation we’ve actually been having?

Until you actually talk about something related to real world situations here instead of constantly dodging them, I’m out.

Your argument was this:

> Some things, it's an existential threat - and existential threats like that tend to only be resolvable with by death or complete subjugation of one side or the other.

But a dirty bomb is not an existential threat to the United States. The US military actually evaluated them for their own use and concluded that they're militarily useless and not worth developing.

And since we're not dealing with an existential threat, we don't have to do anything radical to address it. Did some terrorists do a terrorism? Arrest them. They can't keep doing terror plots when they're locked up in prison forever, and if the result of terrorism is "you go to prison and nothing else changes" then there isn't a lot of incentive for anybody to do it.

You're not even reading your own arguments, near as I can tell?

Of course a dirty bomb isn't militarily useful to the US gov't. They have literal nuclear weapons. Hijacking a civilian airliner and using it to attack a target in a suicide attack ALSO isn't militarily useful to the US government. They have cruise missiles.

They also wouldn't stoop to these kinds of tactics, and have overpowering force in other areas, so what else is the enemy going to use (eventually)?

A tiny group (equivalent to a US Army Company in size) being able to attack one of the most prominent financial centers of the United States successfully (and, notably, the Pentagon as well!) on live TV, instilling fear and terror in the populace, and even getting away with it for a decade is of course an existential threat to the United States.

Near as I can tell, no country in the world could pull that off successfully, not even Russia or China.

And how do you propose the gov't was going to 'just arrest' Osama Bin Laden? Or any other terrorist group?

The whole point is that they hide among civilians and go deep underground when hunted, using what we won't do to be successful.

It took a decade to even FIND OBL. And if they put him on trial, it would just give him an audience to push buttons and get his message out even wider and stir up more shit. Look at what is going on with Israel and Palestine/Hamas.

And how would you propose that the gov't not have the populace scared when something like 9/11 happens.

Should the news just not report on someone plowing nearly fully occupied airliners into the iconic and fully occupied World Trade Center towers in downtown Manhattan, or the Pentagon - in broad daylight during a workday, no less.

Towers that were common tourist hotspots and were plainly visible literally from some of the busiest streets in one of the most prominent cities in the entire world?

With no warning, and no effective countermeasures or prevention at the time?

Or that the entire US picks up deep meditation practice to understand the futility of 'holding on' to such things and how they get used against oneself?

Neither of those are realistic, or even a good idea near as I can tell in this situation.

Honestly, this type of attitude is exactly what leads up to these kinds of situations happening. It's sticking one's head in the sand.

And the world isn't slowing down. Check out this 3D printed surface to air missile project on Youtube.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvcDwSmmxWs]

And this little piece on the Glock Switch, which has been circulating for years. Also easy to make at home with a 3D printer, a vise, and a file.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfVKcItEaiE]

I'm done wasting my time in this discussion now.