The Sun is a dirty bomb
On how what seems to be a screw up with scrap metal became "a terror plot" and why "could" is a powerful weapon.
Previously: Monsters Under Review | 'Spare' is a showcase of Prince Harry as media critic. The reviewers can't tell you that.
The Sun set out to terrify its readers today (11 Jan 2023). Its office is nominally in our reality — you can see The News Building at 1 London Bridge in Southwark — but the people inside write from an alternate dimension; a more paranoid place where politics didn’t escape the 80s and what counts as comedy was settled in 1976.
The Sun's front page today featured a stock image of a dirty yellow nuclear symbol emerging from the inky darkness. It teased EXCLUSIVE: DEADLY CARGO FEARS before the headline screamed:
NUKE PLOT SMASHED AT HEATHROW
Bullet points told the reader:
URANIUM SHIPMENT INTERCEPTED
PROBE BY SPOOKS AND TERROR COPS
… and … cue the scary music:
PACKAGE WAS SENT TO IRANIAN
If it were a movie, it would have to be introduced as “based on a true story”, because The Sun’s tale bears no relation to the events that happened in our reality.
The front page story is bylined to Associate News Editor, Stephen Moyes. He writes:
Counter-terror cops and security services are investigating after a deadly shipment of uranium was seized at Heathrow. Last night, Scotland Yard told several outlets — including The Guardian — that an “extremely small” amount of contaminated scrap metal had been seized and posed “no threat to the public”. It could only have been “a deadly shipment” if someone had tried to eat it; uranium decays by alpha particles which are blocked by the skin.
The undeclared nuclear material can be used in a dirty bomb. I have arms and legs so I could be considered a prima ballerina. There is no record of a successful “dirty bomb” attack ever happening; “dirty bombs” were one of the great bogeymen of the War on Terror, almost as mythical as Bin Laden’s elaborate high-tech mountain lair in Tora Bora.
Putting together a “dirty bomb” would most likely require significant exposure to radioactive material, which would need to be in powder form to ensure it was spread over a wide area. But that very dispersal could mean that the amount of radioactivity in any given area would be too low to cause any harm.
In April 2001, the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control supplied The New York Times with a document it said it had acquired from a UN official which appeared to show the Iraqi Army had tested a “dirty bomb” in 1987. The device described was 12 feet long and weighed close to a tonne. The Iraqis were said to have abandoned the project after concluding that the levels of radiation produced were too low.
The document claimed that Iraqi engineers had used a mixture of zirconium, hafnium, uranium and iron which was irradiated in a reactor. The document may have been referred to in the April 1996 report by the UN weapons inspectors which noted:
Iraq declared that no order to produce radiological weapons was given and the project was abandoned. In 1995, Chechen separatist commander Shamil Basayev boasted of his group’s ability to build a radioactive bomb. He directed the journalists to a spot in Ismailovsky Park where a small container of caesium was buried. The source of the caesium was never identified. No dirty bomb attack followed. Three years later, in 1998, the Russian-backed Chechen Security Service claimed it had defused a “dirty bomb” — a container filled with radioactive material attached to a mine — hidden near a railway line.
In 2002, José Padilla was arrested in Chicago on suspicion that he was planning a “dirty bomb” attack. He was held for four years without charge in military custody and later convicted of conspiring to commit murder and fund terrorism, neither charge related to the so-called plot.
The US Senate’s investigation of CIA interrogations in 2014 included emails from the agency that revealed that Padilla had referred to an online article called How to make an H-bomb, which instructs readers:
Fill a standard-size bucket one-quarter full of liquid uranium hexafluoride. Attach a six-foot rope to the bucket handle. Now swing the rope (and attached bucket) around your head as fast as possible. Keep this up for about 45 minutes.Another CIA email from 2003 said:
CIA and Lawrence Livermore National Lab have assessed that the ['How to make an H-bomb'] article is filled with countless technical inaccuracies which would likely result in the death of anyone attempting to follow the instructions, and definitely would not result in a nuclear explosion.Moyes’ front page article on 2023’s ‘scare’ continues:
[The uranium] was destined for Iranian nationals in the UK, originated from Pakistan, and arrived on a flight from Oman.
A source said: “The race is on to trace everyone involved.” Given that multiple reports say the package was “bound for an Iranian business with premises in the UK,” it should be a short “race… to trace everyone involved.” But The Sun assumes the keywords “Iranian” and “Pakistan” will be enough to put the shits up its readers. Its intentions are made even clearer by an appearance Moyes made on neo-Nazi quoting Tom Newton-Dunn’s late-night embarrassment Talk TV show:
Newton Dunn: It’s obviously a very disturbing story. Now, smuggled uranium is worrying in itself, but dare I suggest the Iranian link may well set of alarm bells up and down Whitehall tonight too?
Moyes: Well, indeed Tom, I think it was just last month that the government issued their concerns that Iran was, indeed, growing its nuclear facility. There was obviously a deal that was in place which sadly was reneged on — ripped up — when Donald Trump decided he no longer wanted to adhere to that. It’s been rather a political potato ever since, for the last few years. And, indeed, as you say, why police are trying to say there is no immediate danger to the public, they have conceded that investigations are ongoing and they will need to fully investigate all episodes here, until they can ultimately rule out any suggestion of a dirty bomb plot here in Britain. The game here is to pretend that an “Iranian dirty bomb plot” has been “foiled” even as there is no evidence of any plot, Iranian or otherwise. Moyes and his editors are hoping to generate a “political potato” and the obvious question is why their sources are so keen to help them do that.
Inside the paper, Moyes shares the byline on a spread headlined…
Uranium flown into London on passenger jet
… with crime reporter Mike ‘Sully’ Sullivan and defence editor Jerome Starkey which doubles down on the false impression that the material was just uranium. The opening paragraph ladles on more generous portions of paranoia:
A NUCLEAR package suspected of being smuggled to UK-based Iranians arrived at Heathrow in the hold a passenger jet. The phrase “UK-based Iranians” might as well be a neon sign saying “the enemy within” and the high drama is continued in the next paragraph:
Specialist scanners detected the potentially lethal uranium as it was ferried to a freight shed, triggering alarms. This is the point at which anyone engaged in journalism rather than the construction of scary stories for the credulous would ask these questions:
Why would anyone trying to smuggle uranium into the UK send it through Heathrow where there are scanners to detect radioactive material?
Why such a small amount?
And why in the form of contaminated scrap metal? Is there any possibility that this might be cock up and not conspiracy?
Professor Michael Clarke, a defence and security analyst, told Sky News:
It is almost certainly an accident. If that was terrorists trying to bring that in, they would be bringing it into the one place in the UK that is bound to catch it. Heathrow is the one place where uranium will always be detected - so that almost rules it out. The point about uranium is that the Heathrow scanners would immediately pick up any toxic uranium.While Sky News deserves credit for interviewing and quoting Professor Clarke, it still placed his quote beneath speculation from Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, a former head of the British Army’s Joint Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear Regiment turned frequent Daily Telegraph contributor, who said while there was no indication al Qaeda was involved, it “has their trademark and fingerprints on it”.
What al Qaeda’s trademark of consistently not putting together "dirty bomb” plots?
The Sun story continues:
Officials will want to rule out any fears that a dirty bomb — a mixture of explosives with radioactive power — was being built here.
The suspected plot was smashed on December 29 and a Heathrow source told The Sun: “The race is on to trace everyone involved with this rogue non-manifested package. Security bosses are treating this with the seriousness it deserves. Protocol was not followed and this is now an anti-terror operation. There are real concerns over what the Iranians living here wanted with non-disclosed nuclear material." Notice that what the front page headline confidently called a “NUKE PLOT” is scaled down on the inside pages to a “suspected plot”. Again, Iranians living in the UK are turned into the Big Bad, despite exactly what this “plot” is or how it might work being unclear even in the simple Steven Seagal screenplay of The Sun’s imaginings.
Of course, Hamish de Bretton-Gordon pops up again to heighten the tension…
Former commander of the UK’s nuclear defence regiment Hamish De Bretton-Gordon said: “For uranium to turn up on a commercial airliner from Pakistan to an Iranian address in the UK is very suspect.”… and the following line was later added to the online version of the story:
A former army chief has claimed the deadly shipment could have been used for a Litvinenko-style assassination plot.That “former army chief”, the cartoonishly-named Chip Chapman, made his comments to Times Radio. He pondered:
This could have been used in a radiological sense, in the same way it was used on Litvinenko in 2006. This could be something as simple as dangerous air cargo but it could be more malign. So for example at the moment we know there is the Iranian revolution.Chip was using the word “could” there in its “I could write this up into a rip-roaring airport thriller” sense. I think Chip could be talking absolute bullshit; I’m using “could” in its “I could not be more certain that’s bullshit but am trying1 to be polite” sense.
Moyes’ story continues:
Officials believe they have prevented any immediate threat to the public. They are being assisted by security services as they investigate the suspected plot.We know from his own appearance on Talk TV that this has twisted what he was told; the police said there was no threat to the public but Moyes wants to continue to hint that there might be. He creates that sense of doubt in the text by saying “officials believe” while on TV he said police were “trying to say there is no immediate danger to the public”, implying things going unsaid.
The story goes on with another quote:
Expert Mr De Bretton-Gordon added: “The nuclear threat has never been higher. Higher than it has ever been in the Cold War. The good news is the system worked and it has been interdicted. Uranium can give off very high levels of poisonous radiation. It could be used in a dirty bomb.”De Bretton-Gordon’s claim that “the nuclear threat [is] higher than it has ever been in the Cold War” is an assertion allowed to masquerade as a fact. Similarly, the statement about the dangers of uranium is simplified and misleading. Once again we get a “could”; it “could be used in a dirty bomb” in the same way that I could be considered for trials by Norwich City football club. It wouldn’t work, but they could try.
The Sun story then moves seamlessly to a discussion of Iran’s nuclear programme and the likelihood of it developing a nuclear missile. We’ve gone from a small amount of contaminated scrap metal to pondering intercontinental ballistic missiles.
A quote from the Metropolitan Police comes at the very end of the story:
Last night the Met Police said: “We can confirm officers from the Met’s Counter Terrorism Command were contacted by Border Force colleagues at Heathrow after a very small amount of contaminated material was identified after routine screening within a package incoming to the UK on December 29. The material has been identified as being contaminated with uranium."
Commander Richard Smith, head of the Met’s SO15 counter-terror branch, said: “I want to reassure the public that the amount of contaminated material was extremely small and has been assessed by experts as posing no threat to the public." Compare that — “small amount… no threat to the public” — with the headline about a NUKE PLOT and the repeated references to “deadliness”.
The Sun’s story is the media equivalent of a dirty bomb. It has taken a small number of facts, irradiated them with lies, distortions, and paranoia, and then exploded them across its front page and all over the internet. There are numerous follow-up stories from other national and international news outlets, and The Sun’s lies are radiating all across social media, presented as fact.
News UK will do no cleanup. It will leave this story to spread poison for years. Lies have a very long half-life.
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Superb! Great digging on the dirty bomb hoax
Good luck with your trial at NCFC!
I hope you can play at centre-back.