Preface and Acknowledgements
I spent the first part of my adult life in the American Navy—8 years during the
final decade of the Cold War, with half of that spent on a nuclear attack submarine. Those years were tense; protests against American nuclear weapons roiled
Europe, the Soviet Union shot down a civilian airliner over the Kamchatka Peninsula, and Ronald Regan jokingly announced that he had outlawed the Soviet Union.
The submarine I was on spent about two months every year in close proximity to
the Soviet Union, following their submarines and collecting intelligence, and they
sent ships and submarines to try to find and to follow us. During these years, too, I
had the opportunity to make radiation measurements on and near nuclear weapons,
giving me an appreciation for not only their destructive power, but also of how difficult detecting them can be. Our primary worry was that there would be a nuclear
war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact that could quite possibly kill hundreds of
millions of people.
Imagine my surprise when, shortly after I left the Navy, the Berlin Wall fell,
followed in the next few years by the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union. The future
seemed brighter than I could have imagined just a year or so earlier when we were
trying to avoid detection by the Soviet Navy.
Fast-forwarding a decade, I have to admit to mild bemusement when some guy
I’d sort of heard of—Osama bin Laden—“declared war” on the USA. But then his
forces attacked two of our embassies in Africa, followed by a series of smaller attacks
and then the attacks of September 11, 2001. And with the latter, my whole world
changed.
As a radiation safety officer, my primary concern had been worries that an angry
graduate student would dump some radioactive reagents into their supervisor’s
lunch—something that had happened a number of times at a variety of universities. And suddenly I was worried about terrorists trying to steal our high-activity
irradiator sources to use in a terrorist attack—I had to learn about vehicle-borne
explosives, how to work with police and fire to thwart or to respond to an attack,
how to set up security systems, and any number of things I never expected to need to
know about. As time went on, I found myself becoming increasingly immersed in a
topic to which I’d never before had to give more than passing attention—I was asked
to provide feedback on a proposed Congressional bill to help prevent radiological
xi
I spent the first part of my adult life in the American Navy—8 years during the
final decade of the Cold War, with half of that spent on a nuclear attack submarine. Those years were tense; protests against American nuclear weapons roiled
Europe, the Soviet Union shot down a civilian airliner over the Kamchatka Peninsula, and Ronald Regan jokingly announced that he had outlawed the Soviet Union.
The submarine I was on spent about two months every year in close proximity to
the Soviet Union, following their submarines and collecting intelligence, and they
sent ships and submarines to try to find and to follow us. During these years, too, I
had the opportunity to make radiation measurements on and near nuclear weapons,
giving me an appreciation for not only their destructive power, but also of how difficult detecting them can be. Our primary worry was that there would be a nuclear
war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact that could quite possibly kill hundreds of
millions of people.
Imagine my surprise when, shortly after I left the Navy, the Berlin Wall fell,
followed in the next few years by the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union. The future
seemed brighter than I could have imagined just a year or so earlier when we were
trying to avoid detection by the Soviet Navy.
Fast-forwarding a decade, I have to admit to mild bemusement when some guy
I’d sort of heard of—Osama bin Laden—“declared war” on the USA. But then his
forces attacked two of our embassies in Africa, followed by a series of smaller attacks
and then the attacks of September 11, 2001. And with the latter, my whole world
changed.
As a radiation safety officer, my primary concern had been worries that an angry
graduate student would dump some radioactive reagents into their supervisor’s
lunch—something that had happened a number of times at a variety of universities. And suddenly I was worried about terrorists trying to steal our high-activity
irradiator sources to use in a terrorist attack—I had to learn about vehicle-borne
explosives, how to work with police and fire to thwart or to respond to an attack,
how to set up security systems, and any number of things I never expected to need to
know about. As time went on, I found myself becoming increasingly immersed in a
topic to which I’d never before had to give more than passing attention—I was asked
to provide feedback on a proposed Congressional bill to help prevent radiological
xi