JAY TRUMAN
Director of the Downwinders organization, a group made up of people exposed to nuclear tests, Truman is one of the nation’s foremost analysts of the effects of nuclear weapons testing. He said today: “A radiological warfare agent is not a nuclear bomb, rather it uses a conventional explosion to spread radioactive material. There would be severe panic and chaos and possibly long-term cancer problems, depending on what isotope was used. ‘Dirty bomb’ is a misleading label — the U.S. government’s nuclear tests with ‘clean bombs’ have done far more massive damage than a ‘dirty bomb’ could…. The U.S. government has been so tardy on dealing with proliferation issues…”
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ROBERT NELSON
A researcher at the Science and Global Security Program at Princeton University, Nelson said today: “A radiological weapon, or ‘dirty bomb,’ would use conventional explosives to disperse radioactive material over a wide area with the intent to create panic. The immediate radiation effects would likely be minimal and would not kill, or even make sick, large numbers of people. It could, however, slightly increase the incidence of long-term cancers in a densely populated urban environment. The economic damage to a large city could be severe from the evacuation and decontamination procedures that EPA standards would require.”
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ALICE SLATER
Slater is director of the Global Resource Action Center for the Environment.
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LLOYD J. DUMAS
Author of Lethal Arrogance: Human Fallibility and Dangerous Technologies, Dumas is an expert on terrorist activities involving weapons of mass destruction and a professor of political economy and economics at the University of Texas at Dallas.

KARL GROSSMAN
Author of Cover Up: What You ARE NOT Supposed to Know About Nuclear Power, Grossman said today: “This underlines the dangers of widespread proliferation of nuclear materials — from the tens of thousands of pounds of lethal spent fuel produced yearly in every atomic power plant to the deadly radioisotopes used in food irradiation systems the U.S. government is now promoting.” Grossman, professor of journalism at the State University of New York, is the author of Power Crazy and writer and narrator of the award-winning TV documentary “The Push To Revive Nuclear Power

For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; David Zupan, (541) 484-9167