Russian attack | Shoigu claimed Ukraine was planning to use a dirty bomb – one dirty bomb may have been found in a Moscow park in 1995

Foreign countries|Russian invasion

Russian Minister of Defense Sergei Shoigu claimed on Sunday that Ukraine was planning to detonate a so-called dirty bomb in Ukraine in order to blame the act on Russia. Šoigu shared his doubts in phone conversations with the defense ministers of Britain, France and Turkey.

At least according to the publicly available information, Šoigu did not present any evidence or other justifications to support his claim. This is apparently the first time that someone seriously claims that a government body is preparing to spread radioactive radiation with a dirty bomb.

Terrorists have been suspected of preparing such a bomb for 30 years, but no dirty bomb has reportedly been detonated anywhere, and there are at most two or three ready-made bombs that have been found.

To get dirty a bomb is a weapon in which a conventional explosive spreads a radioactive substance in its environment. Such a bomb became a horror image in the early 1990s, when the nuclear materials of the collapsed Soviet Union were feared to fall into the hands of criminals.

Chechen terrorist Shamil Basayev (1965–2006) capitalized on these fears by announcing at the time of the First Chechen War that his group had planted four dirty bombs across Russia. The Russian television channel NTV reported at the end of November 1995 that the channel’s reporters had found one such bomb in the Izmailovo park in Moscow. According to official information, a radioactive substance, i.e. the cesium-137 isotope, had been added to the explosive.

NTV is currently owned by Russia’s state-owned Gazprom media and is a central part of the state’s propaganda machinery. In 1995, however, the channel was engaged in independent journalism by the oligarch Vladimir Gusinski owned.

In Russia’s political situation at the time, many parties had an obvious reason to blackmail Basayev, but in any case, it was the first and so far also the most credible information about the discovery of a dirty bomb ready to explode.

Chechen security officials said three years later that they had found another of Basayev’s dirty bombs in the town of Argun, east of Grozny. At that time, Chechnya was still officially part of Russia, but practically independent, and Basayev was the president of the republic By Aslan Maskhadov main political opponent. No independent body confirmed the information about the bomb being found.

A millennium after the change, the terrorist organization al-Qaeda emerged as the main suspect in the preparation of the dirty bomb. US agents extracted bomb confessions from terrorist suspects by means of torture, among other things, and no evidence of the bombs was found.

The closest the FBI got to a bomb was in January 2009 when it rode a white supremacist neo-Nazi by James G. Cummings ökytalo in Maine. A lot of explosive chemicals, radioactive substances and instructions for making a dirty bomb were found in the apartment.

Cummings’ intention was reportedly to bomb the president Barack Obama’s at the inauguration, but Cummings’ wife shot him before the turn of the year. The FBI did not announce the case but WikiLeaks leaked the research report to the public quickly.

The following spring, it was the Ukrainian security service SBU who announced that they had found plutonium intended for a dirty bomb in the Ternopil area in western Ukraine. The SBU arrested a politician and two businessmen who traded material originating in Russia to terrorists, reported Radio Free Europe.

In the research, the radioactive substance was revealed to be americium, which is used, among other things, in fire alarms.

Last In the decade, the terrorist organization Isis became the main suspect of dirty bombs. In the summer of 2014, its fighters were said to have taken forty kilograms of radioactive uranium from a laboratory at the University of Mosul.

The uranium was said to have been unenriched, i.e. like a nuclear safety expert Olli Heinonen stated at the time to the news agency Reuters: not ‘good’ enough even for a dirty bomb.

A common assessment of dirty bombs is that they are effective at scaring but poor at killing. The purpose of Defense Minister Šoigu’s bombastic speeches is a complete mystery.