re: #245 SixDegrees

See my post, above. For a dirty bomb to be effective, all it has to do is trigger a Geiger counter. It doesn’t have to possess a dangerous amount of radioactive material, just enough to induce panic. People has an hysterical fear of ANY kind of radiation, and if any radioactive substance were released over a densely inhabited area - like Manhattan, for example - it would shut business and traffic in the area down for weeks, possibly months or even years depending on how bad the hysteria got. You’d also see lots of stress-related deaths - heart attacks, strokes and so on - even though you wouldn’t see a single case of radiation sickness.

I recall several years ago seeing an analysis of a potential dirty bomb attack in downtown DC. Given the prevailing winds, it predicted a plume of contaminated real estate that started out at six blocks wide and quickly narrowed to a couple hundred feet, but went fifteen miles north.
That was the extent of real, permanent damage. The psychic damage-the fear-would be immense.