Pirates who seized Iranian Ship...dying?

[Broomstick]

Although as the Goiania incident demonstrated, radioactive trash is quite dangerous enough to cause problems. The referenced wiki is a good start for those who haven't heard of the incident.

[Elfdart]

Link

Any other sources than Fox ?

No, which leads me to call BULLSHIT on the whole story.

[CarsonPalmer]

I don't know about that. What motive would Fox News have to just invent this story? If they wanted to falsely claim that Iran was developing nuclear weapons, there would be much simpler ways to do it. I don't think they're on the level of making things up wholesale for no apparent reason.

[Elfdart]

I don't know about that. What motive would Fox News have to just invent this story?

It's FOX News -that's what they do: make shit up.

[Sea Skimmer]

This is only true when talking about people out in the open. Once you bring armoured vehicles into the equation, it becomes much easier to soft kill the crew with a lethal dose of radiation than it is to try to destroy or immobilize the vehicle with heat and blast effects. That is why enhanced radiation weapons came into existence, and even for unprotected troops the lethal radius of an ERW is greater than the heat and blast effects.

Neutron bombs let us build 1kt nukes that could still be useful. Radiation effects don’t scale up as quickly as blast and thermal effects, so for real small nukes of no more then a few kilotons radiation can have a higher lethal radius. Once you get to even 10 kilotons or so the lethality of the blast will quickly outpace the lethal radiation effects, even against a tank.

The real reason for tactical neutron bombs was not any inherent increase in anti tank effectiveness, in fact relying on radiation was highly undesirable, but rather it was politics. By building very small yet still somewhat effective nukes we made it clear to the Soviets that we fully intended to employ nuclear weapons to stop a Soviet invasion of Europe. A major concern had existed that NATO would not use its tactical nuclear weapons if the Soviets could plunge deeply enough into Germany in the first hours of an attack, because of how much collateral damage they’d inflict on property.

[Covenant]

I don't know about that. What motive would Fox News have to just invent this story?

It's FOX News -that's what they do: make shit up.

It doesn't need to be made up entirely, it could have just been a rumor that was played up, and it could also be a case of overly dramatic posturing on the part of the Somali pirates... but I gotta wonder, why would pirates want to tip their hand and say "We're all dying from that shit in the canister we opened up. Um, what was it, by the way?" It still sounds more like industrial toxins than nuclear material, but they say they're transporting iron ore. It's certainly feasible there's uranium ore in there too.

The thing is though, this IS reported outside of Fox, so what I doubt is the pirate's claims, not the whole story. Apparently, the Iranians have bemoaned the fact that the US has offered to pay the pirates 7 million for the ship, 5 million more than the original bounty for it, and both French and American vessels are standing off nearby. If it's just a shipment of minerals then the US could be getting suckered into paying four times the original asking price just to look around a big Iranian boat because they heard some rumors that sounded like a 24 watcher's interpertation of radiation poisoning.

[Admiral Valdemar]

If we can't have them, no one will.

[Ryan Thunder]

If we can't have them, no one will.

Obviously, these aren't the most intelligent pirates we're dealing with here...