I was researching Romney's Iran stance based on another thread, and came across several references like this regarding what he said last month. Pretty basic fear-mongering, since it doesn't make sense.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/09/21/mitt-romney-iran-and-dirty-bombs-so-very-very-wrong/
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/09/21/mitt-romney-iran-and-dirty-bombs-so-very-very-wrong/
In a secret video released early this week by David Corn of Mother Jones, Mitt Romney said:
“…if I were Iran – a crazed fanatic, I’d say let’s get a little fissile material to Hezbollah, have them carry it to Chicago or some other place, and then if anything goes wrong, or America starts acting up, we’ll just say, “Guess what? Unless you stand down, why, we’re going to let off a dirty bomb.” I mean this is where we have—where America could be held up and blackmailed by Iran, by the mullahs, by crazy people. So we really don’t have any option but to keep Iran from having a nuclear weapon.”
This is wrong on so many levels. Iran is not a dirty bomb threat in the least. Dirty bombs have nothing to do with nuclear bombs, nothing to do with fissile material like enriched uranium or even plutonium, and nothing to do with having a weapons program.
U and Pu are the least effective materials to use in a dirty bomb, emitting the wrong kind of radiation, occurring in the wrong form to disperse, are well-tracked and extremely expensive, and are much more valuable in a real nuke. Even the stupid terrorists know this.
But more troubling for a Presidential candidate is that Romney doesn’t seem know which of the two routes Iran has chosen to make their nuclear weapon: 1) enriching uranium, which doesn’t require a nuclear reactor, or 2) extracting plutonium which does require a nuclear reactor, specifically a weapons reactor. Iran has chosen the first whereas DPRK (North Korea) has chosen the second.