Perception

Not even a week after I talk about plutonium and RTGs in a post, the New York Times writes a horrible peice about how the United States is going to start production of Pu-238 again. The article will probably disappear soon, so here are some choice quotes:

"The substance, valued as a power source, is so radioactive that a speck can cause cancer."

"Plutonium 238 is hundreds of times more radioactive than the kind of plutonium used in nuclear arms, plutonium 239. Medical experts agree that inhaling even a speck poses a serious risk of lung cancer."

Now plutonium isn't something that you want to play around with, I think that much is obvious. Notice though, that no "medical experts" are actually cited... just that there exist medical experts with this opinion. Yes, Pu-238 is 'hundreds' of times more radioactive than Pu-239. Around 280 times, to be exact. And yet it's 8,850 times less radioactive than radon-222, some of which is probably floating around in your home right now. So if inhaling a speck of Pu-238 poses a serious risk of lung cancer... what does that say about radon, which you probably inhale a tiny bit of each day (after all, unlike plutonium, it's already a gas, and a fairly common one at that)? There's nothing about radon in there, though, because that's not the point of the article.

The point of the article, and this is clear if you read between the lines, is not that the government is resuming production of plutonium-238, but that this is a very bad thing. And there certainly are issues with the production of radioactive material. But it's not an article tempered by science. It's speculative, citing anonymous sources, with the exception of an outspoken advocate for keeping Yellowstone National Park "nuclear free" (something I'm all for). Let's understand each other... I'm not a big fan of anything radioactive, or anything that, in general, is going to kill anyone else. I'd like it if the world didn't have any guns at all, but I'm not naïve enough to expect that to happen anytime soon, so in the meantime I'm going to pack and strap in the name of righteousness, and when the time comes when there's no longer a need to carry around guns or make plutonium-238, I'll be first in line to spend the rest of my time making daisy chains.

Back on the topic of perception...

In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Americans were urged to resume their American lifestyles as though America had not just been attacked. The NFL skipped a week, and baseball games were cancelled, and the market closed for a few days, but then came the prevailing notion that if we lived in fear and didn't return to our regularly scheduled lives, "the terrorists had already won." Naturally, this was quickly subject to parody: If I don't eat these jelly donuts, the terrorists have already won... If I don't download six gigs of porn, the terrorists have already won. You get the idea.

But I'm reminded of a scene in "Sneakers", where Marty and Cos are discussing banks. If people think a bank is financially shaky, they will withdraw their money, and pretty soon the bank is financially shaky. It's all in perception. This is how elections are won and lost. To get elected, it doesn't matter or not you're soft on crime, but rather how you are perceived. And this is how products are sold. It doesn't matter whether your detergent gets clothes whiter or not, but rather how the public perceives your detergent. Have you noticed commercials for Tyco and Halliburton recently? These are companies that have a negative perception because of media coverage (right or wrong), and they are running advertisements to change that perception.

This all leads me back to the last mission. I thought I had made this point well, but looking back at it, I may not have. No one was going to kill anyone with the materials we recovered. But two things to consider is that (a) they may have tried, and (b) in doing so, they'd have spooked a good lot of people. That spooking is entirely due to perception, but it's not really a good thing to have an entire country afraid to go to sleep at night, and that's why we act. And while this was probably something that an ordinary agent could have taken care of, there were some extenuating circumstances I can't get into that made the services of American Jones et. al. a necessity.