The Dirty Bomb Threat: How Close Are We to America’s Next Invisible Disaster?

 

In Case Radiation Goes Rogue: CIA and FBI Joined Forces to Stop a Dirty Bomb Before It’s Too Late

     You’d never know it walking down Main Street, grabbing a coffee, or taking your kids to school—but somewhere out there, maybe in a crate mislabeled in a foreign port or in the back of a cargo truck that’s already crossed a border, is enough loose nuclear material to turn a major American city into a radioactive wasteland. That’s not paranoia. That’s fact.

     It’s called a dirty bomb—low-tech, high-impact. Not the mushroom-cloud Armageddon of Cold War nightmares, but a terror weapon that uses conventional explosives to scatter radioactive material across a wide area. Panic is the real payload. Fallout can shut down city centers for years, displace millions, and poison everything it touches. Even a failed detonation, with radiation left to simmer in the shadows, could send Wall Street into freefall.

     The scary part? We’ve lost track of the ingredients. Globally, there are around 2,200 cases of missing nuclear and radioactive material reported since the 1990s, according to the IAEA. That includes small amounts of plutonium and uranium—yes, weapons-grade in some cases—that simply vanished from labs, reactors, and research centers. Some were stolen. Some never logged. And some? They were lost in places where corruption is cheap and borders are porous.

     Imagine a rogue nation or terror cell getting their hands on even a few ounces of cesium-137 or cobalt-60, let alone enriched uranium. That’s all it would take to build a suitcase-sized weapon of mass disruption. In fact, the scenario is the beating heart of my spy thriller Shadow War, where CIA spymaster Corey Pearson hunts down a black-market suitcase nuke rumored to be headed straight for U.S. soil. It’s fiction, sure, but built on a foundation of disturbing truth.

     The CIA and FBI aren’t sitting on their hands. Joint task forces, like the Domestic Nuclear Detection Office and the Nuclear Emergency Support Team, operate 24/7. These are the ghost chasers—quiet professionals with radiation sniffers and real-time intel networks. They work with ports, airports, and local law enforcement to scan for even a whisper of nuclear residue. CIA ops have penetrated smuggling rings in Eastern Europe. The FBI monitors the dark web for chatter about radioactive isotopes. But they’ll tell you straight—this isn’t like stopping a bank robbery. It’s a needle-in-a-haystack job, except the needle glows in the dark and the haystack keeps moving.

     We’ve already had dry runs. In 2015, ISIS was caught surveilling a senior nuclear official in Belgium. In 2006, Georgian authorities intercepted smugglers with enriched uranium wrapped in plastic bags. These weren’t “what if” cases—they were “almost happened” cases. And let’s not forget the post-9/11 scare when intel suggested al-Qaeda tried to buy nuclear material on the black market. Whether or not they got it, the attempt was real.

     That’s the backdrop of Shadow War. Pearson and his team follow a whisper trail—from a bombed-out weapons cache in Ukraine to the alleyways of Istanbul, to a secret CIA black site where the suitcase nuke may already be inside U.S. borders. What unfolds is a race against time, not just to stop the detonation, but to deal with the aftermath—because a dirty bomb doesn’t just explode. It lingers. It stains. It reshapes lives and maps.

     What keeps intelligence analysts up at night isn’t the technology—it’s the human element. The idea that someone could be radicalized enough, trained enough, and connected enough to pull it off. Maybe it’s a lone wolf. Maybe it’s a sleeper cell. Maybe it’s someone already inside the wire. The scariest threat is the one we haven’t seen yet.

     There’s a reason Homeland Security has quietly poured billions into radiation detection equipment at ports and along highways. There's a reason the CIA has doubled down on HUMINT—human intelligence—over satellite surveillance. You can’t stop this threat with drones. You need informants. You need old-fashioned spycraft. You need someone like Corey Pearson—because the war in the shadows never ends.

     America’s defenses are better than they’ve ever been. But so are the threats. We’re living in an age where a nuclear device can be carried in a backpack. That’s the world we built. Now we have to protect it.

     And the clock’s ticking.

 

Robert Morton is a member of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers (AFIO) and writes about the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC). He also writes the Corey Pearson- CIA Spymaster Series, which blends his knowledge of real-life intelligence operations with gripping fictional storytelling. His work offers readers an insider’s glimpse into the world of espionage, inspired by the complexities and high-stakes realities of the intelligence community.