(BJNews, October 26, 2001)  I just today had a phone conversation with my father who is a senior nuclear engineer and international expert on radiation and nuclear reactors. He was on the investigative teams at the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl nuclear disasters. In the early 1970's, he was the corporate manager of all GE nuclear sites including Three Mile Island, so he knows the facilities and their operations quite well.

     I discussed with him my scenario for WTC terrorist pilot Muhammed Atta's complaint to his local pharmacist in Boca Raton, Florida, about his red burning itchy hands, just a week before the attack: it might have been due to radiation burns, and not due to anthrax. Investigators have confirmed from the Florida pharmacist that it was not anthrax, but... Atta may have divided up about a pound of powdered plutonium into four separate vials to be taken aboard each of the four hijacked planes. This would account for his red itchy radiation burned hands. That made sense to my father.

     My investigational hypothesis is that if the four planes carried a pound of plutonium, then the plutonium would have been burned or oxidized during the World Trade Center attack into a very fine white ash of plutonium oxide and would have spread in the smoking plumes from the flaming twin towers in the first two hours before they collapsed.

     One clue that this may have happened is that the recovery crews for the fourth plane which crashed in a field in Pennsylvania without burning, were hazmat crews. And none of the public or news services had been allowed near that crash site.

     Obtaining raw powdered plutonium, given enough money, is quite easy in the dark world of terrorist countries or groups who are desiring to use plutonium to build small nuclear weapons, but they do not yet have the scientific tools or technology to complete the construction. It takes several pounds of plutonium, plus other special items, to build a nuclear bomb. In the meantime, world nuclear watchers would agree that somehow certain terrorist groups do have about a pound of raw plutonium, obtained from various sources, which in a burning airplane can be a powerful weapon to "salt the earth" of America and render large portions of the U.S. permanently uninhabitable.

     That amount of plutonium would have been spread across thousands of square miles of the northeast U.S. and Washington DC areas and would be a long-term (1000 years or so) health hazard. My father agreed with all that, but also assumed that somebody would have already discovered the increase in radiation. I asked "but who?" and he did not have a good answer.

     He assumed that there are many agencies and laboratories where people wear radiation dosimeters, have sensitive radiation detectors and they would have noticed the increase in radiation. When I again asked where and who, he did not have a good answer. He said Brookhaven Labs in New York might have seen it. But I said Brookhaven was not under the smoke plume and they would not notice such a radiation increase until it traveled all the way around the earth with the prevailing winds and arrived back in New York several months later. He agreed.

     So maybe there was nobody to notice. During the horrible destructive explosion and fire at Chernobyl there was actually only a small amount of plutonium which escaped from the flaming reactor. Most of it was captured and covered in a permanent cement tomb. But still much of the large region downwind from Chernobyl is a permanent no man's land. If a pound of plutonium had been sent into the atmosphere during the WTC attack it would produce a massively larger worldwide effect than the Chernobyl event.

     I explained to him that local hazmat people in New York around ground zero would never see the radiation since the smoke plume went upward at 3,000 feet above the ground and drifted away from the burning towers to the northeast along with the wind. The main radioactive plutonium ash plume would not have started to fall until 10 or 15 miles away. And that is assuming the hazmat people were even looking for radiation and not just biotech health hazards like asbestos. Probably the first people to notice the possible massive killer irradiation of the U.S. northeast would be the European labs, who about now would start to see a rapid increase in radiation coming across the Atlantic Ocean.

     In the meantime, if anybody in the U.S. government had suspected, which is what I suspect, that there might have been a massive radiation event, such as those workers who cleared the Pennsylvania crash site, this should have required a quick and permanent evacuation of millions of people from the U.S. northeast, and also around Washington DC and areas eastward from the Pentagon. This sudden shock to the U.S. government and populace would create a far greater panic and fear than the original WTC attack and even the current hoax of an anthrax bio-attack.

     To indicate that the current anthrax hoax is possibly part of a cover-up of the aftermath of a more terrible WTC 9-11 event, I would note that the symptoms of being under a plutonium cloud with very fine radiation particles raining down, would include: (1) lesions on the skin of the head, neck, face and hands where particles have landed, (2) pneumonia-like filling of the lungs where particles have been inhaled and (3) general weakness, nausea, vomiting of blood and severe intestinal distress where the radiation particles have landed on food or water which is ingested

     Strangely, those exact same set of three symptoms are the CDC's protocol for identifying those who are suspected of having contracted either (1) cutaneous, (2) inhalation or (3) gastro-intestinal anthrax. And that is right from the CDC's own MMWR Oct 19, 2001 report for the definition of diagnosing confirmed cases of anthrax.

     Another most strange coincidence is that Muhammed Atta was in Boca Raton just a week before the air hijacking attacks on buildings in New York and Washington DC. And then within just weeks after the 9-11 attack, a sudden outbreak of rare anthrax among humans occurs where? In Boca Raton, New York and Washington DC. In the world of scientific analysis, this may be just a strange coincidence, or it may be the unique exception that proves the rule.

     Just this morning I received today's CDC October 26 Anthrax update. I analyzed the medical diagnosis for each of the "suspected" and "confirmed" cases of anthrax and I can easily show that quite possibly none of those people contracted or died from anthrax infection. And that is according to the CDC's second definition of what constitutes a "confirmed" case.