This scene is from a Korean TV series, Iris, where agents try to stop a terrorist from detonating a nuclear bomb in the heart of Seoul. But experts say, nuclear terrorism is no longer something that can only be imagined on television and in the movies.
Nuclear Transmutation Energy Research Center of Korea] "Anyone who has high school physics and chemistry class can put together very functional atomic bombs, if one got the materials to make it. It is really possible to make a bomb by terrorists."
Since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, hungry scientists stretching for cash got involved in illegally trading nuclear materials such as highly enriched uranium and plutonium. There are reportedly two-thousand metric tons of nuclear material available in the world but the amount of trade in the black market is still undetermined.
"If a nuclear bomb were to denonate in Gwanghwamun Square, in the heart of Seoul, anything within a 500 meter radius would be completely wiped out and no one would be left alive. Anyone exposed to the blast in the second circle, extending around 1 kilometer from the epicenter, would face fatal doses of radiation and most people in that area would be left dead or seriously injured.
And the area in the third circle, reaching around 2 kilometers from ground zero, would be ravaged by fire and radiation.
But what's even more dangerous are the invisible effects of radiation which can carry effects as far as 500 kilometers from the epicenter."
And Professor Hwang says the probability of nuclear terrorism is higher than we may think.
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