In 2003 I went back for a fourth brief tour to
investigate a radiological incident and the
problem was that when we were destroying the
arms that had been turned over to us, some
of the weapons had radioactive paint in the
sights and if you cut through that paint with
an oxy-acetylene torch you release the
radioactive agents which you can then inhale
and we were concerned that this was going
to cause long term effects.
Happily it turned out that of all the people who
were involved in the destruction of weapons
only two came up to half of what the allowable
dose is for a general member of the public so it
was a very successful investigation and it used
not only my engineering expertise but also
my operational expertise in terms of being able
to understand how different things went together.
Actually went so far as to recreate experimental
conditions from which we took data to prove
that, in fact, no one was at risk.