>>510780681Yeah when I read OP I thought Cesium, which is widely available in hospitals. The radioactive material isn't the problem, the problem is that once you deploy you (and your cause if you have one) are now permanently illegitimate. It makes no sense unless you either pull off the first 100% perfect false flag operation in history or your entire ethos is nihilism, in which case you probably don't have the superfriends you need to pull off a big terrorist strike.
There are no real lone wolves. Mass shooters are the closest thing because one person can do a lot of damage with guns, but even most mass shooters have a social network that provides moral, logistical or educational support. The most socially isolated mass shooters I can think of are Breivik, tarrant and Stephen Paddock. I kinda doubt Tarrant was truly solo and there are way too many questions hanging over Paddock.
But I digress. Small bombs are easy for 1 or 2 people to make and deploy, but large bombs are hard work, you need a lot of explosive material, which tends to be heavily controlled, technical expertise, and logistical planning to deploy. To be 'successful' it needs to be some kinda large scale thing like the Oklahoma bombing. A small bomb might get 4-9 city blocks cordoned off but most governments can easily handle an incident of that magnitude. Even if teh bomber is smart and gets the message out about their radioactive ambitions to the public, if the explosion is small then government can just say the claims were wildly exaggerated or that so little radiation was found it is barely above background levels blah blah, the same playbook they run any time thre's a safety incident at a nuclear power plant. Thus hte bomb has to be big enough to make the authorities look weak and overwhelmed, and to give credence to the idea that radioactive contamination is widespread and frighten everyone in the surrounding city. In turn that means you need a significant amount of radioactive material.
