Slashdot Mirror
U.S. Publishes Guide To Building Atom Bombs To Web
Jeff writes "The New York Times is reporting that the feds have shut down the 'Operation Iraqi Freedom Document Portal' due to concerns from weapons experts that the 'papers give detailed information on how to build nuclear firing circuits and triggering explosives, as well as the radioactive cores of atom bombs.' One diplomat is quoted as saying, 'If you had this, it would short-circuit a lot of things.' Indexes to older (less sensitive) documents (and some html from pdfs) are still cached at Google today. Rep. Pete Hoekstra pushed for the public release of the archive to help determine 'whether Saddam Hussein destroyed Iraq's weapons of mass destruction or hid or transferred them'. Critics have said the archive was created to perpetuate misinformation about WMDs."
If you set it off, does it result in 404 errors everywhere? Or is it a more powerful version of a Googlebomb?
Where were you when the voynix came?
Woke up this morning with the brilliant idea of building home made nuclear to protect my home from those pesky neighbors. What does the Feds do? Re-classify the documents. What's an evil genius supposed to do now?!
These would be fascinating to look it and I'm sure anyone who could get the raw materials already has this knowledge.
Your CPU is not doing anything else, at least do something.
Does this mean we can send the current government to jail on terrorism charges and get a new one?
And slashdot lashes out at Bush...
Everyone knows Iraq didn't have WMDs and wasn't developing WMDs. These documents which supposedly show how to build an atomic weapon must have been planted by the evil Bush administration. They were never actually "recovered" in Iraq. Concerns that Iran might have used the information are overblown, because everyone knows that Iran is not building an atomic bomb either, their nuclear research is for peaceful power generation only. It just goes to show how stupid the Bush administration is, putting real nuclear knowhow on the web instead of putting the minimal effort into pulling a "Doc Brown" operation like the Clinton admin did with the plans for the nuclear bomb triggers they gave to the Iranians.
Next in the NYT: When mainstream media memes collide!
So Saadam had advanced nuke designs.
Which is why we went in there in the first place.
and the Howard dean crowd is whining because why?
Now that they have provided potential terrorists with information they might require, the U.S. has added themselves to the "Axis of Evil". George Bush wasted no time in acting and immediately attacked himself by knawing at his right hand :P
This story is shamelessly ripped from this morning's BoingBoing version, published at 5am.
Everything I needed to know about life, I learnt from Blake's Seven
If you had this, it would short-circuit a lot of things
I guess we have to assume he means "would be a short cut past a lot of things," presumably some re-inventing-the-wheel R&D that was done 50 years ago and has been repeated in Pakistan, India, and now North Korea (where you can get a free pizza with any weapon you buy, as long as you pay shipping). Worrying about it seems a little silly since the Khan network had already done a fair business in selling complete, down-to-the-schematics and Home Depot shopping list tutorials to all sorts of folks. Any country/party that wants to build nukes is going to have a much harder time getting the riht fissile material pulled together than they're going to have setting the thing off.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
About Iran using this as somebody in a madrassa in one of the former Soviet republics or Afghanistan or Pakistan
In fact, history suggests that President Bush will promote someone for this.
The truly predictable thing about this mess is that Republicans have been asserting that this is a) proof that Hussein was within a year of building a nuclear bomb (it isn't), and b) that this is the NYT's fault.
I mean, nevermind that righty-blogs were falling all over themselves pressing for the release of these. Somehow, they were convicned that opening these documents would unleash an "Army of Davids," and the President pushed to have the documents declassified and published before anyone had the chance to read them. Now that it turns out that, oops, hey, instructions on how to build a nuclear bomb are in there, Andrew Card is blaming - who else? - the NYT.
And this is after they'd already found instructions on how to make sarin in there.
Unbelievable.
Designing an Atomic weapons isn't that hard. Just get a bullet with appropriate fission material and shoot it at a core of enriched Uranium or for you hydrogen bomb... Get some plutonium and put it in a sphere and detonate with appropriate explosives to get it to implode.
The hard part is getting the enriched Uranium or Plutonium.
If you are able to design systems to refine either material, then its a cakewalk making the bomb.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Refer back to the submission about people in Gooberment not knowing anything about technology... and then remember that one time there were blue prints for the Airforce Force 1 on the internets... and countless other documents just laying there in the open over the Googles for everyone to see... LOL?
"U.S. Publishes Saddam's Guide to Building Atom Bombs to Web"?
Big deal. My 16 year old neighbor with Freenet can find out how to make a nuke. Finding out _how_ to is easy. It's actually doing that which requires a lot of resources, connections, etc. Iraq had none of these (as evidenced by the fact that none of it was found after years and years of searching). Just the GOP trying to piss into the tidalwave of DNC talking points about the cockup that is Iraq.
But didn't Iraq have no Nuclear program and Bush lied to us?
So.. if we published Iraq's Nuclear program documents.... wouldn't that Kinda kill that argument?
--------========+++Dont Feed The Lab Techs+++========--------
This is the internet. It's too late to pull the plug. It's already (I'm guessing) on bittorrent and most importantly on various caches either in right-wing bloggers' basements who tried to analyze the data or in interested scientists' basements, the clever ones that thought that there oughta be something good in those files, and, guess what, were proven right.
What a backfiring.
U.S. Rep. Pete Hoekstra's reply:
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
Everyone knows Iraq didn't have WMDs and wasn't developing WMDs.
Idiot. If you spent less time making things up and more time paying attention to facts (hint, even the news!) you might know a little more. Iraq DID at ONE TIME have some WMD's. They used them all and didn't develop any more. Don't go around saying "everyone knows" as though you're some sort of expert. Doing so is a logical fallacy.
So, if I understand this correctly, the NYT (which insists that Saddam never really had any WMDs, and that any development program was phony) publishes an article critical of the administration for putting documents up the web from the so-called Iraqi development programs because they reveal too much information about bomb making?
Huh?
How (precisely) does someone get to the point of knowing enough about developing nukes that his notes are classified as sensitive, without actually trying to build those nukes himself?
-Styopa
Can we actually still say that anyone can "give" the ability to build a nuke to anyone else in the modern so-called civilized world? The first A-bombs are over 60 years old. Whether you want to build a new Fat Man or Little Boy out of 1940s parts or a slick warp-capable photon torpedo with integrated AI sophisticated enough for it to have a favorite Thelonius Monk album is all pretty much up to the builders, but either one uses an idea that anyone who wants nowadays, has. Suppresing it is like trying to supress the internal combustion engine.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
"Couldn't find the "Nuclear Bombs for Dummies" book at the bookstore. A tin-pot dictator from N. Korea bought all the copies."
Yes. In fact, it was the title of this book which inspired his drive to build the bomb, and due to translation problems he thinks the title refers to a proposed trade, not a type of reader. He hopes to trade the bombs for something he can really use: sex dolls.
Where were you when the voynix came?
Another poster said that cryptome would probably have this at some point in the future, and it's a safe bet that they will.
Personally, I'm wondering if there's a google cache or wayback machine archive of the site. I need to go dig around because this is exactly the sort of information I need to have my laptop next time i take an international flight ;)
Look out honey cause I'm usin' technology
Ain't got time to make no apologies
We know by now that Saddam Hussein never ever had any WMD.
Where were you when the voynix came?
I wonder if any of the spider-based web archiving sites caught it in time.
The information on how to build an atomic bomb is already on the web. The issue isn't the directions. It's actually executing the directions. It's not an easy thing to do correctly. Plus, actually obtaining the materials to do so isn't easy either. A few years ago there was a mass panic in some state because a kid did his science project on how to build an atomic bomb. How many high school kids actually built one after that?
Basically, if you have enough resources to obtain the correct materials and the scientific minds to do it correctly, the directions sheet is the last of your worries. I can use the same recipe as Wolfgang Puck, but it takes a certain expertise to do it right.
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
-b.
Your NYT link did not lead to the NYT, but instead led to just another kook partisan blog.
Where were you when the voynix came?
.... When the North Koreans Slashdotted it. I guess they need the help.
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
Heh, except North Korea...
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
Trying to monopolize the strongest weapon technology are we eh. Good thing China, Russia and Korea have these weapons also or else we would never know what USA would do.
"Critics", in this case, allege that the US has created an archive containing material BOTH FROM IRAQ AND OTHER SOURCES, with the goal that PEOPLE WILL FIND WMD-MATERIAL IN IT - in order to create a connection between Iraq and WMD.
"Critics" very conveniently skip over, in this accusation, that such a link would only appear if people believed the material where WMD was described _was_ from Iraq. Which is extremely unlikely as any such material would likely be mixed with other military and security documents (what do you expect? 'A secular handbook to nuclear weapons from the purely scientific point of view') that at least contained a number of names of people and places. It is frankly moronic to "assume", as the plural "critics" does in this case, that the US was betting on people not being able to realise if such a WMD-related document was from Iraq or elsewhere.
Why must we be bothered with these actively disinformational IDEOLOGICAL SHILLS? When arguments and criticism is inane, crazy rambling yet the writer still obviously can both put letters together, actively does so, and manages to have it put on sites with quite a lot of visitors?
What makes you think you're going to get a better government?
If there's one waiting in the wings, I fail to see it.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
a. No you do not "understand this correctly".
b. The NYT has never said that Saddam "never really had any WMDs". We know he had them. We sold them to him back during the Iran/Iraq war
c. The same with Saddam's development programs.
d. Yes, the documents posted contain information that might be useful.
e. But you can probably purchase the information from North Korea or Iran or Pakistan, anyway.
I guess you missed the news about Saddam's nuclear program that was dug up after Gulf War I and when the Israelis bombed his nuclear plant and so on and so forth.
It's all available on the Internet. It's easy to find. You could also go to the "library" and read a "newspaper" from that time frame to see what was being reported.
I appreciate your support, but must you use newspeak? It's a little disconcerting--that's not the new government I was really hoping to see.
Why do you unbellyfeel AmSoc?
If one actually wants to build a nuclear bomb, it's really not all so terribly difficult... in the most basic form, a nuclear bomb can consist of two "rifles" that fire fissile material at each other.
I'm not saying that that's a trivial problem... but if you have the expertise to actually build it using the instructions, I'm fairly certain that you also have the expertise to figure it out yourself.
So is this really important news? Nah. Nuke plans on the web are for self-styled anarchist wannabes and physics geeks. Terrorists don't need them.
Somebody set up us the bomb.
... or maybe there's the possibility that the WMDs never existed.
This is the Technology Age. Information has to be the most valuable commodity around. And this is both good and bad.
I'm fully for such things as the Open Voting Consortium. In fact, I'm an active supporter. The Consortium wants to change the implementation of the voting system by making it open. But this knowledge of nuclear warfare can go unknown by the masses. Not knowing something can be a part of honesty and integrity. If you don't know the location of the secret hideout of your secret organization (that is, you've been brought there blindfolded), all the sodium thiopental in the world can't make you remember (although you could be overdosed and die).
On the other hand, if your government is lying to you, your honesty and integrity is absolutely based on the relative truth value of that administration. The latter is as good as a house built on sand during a storm, and the former is as good as shingles on the roof of that house.
I don't see how anyone could feel entitled to this knowledge, and I support the United States' decision. An important part of this Age of Information is that, in my opinion, with knowledge should come responsibility. Everyone should be able to handle the responsibility of knowing that there may have been some government scandal. Too many cooks spoil the broth, and the masses simply can't handle the responsibility of knowing how to make an atomic bomb. So I'm assuming bad faith? You betcha.
It doesnt matter if the rules or laws are contradictory, overly complex or just plain ridiculous.
I've already seen it in the Japanese "The man who stole the sun" (1979).
I mirrored these illusive documents here:
http://lovemyhounds.tripod.com/litera1.jpg
I am sitting here reading the Slashdot comments and noting that not one person is noting that these nuclear documents are from 1991. No one has ever denied that Saddam had a nuclear program before the first Gulf War. The actions of Bush I shut that down.
This has nothing to with whether Saddam had WMDs when we went to war in this decade. All the intelligence that we have suggests that he was as close to nuclear weapons as a good university (i.e. the know-how but not the infrastructure).
Step 1: Get Uranium 238
Step 2: Place said uranium in a bomb
Step 3: Get a neutron
Step 4: Place neutron in a sling shot
Step 5: Aim said slingshot at uranium
Step 6: Place timer on slingshot
Step 7: Drop bomb on Somethingistan
Step 8: Timer goes off, slingshot shoot neutron at uranium.
Step 9: Kaboom
Step 10: Rule the world
Step 11: Feel sorry for the dead people
Step 12: Give Somethingistan money to rebuild
Step 13: Setup a government in Somethingistan
Step 14: Supply Somethingistan with nuclear capability to protect itself.
Step 15: Somethingistan revolts
Step 16: Declare Somethingistan a member of the Axis-of-Evil
Step 17: GoTo Step 1
A flamebait mod and a handfull of serious replies, I can see.
But not even one post from somebody who read the parent as an obvious satire and sarcasm?
Geez, guys. Get a grip!
(I guess we have another example of sarcasm not coming across in print.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
"The Bush administration did so under pressure from Congressional Republicans"
"The director of national intelligence, John D. Negroponte, had resisted setting up the Web site, which some intelligence officials felt implicitly raised questions about the competence and judgment of government analysts. But President Bush approved the site's creation after Congressional Republicans proposed legislation to force the documents' release."
Bush and Republican congressmen were warned about the security risk and _still_ did this. When incompetence reaches this level it is indistinguishable from treason! They're going to have to change from the "Republican Pary" to the "Rosenberg Party." At least they can keep the traditional "R" next to their names.
Lets see, we're looking for information about making WMDs and it might be in this big stack of documents our translaters don't have time to translate. Lets release it in full on the web despite receiving warning from intelligence agencies that it could be a security risk. Our enemies don't even have to translate it! (I know Iranians speak Persian, but Al Qaeda speaks Arabic).
I thought that I read that the Duelfer Report also talked about how, although the weapons programs were not up and running, Saddam was hoping to use the oil for food program to wiggle his way out of inspections and international pressure? Saddam was hoping that once that happened he could resume the research and development of WMD. We now know that the oil for food payoffs were working. Thankfully we will never know when the next step would have been.
Some bloggers have been looking at the Iraq documents all along and have found very interesting things that have been ignored by the NYT and other MSM outlets. One of the documents turned out to be from an Iraqi general discussing suicide attacks against US interests.
0 8423.php
Take look for your self:
http://www.captainsquartersblog.com/mt/archives/0
Thank you!
I guess it helps to understand satire if you're a rocket scientist!
Iraq once did have chemical weapons, and did have other objectionable weapons programs. This is generally accepted by all parties. The falsehood isn't that. The falsehood is the US government claim that it had them at the time they invaded, as a justification for that invasion.
Are you adequate?
If al Qaeda (or anyone else) is capable of stealing enough enriched Uranium or Plutonium to build a bomb, then their ability to do so ought to be basically assumed.
The physics behind it aren't all that hard; if you can steal a nuclear weapon, I'm sure you can find some out-of-work nuclear engineer to help you draw up the plans. It's not as if the U.S. or even the West has a complete lock on that knowledge. There are probably thousands -- maybe more -- of people who would be capable of designing a nuclear weapon given the raw materials and a blank piece of paper. Probably any bright graduate from a school of Nuclear Engineering could, and I don't think we register or otherwise track people in those programs.
If we want to stop nuclear weapons from falling into the hands of terrorists, we need to work on security in the physical, material plane; trying to secure and stop the spread of information -- particularly information that's 70 years old and well understood -- is a losing game. It's not security, it's a charade; and worse than that, it's a false sense of security and a diversion of resources that would be better spent rounding up and securing fissionable materials.
Information, by its nature (being nonconservative) is far more difficult than matter to stop from spreading. It can be slowed down, for a time, and for great expense, but trying to keep a lid on certain ideas forever is a fool's errand.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
On second thought, my first sentence isn't as obvious in its meaning as it should have been. Please allow me to clarify:
If al Qaeda (or anyone else) is capable of stealing enough enriched Uranium or Plutonium to achieve theoretical supercriticality, then their ability to build a bomb out of it ought to be basically assumed.
I.e., in designing our security precautions, we should err on the side of always assuming that the terrorists will know how to build a bomb, once they have the minimum set of physical objects necessary to do so.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Seems to me like the hard part about engineering an implosion bomb is, well, getting the implosion right. Couldn't you just trial-and-error that with lead stand-ins for the Plutonium for a while until you got it right? I mean, isn't that at least partly what the Manhattan Project did? Is the physics of the "atomic" part of an atomic bomb really that unknown anymore? What am I missing?
We are doing everything we can to deploy that Star Wars missile-defense system, starting with creating the threats that require the system.
--
make install -not war
That must mean all the bookmarks I have for product X are dead-on proof that I am planning to buy it, even though I already bought competing product Y. I'd better break out the credit card.
Holy crap, I just realized I have my tax returns in here! I know I sent a check in already, but unless I burn my copies I'll have to pay them again! I did have them on file, after all!
Wow I didn't even really know myself, let alone Saddam. Thanks for opening my eyes.
Someone had to do it.
Excuse me, stupid (and I mean that with all due respect). The NYTimes admits that in 1991 Saddam had nuclear knowhow. Remember the run-up to the war? Nobody ever claimed that Saddam didn't try to get WMDs back around the time of the first Gulf War, but the whole thing about the UN sanctions was that Saddam was supposed to dismantle the project. And guess what? It turns out he actually did. We've got a few hundred thousand US troops and another 50k "contractors" who get paid by Haliburton who've scoured the country for the last 4 years looking for those fucking weapons and guess what? There ARE NONE, and there's absolutely not a single shred of evidence that Saddam did anything but stop his weapons program over a decade ago. The CIA knew this and STILL Cheney and his chimp insisted that we had to invade Iraq. "Can't wait for the inspectors, gotta do it now". That was all we heard. Remember "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud"? It was all bullshit. Utter bullshit.
And now, after the Republicans told us that since they took over Congress and the White House "The Grown-ups are in charge", we find out that they've actually published instructions for cooking up a little nuke right on the web for anyone to see.
If there ever was a president and administration that badly needs some oversight, it's this one. And the GOP Congress has proven without a doubt that they will not provide that oversight. My prayer is that next week there will be a new congress who can provide that oversight.
And if there ever was an administration that is crying out for some investigations, it's this one. I don't care if the new congress does one single thing besides investigate the hell out of this gang of idiots. It would be better than the 5 years of colossal bungling that we've seen.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Apparently the bomb's design involved fifty million baby teeth and a hammer as a detonator.
Profileration is really a national issue, an issue of resources. Nations build nukes. Maybe a particularly industrialized and wealthy city could as well; but has it ever happened? As far as I know, only two nations have EVER gotten nuke building to point where it was anything other than a horrendously difficult, trial-and-error, hand-tweaked mega project. And those two nations -- the USSR and the USA -- have both since then lost/abandoned their ability to mass-produce nuclear weaponry. North Korea is bankrupting itself trying.
Building a nuke is definitley not about knowledge, it's about the time, money, and manpower to DO it. You really don't need much uranium, although it certainly is helpful that the bulk of the world's uranium mines lie in the hands of Australia and Canada, both non-proliferation nations that enjoy liberal trade with other capitalist democracies.
Iraq HAD a WMD program. According to the NY Times, they were a year from getting a workable bomb.
I guess Bush *didn't* lie, eh?
dumbass
Shows that the current U.S. government is not really interested in arms control, just political propaganda... Republicans making the country safer by publishing nuclear weapon blueprints on the Internet...! FAILs like everything else GWB's administration has been doing. I mean, how stupid can they be? Making these things available just to try to justify their mistakes without giving a damn about the consequences?
In reference to
'whether Saddam Hussein destroyed Iraq's weapons of mass destruction or hid or transferred them'
were there not a couple of mystery cargo ships that departed shortly before the war started and vanished? There was something on the news at the time about them, but they dissapeared ina region where there was nil chance of finding them if they'd been skuttled.
After that, no more mention, but if wmd existed, my money would go on them being on those ships.
I heard about this on NPR during my drive back from class. Immediatly I though about a spider/bot that may have cached the page before it was pulled.
:D
Anyone have any links??
P.S. I am not a terrorist nor am I interested in the actual data included in the pulled pages, only IF the info had been cached or not...
Now all the guys sitting on stockpiles of plutonium will just shrug with a confused look, not knowing what to do with it anymore.
Seriously, who exactly are they trying to stop here?
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
I'm laughing all the way to a Rethuglican victory this coming Tuesday.
Very likely.
The capacity of Americans for perverse logic appear to know no bounds.
"I'm a snake if we disagree"-Jethro Tull, Bungle in the Jungle
>Iraq had none of these (as evidenced by the fact that none of it was found after years and years of searching).
I still remain unconvinced, for 2 reasons.
First, who would cook up such an obvious lie when it would be found out immediately? If the administration was going to lie about this, don't you think they would go to the trouble to plant some evidence?
Secondly, it would not surprise me in the slightest to find that the WMD were secretly helped out of the country into Iran or Syria.
The Palestinians fired thousands of rockets into Israel just scant weeks ago. Weapons that we know where secreted to them with help from their buddies in Syria.
If the weapons can be snuck in, why not out?
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
Freedom soon follows.
Yet another example of what is going on. ( and no this is not bash on bush, its a general statement, as anyone in office is taking advantage of things )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Turned out, he had no working bombs. But he was supposed — under the 1992 cease-fire deal — to get rid of the KNOW HOW (as in destroy the documents) as well...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Link?! C'mon, people! I have an annoying neighbor, and this info seems like just the thing I need.
As I understand, the Little Boy (gun barrel) concept is pretty straightforward if you have the material. You just take two nearly critical masses and shoot them into each other at a velocity sufficient to create a critical mass faster than the increasing reaction rates can blow the mass apart. I don't think the Little Boy design was even tested before Hiroshima...unless you count the scientists at the University of Chicago with their atomic pile in the basement. This design is apparently pretty dirty and has a very limited yield.
The compressed sphere/cylinder concept, as you said, is much harder. Collapse of the mass into a critical density has to be almost perfectly uniform or it fizzes out. It sounds to me like that probably happened in North Korea. I seriously doubt they were trying for a 1/2 kiloton bomb. In designing the HE shells to collapse the fissile material, they reportedly test them on hollow metal blanks the size and shape of the warhead. The metal blank is expected to be evenly shrunk to a fraction of it's original size, but not deformed in any way. It's so precise that they use hundreds of detonators, because the explosive burns to slow to create even pressure from a single detonation point, and all the wires are the same length, to avoid even minor changes in capacitance from delaying any one detonator.
99% of geeks already know how to build nukes. Hell I could build a warp core given some dilithium...
Great Intellect...
Shows you what a joke all this bullsh*t about dangers to national security is. The government is putting people at risk and doesn't hold itself to account. If that was an individual, I'm sure there would be law enforcement involved and anti-terrorism sentences to imprisonment for an indefinate period.
Then you seem to be forgetting Saddam had control of that information. And ignoring the fact that these documents reveal that Saddam retained that information. And you can't call publishing this information dangerous without saying it made Saddam a threat - even until the day he was deposed. Because Saddam had it.
Is this information dangerous and should not have been released, and therefore it made Saddam a threat? You can't say releasing this data was wrong, and then turn around and claim Saddam was not a threat.
And don't you find it ironic that the NY Times is calling the release of information dangerous?
Somehow, they were convicned that opening these documents would unleash an "Army of Davids,"
It did - a lot of interesting translations were released before the archive got shut down. At first the army was simply going to destroy these documents, and doesn't that seem like an even greater act of stupidity?
It's not like instructons for how to build nuclear bombs have not been published in the past. This archive was a valuable look into the Saddam administration and it's a shame it has been shut down - hopefully they'll bring some parts back. But of course to do so, they now have to know what parts are safe, and to know that they need translations of the documents...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Dumberass
Even a latent program is still a program. Saddam held onto document detailing how to build neculear weapons that were supposed to have all been destroyed.
You can't have it both ways on this, even though the left is currently spinning this like a 78 RPM record plugged into a european power outlet. Oops!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
yeah right, you can just nip down to the hardware store and cookup a nuke. get real. anyone with the funds and equipment needed to make a nuclear device doesn't need any help from a website to get the job done.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Fascinating how the New York Times manages to fill the whole article, on the front- and continuation pages, discussing who released the documents, etc. and never explains who taught Iraq how to build atom bombs. As the article says:
Iraq was indeed dangerous before the war: the first Gulf war in 1991. A suspicious reader might, perhaps, wonder where Iraq learnt advanced techniques of bomb construction. A likely source would be the country with the most nuclear weapons:
Fun trivia: Who was president of the United States in September 1989?
No doubt, the New York Times just did not know of the above highly secret information, because it was first revealed only on the floor of the US House of Representatives. See the Statement of Henry B. Gonzalez, Chairman, House Committee on Banking, Finance, and Urban Affairs, "Bush Administration had Acute Knowledge of Iraq's Military Industrialization Plans," July 27, 1992.
I tip my hat to the New York Times, masters of 'free'-world propaganda.
You have no idea what you're talking about.
First, the bullet-core arrangement you mention is not a hydrogen bomb. It's the simplest form of atomic weapon, a gun-type bomb like Little Boy, the weapon dropped on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945. And even that bomb wasn't so simple: in order to insure an airburst roughly 2000' over the city, the bomb used redundant radar and barometric triggers to determine altitude (the actual height of detonation was 1850').
Little Boy was simple but inefficient, given the amount of fissile material used.
Trinity and Fat Man (the first test shot and the Nagasaki weapon) were plutonium-based implosion weapons. A sphere of high explosive lenses was used to implode plutonium around a neutron-rich core (the initiator). This was a more efficient use of fissile materials but the engineering involved was complicated: each explosive lens had to be detonated at exactly the right time in order to achieve perfect implosion (and this was first done by engineers with slide rules, mind you). Even now, sixty years later, the dimensions of the initiator at the core of the weapon are still classified Top Secret.
A hydrogen weapon uses an implosion fission device as a primary, and is designed to channel its energy to a secondary fusion device consisting of polystyrene, uranium, and deuterium. The engineering involved in such a device is far beyond slide rules, since a difference of microseconds can mean a successful fusion reaction or a weapon blown apart by its own primary. A fizzle, in other words.
Enriching uranium and generating plutonium are solved problems, but they are energy- and material-intensive. In 1944-45, it took two massive industrial complexes at Hanford WA and Oak Ridge TN to produce enough fissile materials for three weapons.
k.
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
Iran does have a lot of Uranium. See here: http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/world/iran/mines .htm
Never give in--never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to conviction
Bush insisted on publishing all those docs without review, despite even his Republican crony Intelligence Czar trying to stop his insane blunder.
Bush is the guy who suppresses journalists informing Americans that Bush is illegally spying on us, kidnapping random people into torture gulags, and explaining even the most basic miserable facts about his Iraqatastrophe by calling them "traitors", who "aid the enemy". Meanwhile, he publishes atomic bomb instructions to any enemy with a Web connection.
And waives the requirements on N Korea's nuke plants that kept them from becoming weapons. And sends our army to Iraq instead of securing Afghanistan. And WHERE'S OSAMA?
Bush is the worst terrorist enemy the US has ever had. Even just in Iraq he's killed as many Americans as Osama killed in NYC, DC and PA, to say nothing of the tens of thousands badly maimed, and the tens-hundreds times as many Iraqis.
This Tuesday, November 7, you'll have the chance to go to the polls and vote for a Democrat for your representative in the House. Probably your senator is up for selection as a Democrat, too. Throw out the criminal Republican co-conspirators with Bush who have let him wage his Terror War against us without oversight or complaint. Stop this criminal act now, before it kills again.
Whoops - too late. Tuesday can't come fast enough to save the Americans in Iraq who will have to die before we can even get a Democratic Congress to stop Bush in January. But at least we can start cutting our losses ASAP.
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make install -not war
They stumbled across some of the docs on thumbdrives only after a drug raid on a nearby trailer. Drug criminals holding nuke secrets:
George Bush: worse than Katrina. Feel safer?
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make install -not war
"You have to figure out a way for people to stop hurting each other and stop stepping on each other's feelings, then nobody will use guns and weapons! Like that's ever gonna happen..."
Mandatory lobotomies. Demand it now. For peace.
Where were you when the voynix came?