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Nuclear Warhead Blueprints On Smugglers' Computers
imrehg links to a story at the Guardian which begins "Blueprints for a sophisticated and compact nuclear warhead have been found in the computers of the world's most notorious nuclear-smuggling racket, according to a leading US researcher. The digital designs, found in heavily encrypted computer files in Switzerland, are believed to be in the possession of the US authorities and of the International Atomic Energy Agency, in Vienna, but investigators fear they could have been extensively copied and sold to 'rogue' states via the nuclear black market." Reader this great guy links to the New York Times article on the discovery, and asks "Given that
Khan's revelations were made in early 2004, does that mean it took the IAEA
1-2 years to brute-force the encryption?"
Honestly, I think complete designs are probably available out there from U.S., Soviet, and Chinese sources. The main problem with building nuclear devices is getting weapons grade materials.
But you gotta know that the guys in black are sitting around saying, "THAT is why we wanted to control encryption."
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that no version of this story seems to try to point the source of these plans to the US? They probably should be. I can think of no better reason to understand why they found out about it than knowing the source of the material. Color me cynical.
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Sjuh... there's only one option: contain it at the source(s). Very strict contol of enrichment. That's about all one can do, and unfortunately doesn't control already distributed materials nor as yet untouched ore sources - which may become in trek if the world does get strict on ores. But methinks the only real solution is nuclear fusion. Make sure there's enough power for everyone's needs, and then some; that way we can try to kick the planet into a Golden Age and maybe the shortsighted suicidal monkeys will give it a rest and get back to masturbation instead of terrorism. God knows I'd sponsor 'em with a blowup doll or something.
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it well worth the effort.
Who cares? As a New Yorker, who's HS (Stuyvesant) was in the drop zone of 9/11, and who's dad along with several others decided to continue thesis defenses as the towers burned because if you change you life, the terrorists win... I say let them come. Even with nukes. I'll take the chance. My parents will take the chance. I don't really care who gets Nucs these days because MAD works, to such an extent that NK and Iran etc, will think twice before exporting working nukes. Because if a nuke built in Iran goes off in the US, Iran will cease to exist, and they know it.
I have no solution, but to think that this is a major issue is not to understand politics.
The issue is not with building a gadget that produces an uncontrolled nuclear chain reaction. Putting that in a compact, reliable, and deliverable package is what takes effort.
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
That is an often-repeated statement, however there is very little in terms of facts that support it.
Building nukes, especially advanced ones in quantities over a single test weapon still requires (in addition to the plans) a large and relatively modern industrial base -- for the components, for the various explosives, for the wealth of rare materials necessary etc. etc.
Having such an industry USSR style -- for the purpose of nukes only -- is quite expensive, and out of reach of almost any country. Hence you don't see many succeeding, especially when there is resolute opposition from the superpowers to such efforts.
So, no, the nuclear cat isn't quite out of the bag yet, the weapons are out of reach of mostly every state, and those countries who make them profit very little from having them per se.
And, thankfully, nuke-building capability tom-clancy style is so far quite out of reach of any kind of terrorist group.
International forums and inspections as those that exist under the NPT regime are still the most important, effective and relevant way to keep your "nuclear cat" in the bag.
I am not an engineer, but as I understand it one of the more difficult engineering challenges of designing an implosion type device is getting the arrangement of the explosive lenses just right to compress the plutonium pit into a critical mass symmetrically. Just wrapping the pit in a plain sphere of explosives won't do the job - there will be parts of the explosive that will fire later than others and the compression will be non-symmetric. If the implosion is non-symmetric, the fission primary will fling itself apart before substantial energy from the chain reaction can be generated.
Another design challenge is the electronics needed to fire all the explosive lenses with timing tolerances of less than a few millionths of a second, and switching devices that can switch hundreds of amps of current at those speeds. Needless to say, manufacturers do their best to control who gets their hands on them, though they are "dual use" and probably could be sourced indirectly.
Of course a gun type weapon would be substantially easier to get to work with wider tolerances than an implosion type, but they are so inefficient that they require a relatively huge amount of fissile material to make; perhaps an impractically large amount for a terrorist group to get their hands on without being easily noticed.
Forty years ago a couple of physics students designed a working A bomb.
Heavily encrypted? How did they break them then? The guy left his key sitting in his home directory or something?
That's totally incorrect:
1) Actually, I'm Russian.
2) I'm not (very) afraid of mini-nukes falling into terrorist hands. There's a lot of other things to be afraid of.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davy_Crockett_(nuclear_device)
23 Kg small enough for you ? Maybe by 'taking out' you mean to level the whole thing but I think just exploding one of these from the top of a high building would be enough to destroy Manhattan in an economical sense.
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Look, I've even provided a link describing EXISTING weapon: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Atomic_Demolition_Munition - it's about 1kt and it weights about 70kg. Salt it with, say, cobalt for additional effect. It won't bring down New-York, of course, but it surely can destroy a smaller city.
A 150kt bomb weights about 130kg - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W80 Are you ready to bet that it can't be scaled down further? And in any case, 130kg is still within range for 'baggage nuke'.
And I'm not afraid of 'anything nuclear'. In fact, I now work at the Chernobyl power plant.
IANCS (I am not a computer specialist) - but this has just occurred to me: would it be possible to distribute a task (such as a brute force attack) via BOINC without the user knowing it?
The example being: IAEA/NSA wants to crack a file, doesn't have the time to do it on its own and distributes the task via BOINC, so you can crack it for them? This would mean that the BOINC people are in it too but that should not be SO hard to imagine. Would this be possible?
I take my children to see Madonna(..), but I never for once ever thought I was in the same business.Chris Rea.
It's not just mass that's the issue. There's also a minimum size, and only certain shapes will provide appropriate paths and timing for the fissile material to travel down. Your 70kg warhead may only have 10kg of uranium in it (in fact it does, the SADM uses the same warhead as the Davey Crockett), but all the rest of the stuff in there is there to keep the parts of the warhead separate before detonation.
While nukes are easy to make with the right materials, powerful nukes require a lot more imagination, fissile material and physical space.
The blueprints for nukes aren't that hard to get; fortunately, the weapons-grade plutonium purchase attempt will raise a few real big flags.
stuff |
Yes, but only 23kg unshielded and measuring 11"x16". You could hide that anywhere, provided you could deal with radiation burns or use the container e.g. car metalwork/building foundations to absorb some of the radiation.
For a more disturbing account of what we may have to protect ourselves against, read about the apparently 'missing' ones.
A first-year physics student called John Aristotle Philips did all this as a summer project his first year at Princeton, way back in the early 19790s. Read the book - it's quite enlightening (as well as amusing).
http://www.amazon.com/Mushroom-True-Story-Bomb-Kid/dp/0671827316/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1213618717&sr=1-2
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
The way I would have done this would have been to use a particular SMS text message, and not just a voice call.
:-(
With 140 bytes (160 7-bit chars), you can make the detonation key arbitrarily un-guessable.
For extra credit, add a dead-man switch: An encrypted message which must be received every day (hour/week/whatever) to delay detonation.
At this point you really wouldn't want to experience a longterm cell phone outage.
Terje
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Watch Japan. T Minus ~5-10 years and counting. The only way to grow the working population when the birth rate is low and declining, is to extend the useful, healthy, mentally-able life of productive elders. Efforts are underway, so we'll see if technology can overtake the problem.
True science means that when you re-evaluate the evidence, you re-evaluate your faith.
Yes, +1... the GP is very correct. It was the provocation of the USSR into the conflict that was Hitler's great mistake. Of course, considering that Hitler hated the Soviets and Communism more than anything and specifically felt like the Slavs were the untermenschen that needed to be conquered for Lebensraum, there was a certain urgency to the attack, of course... by the time of the attack the USSR was still weak enough so that the Germans were able to push deep into their territory, but Russia is deep... and eventually this gave the Soviets time to ramp up their production war materiel production, which Germany was never able to match. If the war had only been between USSR and Germany, Germany still would have lost, although it would have taken more time. I have also always played with the thought of what would have happened if Barbarossa had not occurred if Hitler had not been so ideologically committed to eradicating the Soviet Union... his hatred of "the reds" was so burning you'd think he was a Libertarian or something. :-) We'd essentially have had a Europe full of Germany's vassal states, Britain probably would have made peace and might have been spared actual occupation, which was the plan after Seelöwe failed... US would not really have had reason to go to war, and Germany would have been capable of repelling an outright invasion of the Russians. Interesting stuff, that.
I want to play Free Market with a drowning Libertarian.
The task of this piece on the front page of today's Washington Post is to establish the believe that Iran has a nuclear weapon design.
The Swiss 'businessmen', Friedrich Tinner and his two sons, are alleged to have sold several nuke related stuff to Lybia and other countries.
There is more to the Tinner story, but for now let me concentrate on the date. The WaPo says the laptop has been discovered in 2006. But Tinner was under CIA control at least since the 2003 bust of nuclear related stuff on board of the 'BBC China'.
The German magazine Der Spiegel had a big story about this in March 2006:
Tinner was flipped by the CIA at least since the 'BBC China' event but likely even earlier. Another man taking part in the alleged smuggling was also turned by the CIA or has worked for the CIA all along.
Indeed it somehow seems like everybody involved in the issue was somehow related to the CIA.
The usual story is that the Pakistani scientist A.Q. Kahn was the one who ran a smuggling network. That may not be true at all. Khan denies having been involved in such. A new book asserts that it was then Prime Minister of Pakistan Bhutto who personally gave Pakistani nuclear secrets to North Korea in exchange for North Korean No Dong missiles for the Pakistani army.
A Dutch court somehow 'lost' legal files about the Khan case and the CIA likely had a hand in this too. The CIA also successfully pressed (link in German) the Swiss government to destroy information it had about the Tinner case. Tinner will thereby never be convicted.
Now please explain to me how people arrested in 2003 and flipped by the CIA at least since then managed to keep nuclear plans on a laptop that were somehow found only in 2006?
This whole story stinks from A to Z
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Never been known to fail..."