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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?"
Let's face it, the Nuclear Cat is slowly crawling out of the bag and will no longer be containable soon. We need to develop better nuke-detection and interception technology or we will be doomed by rogue garage nukes and missiles.
Table-ized A.I.
the server's been nuked.
Table-ized A.I.
They've been on Usenet for ages. That's why Verizon is cutting off access to the binaries.
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it well worth the effort.
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."
TANSTAAFL GIGO Acronyms to live by!
KHAAAAAAAAAAAANNNN!
Admit it. You post strawman arguments as AC so you get modded Insightful for refuting them, rather than Troll
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.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
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.
Iran, now, is it? Jesus, you buy the american propaganda hook, line and sinker.
Any bomb that fits easily into a standard freight container is already a horrible nightmare:
These containers travel worldwide, are rarely inspected if the paperwork seems to be OK, and they can easily stay in a harbor area of a major city for many months.
The only trigger you need is a cell phone, so you can preplace them wherever you like and blow up any coastal city in the world, whenever you want to.
Stopping this scenario is probably (or should be) the real nightmare for most of the three-letter agencies in the world.
Terje
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"
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.
Encryption: Bad
Laptop searches at the border: good
reason: TERRERISTS!!!
WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION!!!
THE AXIS OF EVIL!!!
let me guess once, what laws will soon be proposed (which will by the way legalize some more of the unconstitutional actions of the bush-regime...)
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
GNUke is an sophisticated and compact nuclear warhead - and more. At its core is are two pieces of piece of sub-critical material that can be combined into a supercritical mass for civil and military use alike.
GNUke is a GNU project which is similar to the Little Boy Bomb which was developed at Manhattan Project Laboratories by J. Robert Oppenheimer and colleagues. It can be considered as a different implementation of Litte Boy. There are some important differences, but much destruction wreaked through Little Boy can be achieved unaltered with GNUke.
One of GNUke's strengths is the ease with which well-produced fission-quality material can be included. Great care has been taken over the defaults for the minor design choices in the nuclear fission process, but the user retains full control.
GNUke blueprints are available as Free Documentation under the terms of the Free Software Foundation's GNU Free Documentation License in source code form. It can easily be set up and functions on a wide variety of launch vehicles and similar systems (including B-29 Superfortresses and ICBMs).
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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?
The IAEA were pretty pissed when they found out that the key was 0xDEADBEEF
post-it note.
A gun-assembly bomb is extremely reliable*. The manhattan project designers only included a neutron source as a detonator in Little Boy to make sure it went off at just the right altitude; Based on the rate of neutron release due to spontaneous fissions, the bomb was absolutely gauranteed to have gone off within 1 or 2 seconds anyway. They didn't even build a test bomb they were so sure it would work.
The problem is that gun bombs are an obscene waste of an extremely rare material; Little Boy had about five times as much uranium as Fat Man did plutonium (~100 vs ~20Kg) but a significantly inferior yield (~15 vs ~20KT). It's estimated that maybe 1/10 of Little Boy's uranium had fissioned when it disassembled.
* YMMV depending on isotopic impurities, but terrorists aren't going to be the ones refining the metal.
The real question is: Whose agenda does it fit to reveal this, and now.
See, nukes aren't that complicated. Most of us learn the basics at school. Assuming the blueprint is genuine, and of a tested design, that's a piece of valuable work, but not groundbreaking. There is no threat of any living-in-caves terrorists coming up with a nuke due to some blueprints. Funny how all this fearmongering always forgets the amount and quality of equipment you need to actually turn a blueprint into a working bomb.
It's roughly comparable to having a blueprint of a machine gun (available in most libraries, and Google will probably give you a hundred of them at least), and an actual working machine gun. You just can't build one in your garage, there's a little bit more specialised precision equipment required. And then you'd still need the ammo.
So who is trying to get a bigger budget for what? That's the question we should be asking.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
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.
There's many different approaches. Bruteforcing even a 128-bit AES key will still take more time than life on Earth has, even given Moore's observation on semiconductor density.
However, bruteforcing a passphrase usually takes considerably less time.
Bruteforcing an interrogation subject can be very quick indeed.
"Heavily encrypted?" What does that mean? Couldn't be all that heavy if the encryption was broken, right?
Oh, perhaps they mean Hollywood-style encryption! In nearly every Hollywood movie you ever see that contains anything about encryption, the encryption is always "heavy" and yet broken long before the movie ends. Since this is probably the only exposure to "encryption" most of the public sees, the public must have a very warped idea of what encryption is all about!
It always amazes me that encryption that should take longer than the Age of the Universe to break is "broken" in just a few minutes by some "super" kid that can barely even spell the word!
Maybe I should do a website on "Hollywood Mathematics" along with the one I want to do on "Hollywood Physics"...
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
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 |
We should try to cut off the terrorists funding source. There must be something which is funneling huge dollars to their backers...I just can't figure out what it is...
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
A bomb is not a reactor. The trick is getting enough together quickly enough that you get a big bang rather than a moderate one that just scatters your fissile material. This is still, for uranium at least, a relatively trivial problem but not as trivial as you imply.
"Physics is to math as sex is to masturbation." -R. Feynman
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.
I think I have seen these blueprints before, I think they were named something like
Pakistani.Nuke.Blueprints.2004.REPACK.READNFO.KHaNDOX.torrent
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
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
> "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?"
It took no more than that. Alternatively, it could have taken seconds because the gov't. has a backdore it has secretly figured out, or has the same lists of 256-bit primes everyone else has, and more.
I mean, if 512-bit encryption is based on two roughly 256-bit primes, how many of the latter have been figured out by computer? If I were government, I'd be calculating them nonstop on large networks and generating enormous lists of them.
That's what I'd do anyway. Like a Google type operation, if smaller of scale.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.