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US Couple Arrested For Transmitting Nuclear Secrets In Sting Operation
DesScorp writes "Recalling the famous Rosenberg nuclear spy case of the '50s, the US Justice Department has arrested a couple working at a 'leading nuclear research facility' for giving nuclear secrets to Venezuela. Pedro and Marjorie Mascheroni 'have been indicted on charges of communicating classified nuclear weapons data to a person they believed to be a Venezuelan government official and conspiring to participate in the development of an atomic weapon for Venezuela,' the department said in a statement. If convicted, the couple would receive life in prison."
Yeah, that's about the right age. 10 and 2 the day the Bomb was dropped on Japan in 1945. 17 and 9 the day the H-Bomb was tested in 1952. 24 and 16 the day the Russkies launched Sputnik in 1959. Perfect timing for a young adult or child to get inspired by the prospects of a career in science and engineering, and to subsequently find themselves in their 30s (or 20s) at a weapons lab building the World's Biggest Fireworks during the heyday of Cold War bomb design.
(What, you think NASA built all those rockets just to beat the Russians to the moon? Manned spaceflight, satellite phones, GPS, and Google Maps are all spinoffs from things that were fundamentally cold war-era military projects: a fleet of reliable ICBMs, communications systems, navigation and targeting systems, and spy satellites.)
The present-day stockpile stewardship has led to lots of interesting advances (with civilian applications) in supercomputing, solid state physics, and helped out with the monitoring/cleanup of old nuclear sites, but when it comes to practical applications, most of the folks are going to be old. (Any young adult growing up today - in the post-test-ban treaty era - that considers a career in this direction is aware they'll still be dealing with very interesting problems... but that the closest they'll ever get to knowing if it really works is in the form of analyzing the results from subcritical tests or from computer simulations.)
I don't have a need to know if there are many (or any) young nuclear weapons designers today, but I suspect that since we haven't fielded a new design in decades, that much of weapons design is rapidly approaching the "lost knowledge" stage, and the demographic is akin to that grizzled (but brilliant!) old guy who still knows how to fix a mechanical typewriter or tune a carburetor.
Much like the WW2 vets, the people of the Manhattan Project aren't going to be around much longer - and the second generation of weaponeers (who worked on the bombs that brought us the Cold War) is also getting pretty damn long in the tooth. Here's hoping the young'uns at the labs - even if they can never talk about the lost knowledge they've preserved - are at least taking steps to preserve the stories of the people who came before them. Because there are (and shouldn't be!) publicly-accessible papers on much of this research, it's even more vital that the labs who did the engineering (and who are entrusted with the responsibility of keeping it under wraps) to take steps to record, preserve, and secure the history for the next generation of engineers.
Fuck these two asshats for leaking secrets. But here's a pseudonymous note of civilian thanks to the vast majority of you old fogies who did keep true to your oaths. You did some damn fine engineering while keeping secret the things that needed to remain secret. We random civilian nerds will never (and given the state of the world, probably should never!) have a chance to fully appreciate just how good the engineering was, but from what you have been permitted to declassify so far... yeah, pretty damn good. You gave us a world in which Fallout 3 was a fun video game, not a reality TV show. Thanks!)