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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."
75 and 67 years old? Jeebus.
Living With a Nerd
nuclear secrets really aren't. The nth country experiment showed that over 40 years ago. Trying to keep the knowledge locked away is futile, the only hope is to control the fissile material.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
...what?
If you read the TFA, you will learn that the government of Venezuela was not involved at all. The accused didn't sell secrets to anyone but an undercover FBI agent. While trying to sell nuclear secrets to a foreign government is definitely a problem, it's not true that they were "giving nuclear secrets to Venezuela".
The devil is in the details. While the basics of making a uranium bomb are fairly common knowledge, the nitty, gritty details of making a proper plutonium bomb are well kept secrets. Get it wrong, and things don't really work. Or it blows up in your face, taking a small city with it. It is very complex and requires some very precise manufacturing capabilities that are beyond the abilities of most countries in the world to get right.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
That assumes that everyone is equally rational, which we know is not the case. It would only take one psychopath to end the world and laugh as everything around him burned to the ground.
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed H
You don't piss off your nuclear scientists. Even retired you better take care of them, or otherwise one or more of them will get past the efforts to watch them, and they'll sell what you didn't want sold.
Keep them happy.
Or buy more bullets.
Be good to yourselves....and each other.
It wouldn't be nearly as bad if it were, say, Canada or Brazil.
Venezuela is known for it's anti-American leader Hugo Chavez, who loves to troll us. From what I hear, though, his people are sick of his bullshit.
> Or it blows up in your face, taking a small city with it.
So make it in the city you want to blow up.
Thus killing 2,423,158 birds with one stone? Hmmm...
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Kudos to his efforts in being both a legendary songwriter and doing his part to help keep our nation safe!
What the hell would Venezuela want nuclear weapons for anyway??
Clive DaSilva Email: clive.dasilva@gmail.com Ubuntu 18.10 Kernel 4.18
is more realistic approaches to nuclear nonproliferation. face up to the fact that all countries will inevitably achieve nuclear weapons capability in the near future, and act accordingly with the international community through political and economic incentives to assure all countries are well appraised that, while attractive in the face of gridlock warfare or political strife, the ending outcome of nuclear war is negative for all parties involved. Arms will always proliferate, the question is, how do we proliferate peace.
Put it this way:
A. There are some countries who should not be allowed nuclear weapons because they will probably use them.
B. There are some countries who should not be allowed nuclear weapons because they may lose track of them (thus making those weapons available to nations of type A -or- to certain (ahem!) non-governmental organizations who will probably use them.
The Cold War was a dangerous game (and we're not out of the woods yet: many of those weapons still exist and so do the ideological differences for that matter) but the leaders of both sides weren't willing to die for their ideology. That basic rationality is no longer a given, as these weapons proliferate to less politically stable nations.
This (badly mistaken) idea that it's acceptable for anyone to steal nuclear weapons technology because, well, heck, they'll get it eventually is just wrong. Yes, they might get it eventually, but the odds of that happening are reduced if they aren't forced to make the same investment that we and the Soviets made. And you never know: if it comes down to that, they may decide they have better uses for the money. And if not, if they do get nukes but have to take a few years to figure out how, well, that's a few more years of relative safety for the rest of us.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
what about the time homer simpson let that kid in the foreign exchange in to the plant and give him all kind of plans as well?
He claims he did it to secure funding for his fusion research. It was more noble than doing it for the cash, I guess...
I believe, that a crude but working plutonium implosion weapon can be fairly easy modeled even on a fairly modest supercomputer.
Precision manufacturing? Yes, but it's also much more accessible now (think laser cutting).
I can think of nothing more psychopathic than several former leaders of the USSR. And the bombs did not go flying!
I think that has to do with those rational enough to have a team to finance, build and deliver a nuclear device are sane enough to want to avoid the inevitable retaliation that would follow any kind of atomic or nuclear attack. For example several Arab nations have a serious hatred of Israel yet none of those nations want to be turned into a smoking pit which would be a rather easy thing to do. Even that little 9/11 stuff has turned into a real negative for the Arab region with an awful lot of suffering going on over there. Imagine if they had harmed our nation as a whole rather than as a somewhat confined attack.
He's from Argentina, if you have to know.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
As frightening as a nuclear Venezuela is, I'd be more scared by a nuclear Vuvuzela.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 is the magic number.
Parent is not a troll, his sarcasm is justified. As far as I remember there were plenty of people here who were (seriously) making that very point regarding the wikileaks case.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
They wanted me to build them a bomb, so I took their plutonium and in turn, gave them a shiny bomb-casing filled with used pinball machine parts.
> Imagine if they had harmed our nation as a whole rather than as a somewhat confined attack.
'They'? I'm quite sure most of the people suffering (or dying) had nothing to do with the particular attack that I assume you are referring to.
It appears that in a desperate attempt to fund their FUSION research, they tried to contact foreign governments with information on building a FISSION bomb (plans downloaded from the Internet) so the FBI obliged by providing a fake Venezuelan contact to trap them.
This is just sad.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
That assumes that everyone is equally rational, which we know is not the case. It would only take one psychopath to end the world and laugh as everything around him burned to the ground.
That's why you don't give political power to psychopaths. The preferred cure is prevention. If they somehow achieve power and show signs of being psychopaths, and nuclear weapons might be involved, then the people of Venezuela should understand that sometimes a rabid dog needs to be put down.
It's not like there is any shortage of politicians. There are plenty more where that one came from.
A better long-term solution would be to institute a system like the US Constitution except that all political offices are limited to one short term, assigned by lottery from a random selection of all adult citizens, and conducted like a military draft in that refusing to serve could result in imprisonment. Anyone who has ever held office at any level of government is disqualified from ever being selected again either voluntarily or involuntarily. There would still be popular elections occurring at every quarter of a term of office (so every year if it's a 4-year term), but they'd be for the purpose of deciding whether someone holding office should be removed prematurely and replaced by a new random selection. Corporations and organizations would be strictly forbidden from participating in this process at any level, backed by the penalty of having the entity dissolved and all assets seized and sold off at auction. That's because with the elimination of a need to campaign, any participation by them must be corruption and cannot be called a *wink wink nudge nudge* campaign contribution.
Maybe that idea is flawed and maybe it isn't. The point though is to remove "politician" as a career and to recognize that the people who want power so badly that they'll campaign, accept corruption, etc. in order to obtain it are not to be trusted with it. It would remove the notion of a ruling class and replace it with a notion of civic duty, much like the way we view jury duty. I think what we'd find is that average working people are not eager to obtain nuclear weapons and play silly games based around flirting with utter destruction.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Those "psychopathic" leaders from the USSR only cared about one thing. POWER! That's all the cared about. However, launching a full scale nuclear war would render their cities into smoldering ruins with nothing to show for it. Basically, between the US and USSR, it was a classic game of chicken.
Now with religious (Islamic) leaders at the helm... Well, they might actually burn the world to win Jihad against sinners in the eyes of Allah. Real honest-to-God religious convictions at the helm of a nuclear arsenal is not what you want.
I'm confident the leaders of major world powers wouldn't ever have to die for their ideology. The days of the king having the balls to lead his troops into war and have his sons fight alongside him are long over. No, they'd be sheltered in a bunker somewhere with years and years of stored non-perishable supplies.
It is the general population that would die. As there is no political power or tax money to be obtained from a mass of dead people, the leaders would lose the only things they ever cared about. It would possibly be a fate worse than death for them. That's why they displayed some rationality when confronted with concepts like Mutually Assured Destruction.
Right there you seem to acknowledge yourself that sustained ignorance of how to build such weapons is not a long-term solution. It must be assumed that at some point some very dangerous and very crazy people are going to obtain a nuke. Keeping such information out of their hands serves only one purpose and that is to buy us time. We should be using that time to come up with better long-term solutions, like detecting the facilities used to build such things or tracking the transportation of the required materials or rendering non-fissile as much nuclear material as possible.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
2,423,158 umh? according to wikipedia you are not thinking of any city in the USA http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_population
I'm surprised that more countries don't have Uranium based devices. Even a low yield Uranium device is enough to destroy a city, kill 10s of thousands of civilians (direct blast or contamination) and use as a stick to bully your neighbors.
...
And as you point out its much easier to build a Uranium device than a Plutonium device, yet most countries put such effort into the latter. Yes I know, higher yield, smaller size but still
Wish I had the mod points to vote you up there, you're making an important point and being punished for it.
Who cares how futile it is, if you can delay potential nuclear armageddon for a century or two?
The theory behind making a working fission bomb was considered straightforward back in the late 30's. It's no accident we had a working nuke a decade after learning the structure of the atom and the nature of radiation. The only reason we beat Britain, France, Germany, and the USSR to the first nuclear weapon is because everyone else was putting their entire economy into winning WWII. More important than the design of a nuke, as Chill mentions, is the manufacturing process (and hiding it from the IAEA). Also, effective delivery devices are fairly well controlled. There's a big difference between a medium range ballistic missile MIRVs/SLBMs. I've read that it is uncertain whether Pakistan has small enough nukes and delivery systems to have significant second strike capability, which has some serious implications for stability in the region.
That's why you don't give political power to psychopaths.
Silly me! i thought it was a requirement.
The Rosenberg couple received *death* in prison.
There's something strange about this. How to make atomic weapons is not that difficult, and certainly not secret. Any 14-year-old with an interest in physics and chemistry has enough information to do this. The tough part is that you need a medium-sized country with the infrastructure and budget to refine the materials and manufacture to high specifications.
According to your reasoning about A (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki) and B (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20427730/) the USA should not be allowed to have nuclear Weapons.
How, exactly, would that work? Also, the tracking and the detecting is, I believe, what the IAEA has been doing for decades, and Kim Jong Il still got the bomb.
the usa should not have nuclear weapons. no nation should
so you should be spending your time pestering those with nukes to get rid of them. not condoning even more nations getting them!
its like "my neighbor has a meth lab. i won't try to get my neighbor to get rid of the meth lab. instead, i will simply support my other neighbor getting his own meth lab, so that its fair"
seriously?
and yet that is some people's reasoning on why nuclear proliferation is ok. its insane
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
From what you heard, everyone in the world loves Americans.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
dig it up and refine it secretly, so not even satellites could see it happening
and all you really need i think is some thick walls of lead, a nice shipping container on a ship headed to a port that handles millions of shipping containers, and boom. how do you detect a bomb through thick walls of lead?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Well some of Chicago might survive
I reject your reality and substitute my own.
To make FARC the effective government of Colombia?
Power is all that matters. Thats all anyone cares about, thats all governments care about, thats all that matters because might is right.
and many think they will hit it big alleviating them from having to save for their retirement.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
What really scares me is not that someone is calling for the extermination of entire peoples and states (it's been done before); but that while reading this post, for a brief moment...I seriously considered the proposal.
While this sounds nice theoretically, you would be amazed at the amount of horrible damage one idiot could cause in a single year.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
I believe what the poster was saying (and I agree with) is that as a State the USSR was unwilling to sacrifice its population to win a war against the US.
Iran clearly has no such compunctions. They are willing to sacrifice their population over an election. There are a number of other states and non-governmental groups that would be more than happy to start a nuclear war because regardless of the lives lost their ideology would survive.
Unfortunately, there is no technology that allows for remote sensing of nuclear materials in a bomb. At extremely close range you can (probably? hopefully?) detect some increase above background radiation and the US is counting heavily on that today. You cannot stand off in Earth orbit and detect even a big pile of unshielded uranium much less a subcritical mass bomb that is shielded.
Right now it seems Iran is a special case of thumbing their nose at the world and saying they are going to do whatever the heck they want regardless of what anyone says about it. Sanctions that affect the population aren't going to have much effect on the decision makers. This is likely to turn into a very nasty war because they are certainly going to take out Israel as soon as they have the capability to do so. Their leaders have said so, their national identity says so and they have never said that was off the table. So of course, Israel says they are going to take them out first. So far, I believe the US has requested they hold off but that state of affairs isn't going to last forever. If Israel gets hit - either as a first strike or as a result of not destroying every weapon in their first strike - the US will pretty much be committed to following up with a strike on Iran. Which then triggers the rest of the Muslim world declaring war on the US.
Frankly, I don't see a way out of it. Iran certainly isn't going to abandon their status as a Muslim theocratic nation whose obligation is to destroy the state of Israel. The US is certainly going to honor its committments to Israel. The rest of the Muslim world isn't going to stand by and watch millions of Muslims be killed.
[needs citation]
1. I bet I know a lot more people in the gun rights movement than you, and I don't know one -- NOT A SINGLE ONE -- who thinks the way that *you* think they do.
2. You say "there are a lot of people in the US who think that *everyone* should have a gun." Really? So there are "a lot of people" who think psychopaths should have guns? Convicted felons on parole?
3. They may think that only people here legally should have guns, but that is a perfectly defensible position. I have NEVER, EVER seen ONE SINGLE INSTANCE of someone saying that guns are bad for illegal Mexicans, but fine for other illegals.
4. In the same vein, please support you assertion that "lots of people" believe everyone should have the right to bear arms in self defense except Muslims.
5. Failing all this, do you think it might be possible -- just *possible -- that in fact you just got up in front of everyone and tried to pass off your own personal bias as fact?
- AJ
That's right. Remember "Arm the Homeless" and the reaction to it?
It wouldn't be nearly as bad if it were, say, Canada or Brazil.
Canada is already a nuclear power, we just don't have nuclear weapons. But we could build them in a very short time frame, as we have the infrastructure to do so.
Om, nomnomnom...
You know, a funny thing I've noticed is that there are a lot of people in the US who think that *everyone* should have a gun. But when you pressure them a little, it turns out that they don't think that *really* everyone should have a gun.
Who really says that? I've never heard any gun advocate (nut or not) say anything like that. In fact all gun owners I know are usually more thoughtful and respectful people than the populace at large and certainly not fascist as you paint them to be.
It seems like you are on a bigot hunt, when all you had to do was stay home and look in the mirror. You can be just as bigoted against peoples philosophical standpoints as you can against race...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
No - the accidental triggering is not going to be that sort of critical (you may get criticality depending on the design, but it'll be the sideways fizzle kind that leave a nasty mess, but not vaporization of the small city). Mostly it doesn't work and makes pollution. If you are that bad at designing the initiation sequence for your explosives you're probably going to design yourself into oblivion with a poor road system before you even get that far.
That's why you don't give political power to psychopaths.
Silly me! i thought it was a requirement.
A decadent and/or broken people won't allow reasonable people to rule. Children of divorce are unlikely to respect them. Reasonable people won't give them the phony sense of worth (the one that comes from "us and them") that they want, so reasonable people won't appeal to them. They aren't sexy. They haven't spent a good portion of their lives learning how to manipulate and market and tell you what you want to hear (how to cater to your base nature, your ego). They haven't mastered the art of doing one thing while saying another while pretending like there is no hypocrisy in it, while lying to you with a straight face as though nothing were amiss. Reasonable people don't have glitter and pizzaz and charisma. They just have their reason.
Reasonable people are outgunned, out-classed and out-ruthlessed (if such can be a word) by those who will say or do anything, absolutely anything to get your support. Reasonable people won't whore themselves out to the highest bidder, to appeal to the most powerful. They tend to be anonymous and/or marginalized. They tend not to make a big production, a huge public spectacle, of their reason. They just see what is right and do it according to their reason.
So yeah, sociopathy is a requirement when most of the electorate is governed by fear, ego, gratification, and a failure to be fulfilled by the way they live their own private lives. It's a requirement when so many families are broken and so many people are so overwhelmed by their own existence that they cannot see beyond their own immediate personal concerns. It's a requirement when politics becomes all about charisma and allure and not about sound policy rooted in solid reason. Most of all, it's a requirement when government has become totally out of control and unaccountable to the people and this is accepted as normal.
Like I said, the cure is prevention. Otherwise it's a very large downward spiral from there. Otheriwse it gets much, much worse before it has a hope of getting even slightly better. Once these self-reinforcing, feedback-loop processes are set in motion, it's hell itself to have a chance at breaking their momentum and returning to something more... well, reasonable.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
He said birds. I think that's only about a tenth of the number of pigeons currently residing in Trafalgar Square, so surely we've got a few candidates for that over on this side of the pond.
Do you really understand how big a critical mass uranium bomb is? It is easy to make and the concepts have been pretty much disclosed and well tested. Should be easy, if you could get the uranium.
But you are looking at something that weighs 5,000 pounds at least. The Hiroshima bomb weighed more like 10,000 pounds. And this wasn't fancy instrumentation to see how well it worked. Just about all of the real creative work done since 1945 has focused on smaller, lighter subcritical mass weapons.
Yes, if someone wanted to wipe out New York City all it would take would be a 10,000 pound bomb in a ship. But most other delivery options are off the table. How many aircraft today can lift a 10,000 pound bomb?
I'd say this is the principal reason we don't have a nuclear arms club that includes every country. What would you do with such a thing if you had it? That and the fact that the amount of uranium required is quite a bit. Easy to get enough for a subcritical mass weapon, but hard to know what to do with it once you have it.
While this sounds nice theoretically, you would be amazed at the amount of horrible damage one idiot could cause in a single year.
I greatly prefer the horrible damage caused by genuine temporary idiocy to the immeasurable damage caused by carefully calculated incompetence in the style of "Problem, Reaction, Solution" currently perpetrated ad nauseum by our ruling class. Any day. Without question. No contest about it.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
But it isn't bad at all, the whole situation is a fiction created to lure in potential "traitors" - Venezuela is not involved at all (TFS describes it decently clear, and TFA completelly)
Though, I imagine, it's convenient to spread the news that way... (instead of "...trying to sell to a foreign state", which would suffice)
Now 50+% of Americans might start to think that Venezuela wants to build the bomb (basically stolen from superior us, on top of that)
One that hath name thou can not otter
Determinations by the U.S. or other nuclear powers about who should be "allowed" to possess nuclear weapons are not only ethically laughable, but a ridiculous impossibility. "Ok, here's the rule: only we can have these. Honestly, we promise not to use them again. Shit, Russia's got 'em. Ok, only we and Russia can have these, seriously. Damn it, U.K.! Ok, only us, the Russkies, and the Brits. And the French. Fuck. And the Chinese. Ok. But no more, you hear me? Hey, India, put that down! Israel, I'm going to pretend I didn't see that! Pakistan, what the hell? Oh, India did it so you can too, huh? Let me tell you, mister -- Hey! North Korea! God DAMN it!"
It's not a question of what should be "allowed". As things stand now, we have neither moral authority nor the practical ability to stop other nations from developing nuclear weapons. To gain the moral authority, we have to give up our own; to gain the practical ability, we need to work together with all other nations to form a legal and social framework where any nation creating weapons of mass destruction is see as the enemy of all mankind.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
there is only two countries that has for sure used and continues to use nuclear weapons in the form of depleted uranium weapons
Depleted uranium rounds are not nuclear weapons. They could have made them out of tungsten, a nonradioactive material, and they'd still have almost the same killing power. Depleted uranium is cheaper and has some slight material advantages.
As to the danger of Sarah Palin? I doubt someone who doesn't know what nuclear weapons are would have a clue.
I'm not defending the status quo at all. And I like the basic premise for your system here. I just think it would need a bit more polish, maybe some sort of competency exam to keep out the truly stupid/malicious/insane.
And there is the small problem of the bloody revolution we would need to have in order to throw out the current rulers and get it implemented.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
I believe what the poster was saying (and I agree with) is that as a State the USSR was unwilling to sacrifice its population to win a war against the US.
Yes, unlike some of the other drain-bamaged individuals here, you take my meaning correctly. More to the point, the Soviet leadership was probably willing to sacrifice some percentage of its population, but it most certainly wasn't willing to sacrifice itself. Now, one of the tenets of waging a nuclear war is that you don't take out the other side's leaders, because then there won't be anyone left to say "stop, we give up" and have the authority to make it stick. It's unlikely that we would have specifically targeted Russia's leaders for just that reason, but in all-out nuclear war nobody is exactly safe. Regardless, Russia's government was never willing to risk it once we made it clear that Russia wouldn't survive the attempt.
I wish you folks that think that this it's just so gosh-darned unfair that the United States (and, I might, pretty much every other member of the nuclear club) doesn't want Iran to have nukes would pause just for a moment. Look past your anti-American sentiment, and realize exactly what we are talking about here, what the risks actually are. CdrGuru made a pretty good case that Iran is not to be trusted with the things: maybe no nation can, in the long run, but in the short run some countries are far more dangerous than others.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
In addition to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there have been more recent efforts, most notably by Paul Wolfowitz (as Deputy Secretary of Defense), to make nuclear weapons something the US will consider using regularly.
On the upside, the latest nuclear treaty between the US and Russia should help. As far as what us normal people can do about the threat of nukes, here's the instruction guide.
I am officially gone from
Get the fuck over it. I could build a zippe type centrifuge cascade with alluminum rotors given a cnc lathe and $20,000.
I see. So, in your learned opinion, the only aspect of nuclear weapons development that counts is the fuel? Are you serious? Really, please do a little Googling on the history of weapons development before you come back here. Russia stole a lot of information from us during the Cold War, and a lot of that was data (math and simulations) on how to maximize yield (among other things), not just how to purify fissionable materials.
There's a lot going on here, a lot of information that can and should remain secret. Furthermore, as an American citizen whose taxes went to pay for that development, I don't particularly see any reason why the likes of Iran should get it for free. Make them pay, like we did.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Maybe not that many countries actually want those things / are a bit different than your (almost) portrayal...
One that hath name thou can not otter
According to your reasoning about A (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki) and B (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20427730/) the USA should not be allowed to have nuclear Weapons.
What?
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Well, duh, the US is the biggest terrorist country on the planet, and most dangerous, and most out of control.
What?
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Wow, I think that's the most threatening thing I've ever heard a Canadian say.
So basically, what you're telling us is,
IT REQVIRES ONLY ZE VILL TO DO IT!
you let pinball technology fall in the hands of terrorists?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Eh, Venezuela wasn't involved here at all; it was a ruse created by US agents to capture "unreliables"; stop saying things like it is involved / I fear we will see, in a few short days, 50+% of US population convinced that Venezueala wants to build (and via stealing from the Righteous Ones) the bomb, anyway. :/
One that hath name thou can not otter
That really doesn't help unless you can build them in the time it takes an ICBM to fly over the pole.
I read the internet for the articles.
Oh... well, if that's all we have to do, let's get on it!
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
*cough* Bush *cough* Palin *cough*
Table-ized A.I.
Depleted uranium rounds are not nuclear weapons.
Yeah, the GP pretty much shot his credibility in the foot with the comment. Depleted uranium is used because it's very dense and therefore has more kinetic energy at a given velocity. What cracks me up about that is that, while it is radioactive, it's depleted uranium. Spent fuel, which wasn't even weapons grade to begin with.
The GP must lump anything that uses radioactive materials into the "nuclear weapon" category. I wouldn't be surprised if thinks smoke detectors are nuclear weapons.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
You just read all that from the back of the Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker box, didn't you?
No. But if you disagree, please feel free to indicate where.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Note that this story says absolutely nothing about whether or not Venezuela actually has any nuclear programme or ambitions. The only "Venezuela" in this story is a fake one, made up to sting these traitors.
But this story does tell us something about how Americans have been led to believe that Venezuela does aspire to get a nuke. It's not clear exactly what it tells us about that, but it tells us something about it.
--
make install -not war
the US will pretty much be committed to following up with a strike on Iran. Which then triggers the rest of the Muslim world declaring war on the US.
I also don't think that a lot of people posting here understand that modern thermonuclear weapons are not twenty kiloton toys like Fatman and Littleboy. Well, we do have quite a range of yields available to us. Depending upon how hard we decided to hit them Iran, and its State ideology, could easily cease to exist.
In the old days we used to call this "brinksmanship." The Russians haven't been playing that particular game for some time now, but apparently Iran thinks it can get away with it.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
rendering non-fissile as much nuclear material as possible.
How, exactly, would that work? Also, the tracking and the detecting is, I believe, what the IAEA has been doing for decades, and Kim Jong Il still got the bomb.
Yes, and detecting nukes is a joke. Take any of the major shipyards: the Feds admit they can't even begin to inspect more than a tiny fraction of the goods that go through them every single day. We live in a goldfish bowl, and sooner or later the cat is going to knock it over.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Why do Oil Producing Countries want nuclear bombs? Because they can afford them? Does oil make you paranoid? Maybe Canada should nuke-up to defend the tar sands.....
The reality is we don't need to worry about having our own nuclear deterrence. We can rely on the US, and in turn the US relies on us for air and primary/secondary support in times of war, via rearming/fuel/layovers/etc. This isn't to say we haven't ever carried nuclear weapons(US) in our bombers either, we did. A lot during the cold war. Or that we didn't run joint interdiction missions with the US either, because we did.
Om, nomnomnom...
The big secrets are out. Everybody understands generally how an atomic bomb works. There remain smaller secrets, along the lines of construction tips. Machining plutonium is very difficult; in addition to being radioactive and poisonous, it has weird physical properties - it expands when heated, but doesn't contract fully when cooled, because the crystalline structure changes. The detailed techniques for doing that and compensating for the changes aren't public knowledge. Exactly how plutonium behaves when compressed by a shock wave is still being studied. The tricks by which atomic bombs are made smaller and more efficient are not well known. There are neutron reflectors, tampers, and such. The data from the experimental work to develop those items is still classified.
Developing that data independently requires a sizable research operation. All the big nuclear powers had to build big R&D operations to struggle with those problems. (Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea probably used leaked data from one of the big powers.)
The interesting question with this guy is whether this guy fed the FBI real classified data, or just faked up some plausible design numbers.
Further to that the US has threatened to use nuclear weapons on many occasions, probably more times that all other nations put together:
Empire and Nuclear Weapons
What really scares me is reading or hearing of such an event from the news would not surprise me in the least.
"[I]t is a wise man who admits the limits of his knowledge or skill, and that pretending either causes harm." --Terry Go
The corporate states of amerika consider Chevez the enemy. He'll never give away Venezuela's oil. The stage is being set to take Venezuela.
Conspiracy theory you say? Flashback to the eighties. Reagan's special emissary, Donald Rumsfeld, brokered a deal to sell Hussein anthrax and more pathogens. Republicans in congress loopholed the munitions export law with a Commerce act to make it legal. Then they waited to manipulate public opinion (recall the ANTHRAX terrorist(s) targeted the Democratic Senate leadership and certain liberal media outlets). Their pecker tracks were all over the biological evidence, so they stacked the deck with Nuclear and Chemical WMD.
The groundwork is being laid now to take out Chavez. So in the future when a corporate tool is POTUS and needs a boost to their failed administration, we'll see something like Operation Free the Venezuelan Oil. Of course the price of oil will double and billions of dollars in Venezuelan oil will disappear, but all you have to do is drink the kool aid and watch Faux Newz.
The scale and cost of the Manhattan project is one that still amazes me, and the more that I study the project the more that I discover it was by far and away much larger than I ever could have imagined. I've heard stories that at least at one time or another the Manhattan project consumed as much as half of the GDP for the entire United States.... during the middle of World War II and including the Liberty ship production, all of the bombers, fighters, and other weapons and even consumer goods produced at the time. In other words, nearly half of all Americans were in some way or another involved with producing those first nuclear weapons in the 1940's. The USSR had an even larger portion of its population engaged in that research in the late 1940's while they didn't have to deal with pesky issues like being engaged in a desperate war as well.
While I will agree that those who steal the research from American and Russia are not likely to repeat the same mistakes of those two nuclear programs, it still is an insanely expensive process for anybody to make these weapons. It isn't something a small time terrorist is going to come up with on their own. Dollar for dollar, there are many other much more cost effective ways to bomb somebody that doesn't involve nuclear weapons.
Put it this way: A. There are some countries who should not be allowed nuclear weapons because they will probably use them.
There is only one country that has used nuclear weapons in an offensive manner. Should the United States not be allowed to possess nuclear weapons?
We (the US) shared most of our nuclear bomb secrets from WWII with the Canadians. It was part of an agreement we had (have?) with them. (They are our best buddies, who do you think is our biggest source of oil!) I suspect they could whip up a bomb in a year or less if they wanted.
I'll trade you your pigeons for our Canadian Geese infestation.....
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Actually, you'd need more than a Fat Man or Little Boy sized bomb to "wipe out" New York City. You could kill a lot of people with such a device but you could not wipe out New York City with one. If this site is to be believed you couldn't even wipe out Manhattan, though you could get a large portion of it.....
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
After this last year, I might not be as amazed as you think.
Would that I had the points to mod you up.
I've heard stories that at least at one time or another the Manhattan project consumed as much as half of the GDP for the entire United States
You heard wrong. The Manhattan project cost around $2,000,000,000 in 1940s dollars. The US GDP in 1940 was right around $100,000,000,000.
This is why the people that say we need a "Manhattan project" for green energy have no idea what they are talking about. The US Department of Energy has an annual budget that's pretty damn close to what the Manhattan project cost when adjusted for inflation. This site says that $2,000,000,000 in 1945 dollars is worth $24,000,000,000 and change. DoE's FY2009 budget was $24,100,000,000.
All that notwithstanding, the Manhattan project did have some impressive statistics in other areas. Picking one off the top of my head, the uranium enrichment plants consumed around 10% of the total electrical production for the entire United States.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
NORAD's Deputy commanders have all been Canadian too....
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Why don't you take your tinfoil hat off? If the news didn't come out now that their intended client was Venezuela it would certainly have come out at trial. Not everything is a US Government conspiracy ya know....
And what's with the quote marks around "traitors"? They are traitors. The fact that they got caught before they managed to do any damage doesn't mean they weren't attempting to commit treason and/or espionage.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
In the old days we used to call this "brinksmanship." The Russians haven't been playing that particular game for some time now
Threatening to target a neighboring country with nuclear weapons because you don't like what they are doing isn't brinksmanship?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
So that it may have an effective deterrent against any potential U.S. invasion?
Anyway, in this case, Venezuela wasn't really involved. The arrested folk thought they were selling the information there, but in truth there was only FBI agent provocateurs, and nothing more.
might be used against someone you love, you would never sell out, at any price
the idea that everyone has a price is a very nihilistic way of looking at the world, and simply isn't true, simply because not everyone is nihilist. some people actually believe in something. now you may ridicule what they believe in, that it has no merit. and you may even be right about their beliefs having no merit. however, that doesn't change the fact they still believe in those things nonetheless. and therefore, they don't have a price, no matter what you promise them
and thankfully such people exist
because when reading your words, i would much rather this world be populated by people who believe in magical sky fairies, even though i myself don't believe in magical sky fairies, than a world populated by someone like you, who doesn't believe in anything at all, and loves no one and no thing, except your own selfish ignorant self. you are an asshole, and without any redeeming qualities as a human being, because of what you wrote above that you believe about your fellow human beings. what you wrote is actually less instructive about your fellow human beings, and much more instructive about how only one person thinks: you. and the way think is known in some circles, as evil. and although such crude terminology is mostly not very useful in understanding one another, i make an exception for you. you suck, asshole, you really do, for what you find acceptable, which is never acceptable, ever
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Right; even if they aren't actually psychos, they came across as if they are which drives logs of other people to think about getting nukes.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
Interesting idea. It was indeed used in some classical greece cities. I'd combine that with a long-term congress with oversee and/or weak veto power (a bit like the chamber of lords). Take the best of those random officials at the end of their term, with 'best' being subjective (voted by the people, those who got closest to their objective, etc) and put them in this long-term congress for life.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
The critical mass is the MINIMUM amount of material needed for sustained nuclear reaction. A sub critical mass could not have aa sustaained reacation. So no, the USAA is *not* doing mini bomb with sub critical mass. On the other hand the critical mass for Pu is around 10 Kg (10 cm diameter sphere), and uranium 50 Kg (around 20 cm diameter sphere). Even counting that you have to hollow the sphere to not start reacting early and spending your material uselessly, a 30 cm sphere goes well into some of the biggest amazon package. Use well timed explosive lens, a neutron source, coat in Berillyum or some type of neutron reflecting coating and you are set for a first stage bomb low yield. Naturally this would be small yield, but enough to raze most of the governement building around the world in one split second.
A low yield bomb is an engineering problem not a complex one. Where it come to be complex and where the various governement keep their secret, is when you want a much bigger yield, say multi hundred kiloton, or multi hundred megaton. That is where a multi stage bomb is to be used, eventually with nuclear fission. How to make the second stage work and ignite in time to feed the third stage is much more complicated. And needs a lot of research.
So basically I think that a very low yield nuke is already feasible with available material for an engineer or physicist. And those one could be put in a car , package, coffer. But what interrest foreign governement are the multi stage high yield/efficient one whicvh can be delivered remotely at precise location.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
As things stand now, we have neither moral authority nor the practical ability to stop other nations from developing nuclear weapons.
First, there is a widely accepted morally compelling reason for nonproliferation even in a situation where various parties have nuclear weapons, namely, to reduce the loss of life from use of nuclear weapons. But there is a big problem with your assertion above, which I'll describe in some detail.
Morality is arbitrary and subjective. Moral authority can easily be obtained by flipping the appropriate bit in your belief system and having the military power to back up that choice.
The elephant in the room here is using nuclear force on any country which attempts directly or allows someone in its region of political control to get nuclear weapons. If the use of nuclear weapons as weapons ever becomes common, this is one possible outcome. For example, one such scheme, appearing in some of Jerry Pournelle's science fiction work, is the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CoDominium">CoDominium an alliance between the US and USSR that lasts about a century (before ending in a full blown nuclear war). Everyone else is reduced to the status of client states and from what I understand, only the two superpowers are permitted to have nuclear weapons or other WMDs.
If you can get nuked (and this can range from a single demonstration of might with a small nuke to obliteration of your entire country and its population) just for having certain nuclear technologies or allowing "terrorists" (the official definition being people whose presence is enough to make you a target for military force) to use your country to build a nuclear weapon (presuming you don't fully cooperate with the CoDominium expeditionary force that's going to move in and cleanse the area of anyone who might be a terrorist), that's going to provide a mighty disincentive to developing nuclear weapons.
And that's one of the points of nuclear nonproliferation now (which I consider even more important than the loss of life from use of nuclear weapons): to reduce the incentive for creating a global tyranny.
Where does cowardice come into it? I'm trying to talk from the Soviet point of view. They firmly believed that Reagan would start WW3.
the problem with single term limits is that it takes your first term or at least several years to know how the system works and to know when the civil servants are running a line and getting you to do what they want!
Sorry, no, Canada can build nuclear reactors, but you don't have the infrastructure to build "weapons" beyond the primitive enriched-uranium critical mass gun type like Little Boy that was used on Hiroshima. As Canada has no ballistic missile industry, this weapon would have to be delivered in the same way as Little Boy.
For Canada to build a nuclear weapon equivalent to Fat Man dropped on Nagasaki, it would have to build a reprocessing facility. This facility would be used to reprocess spent fuel from Canada's CANDU reactors to 'harvest' the pu-235 that is a natural byproduct of the fission process used in these reactors. Then pu-235 processing facilities would have to be built to create the pu-235 parts of the weapon.
By the time this happened, Canada would be in such debt that it would have to rid itself of its national health care system, and would be in the same pathetic situation that we in the U.S. currently are. We've got tons of nuclear weapons, but we can't seem to be able to provide a proper health care system for all of our citizens.
OK, maybe that last paragraph is a bit of an exaggeration. My main point is that Canada doesn't have what it needs to build a deployable nuclear weapon (given that Fat Man and Little Boy were both experimental devices and not properly weaponized) in "a very short time frame." Unless you define "a very short time frame" to be on the order of a decade. In any case, WHY would Canada want to build nuclear weapons? Canada would be MUCH better off spending its energy (no pun intended) on developing an export market for it's reactor know-how and convincing countries to adopt them as a means to get off non-renewable energy.
+1 to the Canadians for not being foolishly afraid of nuclear energy like their moronic neighbors to the south.
Bush seemed pretty serious about his religious convictions. So seem many of your (assumedly) fellow countrypeople. And unlike Ahmadinejad he did have the bomb and he did start a war against another country.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
Nice strategy of denial there. Also try crying and flailing about with your arms next time you hear an argument you don't like.
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
Yeah, so much bullshit. Nobody can stand Chavez anymore.
Since he's in power, poverty rate has plummeted from 42% to 28%. Oh, the horror. He nationalised mineral resources and now the poor foreign oil companies can no longer take all the oil they want for free. This is outrageous. For the first time in their lives, millions of Venezuelans have health care and education. I don't know how they can't stand so much misery.
Really, Chavez has to go before Venezuela ceases to be a third world country. I don't think the people can stand that kind of suffering.
Pedro is not Italian. It's a Spanish and Portuguese name. Mascheroni is an Italian family name. He could be anyone in any country of the Americas, where millions of Italian descendants live.
I have difficulty understanding what could be so amazingly new, different and ground breaking that the US has it and other countries do not. Seems like comic book stuff to me. I would really like to know. Maybe US can haz flying car, space elevator and invisibility cloak and will not allow others to share the Hogwarts magick. Maybe Venezuela doesn't know this or doesn't have the friggin' internet. What can be so exotic and esoteric that is not known? Perhaps I'm am naive and in actuality xMen stuff is REAL!
http://www.acetonestudio.com
That is correct, as far as I know, there has not been a nuclear weapon manufactured that did not need a traditional fission-based nuclear explosion as at least an initial stage. All other methods to initiate fusion are so far impractical to be deployed as weapon systems due the mass and size of the equipment required and amounts of electrical power needed.
Tinfoil hat? Even here too many people assumed Venezuela was actually involved; now imagine general population, especially people that still think Iraq was attacked because of involvement in 9/11 & WMDs.
Quote marks are perfectly valid because, technically, no actual treason has taken place. Hypothesizing what they might have done in the future is a newspeak in itself (and still, do take note subtle differences between writing traitors, vs. "traitors", vs. not traitors)
One that hath name thou can not otter
The killer psychopath does not take over the leadership of a nuclear armed country. He goes around killing people with his hands.
The power and control freaks are not psychopaths, and are capable of enough rational thought to realize that upon launching a preemptive nuclear attack they will die along with their country, which will be reduced to dust in massive retaliation.
Additionally, without nuclear weapons, the USSR would have invaded Western Europe in the 60s at the latest. The UN Security Council would have no real power, and wars between superpowers would probably continue.
Those who would give up liberty to obtain working drivers, deserve neither liberty nor working drivers.
Life in prison for giving secrets to nations with strong anti-American sentiments?
There was a day this would call for the Death Penalty.
why this is on your rights online?
I jest because your proposed solution is simpleminded and unworkable. I jest because I believe that we're collectively incapable of choosing a wise direction for humanity and then going in that direction, and I've got a lot of history to back me up. I jest because I understand that we are not in control of our collective fate. And I jest because when people like you get any measure of political power, it tends to end in mass graves for those who disagree with you.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
What's a "pinball machine"?
Indeed: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-zoPgv_nYg
Table-ized A.I.
As a Venezuelan living in Venezuela, I can confirm this. He still has support of people that rely on the Venezuelan equivalent of government food stamps, but hey, those people will support a trained monkey if it gives them money. Upcoming congress elections on the 26th will actually tell us how popular Chavez really is in Venezuela. Oh and that Argentinian couple is really stupid. To think that the Venezuelan government could actually pull something like this off. They cannot even make electricity work in the country, or even simple paperwork for every day tasks. Just the thought of them creating a nuclear bomb is ridiculous.
There seems to be one just above...
You mean the guy who was telling you what he THOUGHT the argument was? The argument that in fact was not directed against any race specifically, mentioning only citizens (some of which are Mexican thanks to dual citizenship)?
Looks like you're gonna need a bigger mirror!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
My solution is elegant and effective.
And impossible to achieve, therefore not worth considering.
People in the U.S. can't even agree to provide universal health care for themselves, when it's demonstrably cheaper and demonstrably better at providing higher quality health care, as the rest of the first world countries have proven over several decades. It's a no-brainer, and the U.S. could pick from any of five or six different models and learn from their experience to fix the parts that need improvement, yet they don't do it. And yet you think that we could collectively decide to radically alter how everyone lives and works?
What do you propose we do? Lean back and accept our fates?
I'm not defending the status quo, but I'm also not pretending that I know what will save us. I do what I can around me to improve things, and accept what I can't change.
As far as the snipe about mass graves: what's your logic? I'm here to help prevent death and disaster. Not cause it.
The history of the 20th century is my logic. The great murderers of the 20th century were all leaders who decided to drag humanity towards a better way to live--Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Castro, Mussolini (and now a generation of radical Islamists)... What tends to happen when someone with a vision realizes that he can't get everyone to co-operate, is he decides to force the issue under the belief that history will vindicate him.
History continually demonstrates that people with grand visions for how we should all live, should be feared, not followed.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
Nice strategy of denial there. Also try crying and flailing about with your arms next time you hear an argument you don't like.
Well, when someone presents a completely illogical argument that is irrelevant to current circumstances, I generally don't feel the need to say more: the author of said arguments has usually made my case for me.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Tinfoil hat? Even here too many people assumed Venezuela was actually involved
That proves people are idiots who are too lazy to read the whole article. It does not prove any sort of underlying agenda to create a casus belli, which is what you seemed to be implying was the case.
Quote marks are perfectly valid because, technically, no actual treason has taken place.
Irrelevant. The mens rea was there. They are traitors. They may not have committed treason (and proving treason is difficult anyway due to the Constitutional requirement of confession or two witnesses) but that was their intent.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Proliferating nukes is for traitors to all humanity. No proliferation makes anyone safer, and each new proliferation makes us exponentially more in danger. People who give their country's secrets to other countries, especially when that makes their fellow citizens more in danger, are traitors to their country.
You, Anonymous gibberish Coward, are bending over for insanity.
--
make install -not war
Why does it have to be an agenda? It's irrelevant to the issue; a trend of organic type (as very possibly happened with Iraq & WMDs) is even more troubling.
And such small technicality is perfectly relevent IMHO withing such small difference, of a word with and without quotation marks. Especially if the case would be considered entrapment in many areas...
One that hath name thou can not otter
A LEO that offers to murder your wife if you pay him $10,000 is trying to entrap you. A LEO that poses as a contract killer after hearing that you are looking for one has not entrapped you.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
And it might be just subtle enough to fall at least somewhere between those two. It seems the mess might have started with them looking for a funding for their research; well, so it was offered, but with a fictional situation of Venezuelan nuclear weapons program and "...but we want those few things in return"? I doubt it's hard to manipulate somebody desperate for funding (and of such importance to the world, at least as far its originators are concerned) to become such "traitor"/traitor/whatever. Especially if contacts didn't have to follow proper ethics of questioning (if only this one was in itself was reliably followed...), if current homeland was totally disregarding revolutionary ideas while some other offering helpful hand, etc.
One that hath name thou can not otter
I'm playing the world's smallest violin right now. If you are so self-important that you can be "manipulated" into agreeing to betray your country for a few lousy greenbacks then I have zero sympathy for you.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
You say his argument is both completely illogical and irrelevant.
What was illogical about his argument? He really didn't even make an argument, he just delivered two facts that plug into the argument you made for him. The upshot being that your argument has an interesting conclusion: the US is among the countries that should not be allowed to have nuclear weapons (and in fact, this is true for all countries). I think that's an unsurprising result and shows that your argument is sound.
As for being irrelevant, well maybe. The argument that the US and any other country shouldn't have nuclear weapons pales against the reality that the US and many other countries do have nuclear weapons. However, the non-proliferation debate tends to imply differences between "legal" nuclear weapon states and the "nuclear upstarts" where there aren't any. Non-proliferation can only be attained if nuclear disarmament goes along with it.
Also, you really had it coming with your phrasing of argument A. At first I thought you were being ironic...
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
> I'm entirely opposed to government market intervention
So if you were American, and the U.S. gov't said "here is a plan to provide higher quality health care than we have now, to every American, at 55% of the cost we currently pay", you'd oppose that.
This is not to denigrate your libertarian beliefs, or your feelings about UHC. Rather, it's a very neat illustration of the problem. Everyone in America could have high quality health care at a much reduced collective price. This is a solved problem. It's been demonstrated to work elsewhere over decades. Yet you would oppose its implementation for philosophical reasons. The better world that you see is radically different from the better world I see, and neither of us are spiteful or malicious in our beliefs. We both sincerely believe that we should all go in the same direction, but the directions we choose are opposite.
This is why I jest. This is why I think we don't have collective control over our fate. These well-meaning differences are mutually exclusive. We can't possibly all agree to either have UHC or all leave the cities and start telecommuting.
Good for you for inventing technologies that lead to a better world. I hope you're successful.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
How were they able to get passed our supper duper high tech security systems and screening, especially our
advanced profiling , we put a lot of energy in coming up with such advanced systems.
On a serious note, I am a bit confused how this could happen, I thought a lot of the nuclear stuff was being outsourced to private companies, and that they had extreme measures of security much more advanced then what the government could come up with.
After watching that movie with Mel Gibson, I tend to think that these companies go further then the government ever could because of the lines the government just cant cross...sometimes almost sad, in some cases the government wont step in when it should...
(ie- take away a pedophile and send a clear message of "do this, and you disappear".....) and when we wonder why they are getting involved at all when they should just stay clear of it....like gay marriages, if they want to get married, let them, if someone wants to spend major cash to marry his BMW car...who cares...let the poor sap tie the knot with an inanimate object.