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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."
I don't understand why people (continue to) try to sell government secrets. The risk of getting caught far outweighs the potential reward; especially if you can't spend any of it without drawing attention.
If you want to sell "secrets", join a bank.. nobody gives a shit about leaked customer information.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
At that age, 'life in prison' probably isn't much of a deterrent. The potential reward may well outweigh a decade of imprisonment.
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
At that age, 'life in prison' probably isn't much of a deterrent. The potential reward may well outweigh a decade of imprisonment.
especially if the reward isn't for you, and is for family members/loved ones
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".
People risk their life for less of a potential reward every day. Think of the average solider or firefighter.
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed H
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
> Or it blows up in your face, taking a small city with it.
So make it in the city you want to blow up.
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.
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).
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?
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!)
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.
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.
The Rosenberg couple received *death* in prison.
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.
They'll be better looked after in prison than on Social Security. No joke.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Au contraire: the time life you have left, the more valuable it becomes. That's 0 more birthdays, holidays, or weekends spent with the grandkids, and they with you. You didn't just gamble with your own future, but everyone who cares about you as well.
The thing that surprises me (though I guess it shouldn't, given the number of incidents) is that while I might expect someone working at McDonalds to be both stupid and desperate enough to try to do something like that, I would have hoped that someone working at a nuclear research facility with access to TS information would be neither stupid nor desperate.
And the irony is that knowing *how* to make a nuclear weapon isn't even a well kept secret.. AT ALL. Someone offering to pay lots of money for that information should have been a huge red flag, even absent any other moral, ethical, or practical concerns.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Any 14 year-old could probably make an atomic bomb with a critical mass of uranium or plutonium. Such a bomb would be huge and require lots of shielding to be safe to handle - like attaching to an aircraft or loading into a shipping container.
On the other hand, what is required to detonate a subcritical mass is a little bit tricky. It is clearly possible because the US has thermonuclear weapons that are smaller than the core of the first atomic bombs. I'm not sure that A. Q. Khan even had that information, although he was US-trained.
If you want to put a bomb in a shipping container, the Hiroshima bomb would be good enough. If you want to put a bomb into an Amazon box and ship it somewhere in the US that might require a bit more expertise and that is much harder to come by.
They'll be better looked after in prison than on Social Security. No joke.
This is the truth, why was this marked as Troll?
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.
[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
You did some damn fine engineering while keeping secret the things that needed to remain secret.
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. Those damn illegal Mexicans, for example, they shouldn't be allowed guns. Or those Muslims, no guns for them. So really what they want is for only the people they think are the right sort of people to be able to have guns.
I believe the argument is that every US citizen who can qualify on a shooting range with a gun should be able to carry one. So non-US citizens would not meet that criteria.
Now, consider that a nuclear weapon is really just another kind of gun...
You fail completely with this statement. The method of operation is different. The energy release is orders of magnitude different. Ignoring the difference in energy magnitudes, a nuclear weapon is really just another kind of BOMB. Note that this is different than a gun. Is it legal for you to own a bomb in the US?
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.
Agreed. But its much more fundamental a problem than that. There are a lot of people in the US that think that:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
only applies to Americans.
And the irony is that knowing *how* to make a nuclear weapon isn't even a well kept secret.. AT ALL.
True in some senses. Most junior high kids interested in the physical sciences could describe a gun type or spherical type fission bomb. One might even get the concept of the implosion lens (make the shockwaves match up & stuff).
Knowing the general theory isn't exactly the same as: make a hemisphere of diameter X out of alloy Y, or: blend explosives A, B, C, D in the gradient {a, b, c, d}, or perhaps: the tritium concentration must be above n mass percent, or maybe: the neutron flux shall be Z or thou shalt surely fail in epic fashion.
We went through a lot of atolls worth of data to get the specifics of our top secret data. Depending on what's leaked you've eliminated a lot of obvious R&D (especially to the IAEA) and given somebody a highly advanced warhead (Firefox 3 vs Lynx 1).
Some people claim that the declassified or otherwise published data has not been altered and has pretty precise blueprints, but until someone verifies that through a DIY atol removal, I think there's a decent chance that at least some of the information has been cleverly and subtly altered before public release. Otherwise I'd have expected quite a few more nuclear powers given the easy information.
Guns? Well, there are clearly three sorts of people when it comes to guns: those that are frightened of them, those that know how and when to use them and those that are quite willing to use them anytime.
Nuclear weapons are a bit simpler. There are only two sorts of people when it comes to them: people that value this life and people that only value the afterlife. I'd say the folks that only value the afterlife are fucking dangerous and shouldn't be allowed to have anything more complicated than a safety razor.
The leaders in the USSR valued this life for themselves and their population too much to throw it away on the possibility of leading the world into a new era of socialist superiority. The leaders of Iran apparently value only the afterlife and likely consider killing someone as advancing them along the path to their reward. We have seen much evidence of this and nothing that contradicts this view.
The real question is how many people of the Muslim faith agree with that outlook. I don't care what they are praying about if they are afraid of losing their lives and the lives of their children. If they consider their lives better spent as martyrs and the lives of their children to be of no importance as long as they have a nice secure afterlife they are dangerous and unfit for the community of Man.
Oh, and Christians that only value the afterlife are equally as dangerous. It has nothing to do with the specific brand of religion, just the attitude towards the living and the attitude towards whatever possible afterlife you might believe in.
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
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
People leaking such secrets might as well think that's exactly what they're doing, saving lifes (just on the "wrong" side) - wasn't there a thing how most "traitors" of such kind are motivated not by money?
One that hath name thou can not otter
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.
Err, a bare-sphere (no neutron energy manipulation or reflective shielding) critical mass of a plutonium-239 core is only 10kg and with the density of plutonium that translates to a sphere smaller than an orange (9.9cm to be exact).
The reason the original plutonium weapons were so huge is because of low purity of the fissionable materials available, massive over engineering resulting from poor understanding of materials and nuclear processes etc
No such thing exists. All nuclear explosions are accomplished by achieving criticality in some fission material. The critical mass however varies with shape and external factors such as shielding materials capable of changing energies of neutrons or reflecting them back onto their source, temperature of the material, its degree of compression etc.
You could wire it up to go off if your heart stops and drive around on a motorcycle with it in the sidecar. Just watch out for some pizza delivery dude named Hiro Protagonist.
Who is John Cabal?
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
This is so true. Anybody with a general understanding of radioactive isotopes is likely going to be able to make something akin to the "Little Boy" or the "Fat Man" bombs that were used on Japan. In the realm of nuclear bombs, those were puny little things that were unbelievably heavy and inaccurate as well. It is sort of hard to miss a target the size of a city, so that wasn't a problem when they were used.
The trick, as you have pointed out, is to make the bombs small enough to be practical in terms of their delivery and to perhaps amplify the yield to give a genuinely powerful punch. Getting the size of a warhead to a manageable size is the key to much of the research, and to be able to know how to compress the fissionable metal sufficiently to initiate the chain reaction.
I've seen some magazines, notably an old issue of Analog, that even had a special supplement labeled "give this to your local terrorist" that went into depth about how to make nuclear weapons... at least some crude enough to get the job done. It also gave a rather detailed description of centrifuges necessary to get the material to a concentrated form from material found in a nuclear power plant... with a rather gruesome description of the medical problems nuclear materials workers need to be concerned about unless you have gobs of money necessary to build the proper facilities to get everything put together.
That is ultimately the largest problem with nuclear weapons: It needs the resources of a major nation-state in order to get one put together. You can trade real estate for cost.... which isn't too bad if you are a 3rd world dictator. Something like that sticks out like a sore thumb if it is done by a group trying to stay covert. Certainly no country is going to be unaware that nuclear bombs are being developed within that country, and it will never happen in a place like Somalia or Tuvalu.
Even once the bomb is built, unless that country is prepared to use the bomb immediately (with the massive consequences for doing that), the bombs become even more expensive in terms of basic security (making sure somebody other than the leaders of that country are not going to use those weapons) and maintaining the infrastructure necessary for simply hanging onto those weapons. Basically, there isn't a strong compelling reason to even have these weapons unless you are in a life or death struggle for national survival or are one of the top major economic and military powers in the world.
There's a problem with your understanding of the crime. Us normal folks (those without DoD clearances, who'd never be offered millions for anything we know) only hear about the people who are caught.
Think of it as smaller crimes. Have you ever known someone who was a drug dealer or user? You don't have to answer that. :) Sure, we see the news where drug dealers and users are arrested, killed, etc, etc, etc. What you don't necessarily know about is that for every name or face that shows up in the news, there are thousands of people involved with that industry. The reason for the publicity of such events isn't to slow down those who are actively doing it, it's to persuade people who may get into that line of work that it's horribly dangerous.
By the sound of the story, they were framed. A retired couple, one who was laid off years ago. The other probably wasn't making great money. Between the two of them, they had sensitive information and knowledge. The FBI sting involved pretending to be a foreign national offering up almost 1 million dollars.
If you were an old retired couple, barely making ends meet with your pension, doesn't a million dollars in cash sound like a nice way to live the rest of your life? As it appears, they didn't actively pursue such a sale. The FBI staged the whole international secrets crime.
So, what comes of all of this? The couple may end up in prison for the rest of their lives. Other government workers will think twice about giving up any sort of information for any amount of cash. The smart ones (the ones who don't get caught) will still commit crimes such as this. The stupid ones (the ones who do get caught) will make headlines again when they work out a deal with the FBI to commit such a crime.
All the FBI managed to do was bust a couple who probably wouldn't have committed the crime in the first place. We all have our price, it just matters how gullible you are, and how much it would cost to buy you off. Would I accept $1 million? Probably not. $1 billion and guaranteed protection in another country? I'd have to think about it.
Sadly enough, we're arresting people now for actions that were encouraged of skilled people years before. The United States accumulated many great scientists and military experts. Surely many of them were bribed in one way or another. Much of that will never make it to the history books.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
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.
MICE.
Money
Ideology
Coercion
Ego
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Err, a bare-sphere (no neutron energy manipulation or reflective shielding) critical mass of a plutonium-239 core is only 10kg and with the density of plutonium that translates to a sphere smaller than an orange (9.9cm to be exact).
A bare sphere of critical mass will not produce an (efficient) nuclear explosion, however. It will immediately begin disintegrating itself, and as soon as the mass drops below critical (due to chunks of radioactive fuel blown out), the process stops. The efficiency of such device is very, very low.
Hence you either need a lot more than critical mass (so that, even with low efficiency, the overall yield is high enough), or you need some way to raise the density rapidly and keep it there for at least some time while explosion is going on. The latter is what implosion-type devices do, but their assembly requires some very high precision to get everything right; throw it even a little bit off balance, and it will fizzle. The former approach works even with crude activator such as a gun assembly, but the amount of material needed for it is quite prohibitive. For example, Little Boy, which used this method, contained over 60kg of U, of which less than kg actually contributed to fission - the rest was just blown into radioactive dust. Very inefficient.
To conclude: implosion-type devices require some advanced engineering to assembly, while more crude activators need significantly more radioactive fuel (which is damn hard and expensive to obtain). So we aren't going to see 14 year olds assembling nukes in their basements anytime soon.
The Wikipedia article is intentionally not useful for designing anything.
However, we do have an online textbook (at roughly upper-division engineering/physics college student difficulty level) on the subject:
http://www.nuclearweaponarchive.org/Nwfaq/Nfaq0.html
In terms of what's been published online -
* There's a book with precise dimensional drawings and measurements on the Little Boy type Uranium gun type bomb. Not online, but purchasable at Amazon. It's not "a blueprint" but any competent draftsman / mechanical engineer could produce blueprints to build from, given the book.
* The dimensions and materials of all the layers of the Fat Man / Mark 1 type nuclear weapons are published in numerous sources. The precise shape of the lens in the outer layer has not been, though a rough back-of-the-envelope version of the equation for the lens shape is published. A precise and buildable lens shape would require someone with a fair talent in explosives engineering and shockwave engineering, especially someone aware of what the published equation left out, but the Fat Man design is fundamentally so brick-solid-simple that one could get the lens fairly imprecise and still have a functional weapon.
Some effort has gone into not actively publishing newer weapon design details in public. But that's not nearly the same as "they're not out". A number of more modern weapons are understood to at least close to the level Fat Man and Little Boy are. There are accurate internal component photos declassified for some weapons and parts. There are detailed hands-on descriptions of some parts, by people who worked on them. Check out the Wikipedia article on the B61 bomb, for example; the fission and fusion components were shown in a declassified film (but not the explosives to compress the fission parts).
if you knew the technology might be used against someone you love, you would never sell out, at any price
And what if you knew that the technology probably wouldn't be used against someone you love, and dang, a million bucks is a lot of money. Never underestimate the power of humans to rationalize what they want to get. While there probably are people who won't compromise under any circumstance, a common trick is to present the negotiation in a way that allows the target to rationalize ignoring the downsides.
I think the odds of Venezuela starting a nuclear war with the USA are pretty slim. For a million dollars I'd call it an acceptable risk.
Because it contradicts the "welfare queens and retirees suck up our tax money" meme, and might even imply that the amount paid by Social Security is insufficient.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
If you can get your hands on fissionable material you can build a bomb. Getting your hands on the fissionable material is the hard part. The rest is just engineering.
Fortunately, no. Or else Iran would have had a bomb 20 years ago. Heh perhaps the shah would have used one on the paedophile khomeini. There are many known locations where you can pick fissionable material off off the ground. One of those is even in Iran.
The problem is that for a neutron cascade ("the bomb"), you don't need fissionable material. What happens in a nuclear bomb starts with one nucleus falling apart. This produces 2 fast neutrons. IF both of those neutrons hit the correct fissionable material, it will cause 2 nuclei to split, producing 4 neutrons. Then 8. Then ... we all know where this is going.
So far so good. There is one problem, though. If you're the size of a neutron, hitting your neighbor nucleus is like attempting to hit the moon, if it were in the andromeda galaxy. It's just not going to happen. Of course there are many neighbor nuclei, increasing your chances. But if the neutrons hit non-U235 nuclei, nothing will happen.
So in a bomb you must make sure that there are enough U235 nuclei in the vicinity. That translates to concentration. How much concentration ? 98% pure at least, preferably more (if you want to be sure it blows up).
Easy enough, let's separate them. Unfortunately, U235 is never found alone, but generally in ore form (bonded to oxygen, for example). You need the pure metal U235. Furthermore it's at least 5% U238 and smaller concentrations of various isotopes. So you got to separate these things out. This is easy enough until you get to having only uranium nuclei, of various weights.
You need to appreciate just how similar U235 and U238 (for example) are. They are nuclei with the exact same magnetic field. Same magnetic moment. They react to the same light frequencies. Everything is the same, except the weight, but that isn't all that different either. U235 and U238 differ about 1.2% in weight. The only known way to separate them is to vaporize them into a highly positively charged plasma, then throw that plasma into a strong magnetic field, where the flow will start to rotate around the center of the field. This will create a minute difference in isotope concentration : less than 0.1% more U235 in the center, slightly over 0.2% more on the other side (the problem is thermalization, constantly remixing the isotopes). That's what's happening in those big tubes the US dislikes so much. Then the purified output of centrifuge 1 can go into centrifuge 2, restarting the process, slowly increasing the purity of the isotopes. You need to connect about 3000 in series.
It is not known exactly how efficient this process is. But it is known that about 200 kg of ore (5% uranium) is needed to create 1 kg 95% U235 (which is what the first nuclear power plants ran on). Undoubtedly it's at least 10 times that for 98%, but ... (the "losses" of this process are the fuel for it. You use the less pure output to fire a nuclear reactor to power the whole purification system, which eats a LOT of power).
Fissionable uranium, explosion-grade, is not easy to get. Not even if you're sitting on tons upon tons of fissionable material.
And quite frankly : thank God this is so.
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.
As one of the worlds largest producers of medical isotopes, Canada has much of the needed infrastructure to produce Pu-239 should it really want to. The NRU reactor at Chalk River would simply need to switch out its Molybdum targets for Uranium and we'd be in business. All of the reprocessing facilities are in place (currently processing medical isotopes). As well, the CANDU reactor design, for a civilian reactor, is quite capable of producing high quality Pu-239 with minor modifications since it can be refueled while operating (as India has done with its CIRUS reactor). Most civilian reactors have to be shutdown to extract the U-238 slugs (that breed the Pu-239) to either you run them for a while (and contaminate your Pu-239 with Pu-240, Pu-241, and Pu-242) or you're firing them up and shutting them down every few weeks. Tritium boosting and a berillium reflector would allow you to build a small enough device to carry on a CF-18. So if it really came down to it, Canada could probably build a couple of bombs in less than a year for a few hundred million, of course there is little reason for us to do so. Just remember the Northwest Passage is Canadian terittorial waters and the North Pole is ours :o)
So in a bomb you must make sure that there are enough U235 nuclei in the vicinity. That translates to concentration. How much concentration ? 98% pure at least, preferably more (if you want to be sure it blows up).
Little Boy used roughly 90% enriched uranium.
In general, the required isotopic purity is closer to 90% than to 98%.
The only known way to separate them is to vaporize them into a highly positively charged plasma, then throw that plasma into a strong magnetic field, where the flow will start to rotate around the center of the field. This will create a minute difference in isotope concentration : less than 0.1% more U235 in the center, slightly over 0.2% more on the other side (the problem is thermalization, constantly remixing the isotopes). That's what's happening in those big tubes the US dislikes so much.
Centrifuge enrichment does not happen in plasma. It uses uranium hexafluoride, which sublimates above 93*C. It is a regular gas like carbon dioxide or oxygen, only heavier.
There's also an obsolete thermal diffusion process, but it takes roughly 100x more energy (!). The last thermal diffusion facility in Europe, Eurodif, will free up some 3000 MW of power when closed. Its job will be done by a new centrifuge enrichment plant that takes only 50 MW.
It is not known exactly how efficient this process is. But it is known that about 200 kg of ore (5% uranium) is needed to create 1 kg 95% U235 (which is what the first nuclear power plants ran on). Undoubtedly it's at least 10 times that for 98%, but ... (the "losses" of this process are the fuel for it. You use the less pure output to fire a nuclear reactor to power the whole purification system, which eats a LOT of power).
Your numbers are far off. U-235 makes up only 0.7% of natural uranium, the rest is U-238 which is not fissile. Furthermore most uranium ores are far less concentrated than 5%. Common ore grades are in the 2000-500 ppm range, or 0.2%-0.05%. To get 1kg of 90% U-235, you need roughly 100 tons of 2000 ppm ore and 167 kg of pure natural uranium (assuming that the tailings contain 0.16% U-235, which is very low but possible; actual tailing concentration is 0.25%-0.3%)
Fissionable uranium, explosion-grade, is not easy to get. Not even if you're sitting on tons upon tons of fissionable material.
That is true, but has little relevance for modern nuclear weapons. All nuclear weapon states except Pakistan use plutonium weapons, which are less costly and much smaller than high enriched uranium weapons. Plutonium can be produced from natural or low enriched uranium in specially designed reactors, then separated chemically. Some plutonium is produced in LWR reactors, but can't be used in nuclear weapons due to its isotopic composition: weapons plutonium needs 90-93% Pu-239, whereas LWR spent fuel contains ~60%.
Those who would give up liberty to obtain working drivers, deserve neither liberty nor working drivers.
I hope you are not an American, as your ignorance about your own constitution is amazing.
The American constitution does not give you any rights. The American constitution points out that you are born with rights, simply by being human, then sets out some specific things the government may NOT do as they would infringe your rights.
The USA constitution does NOT give you rights. It protects your rights from your government.
Anarchists never rule