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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."
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".
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
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.
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.
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.
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!)
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.
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.
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.