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Buying Goods To Make Nuclear Weapons On eBay, Alibaba, and Other Platforms
Lasrick (2629253) writes The blossoming of online Internet-trading platforms has at least one downside: insufficient inspectors and product controls when it comes to goods relevant to nuclear proliferation. "On Alibaba (and other platforms), one can purchase many of the specialized items needed for the manufacture of nuclear weapons. A short list of items advertised for sale on the site include metals suitable for centrifuge manufacturing, gauges and pumps for centrifuge cascades for uranium enrichment, metallurgical casting equipment suitable for making nuclear weapon 'pits,' and high-speed cameras suitable for use in nuclear weapon diagnostic tests. A company on an Alibaba-owned Chinese Internet-trading platform even posted an ad for the sale of the rare metal gallium, which the seller trumpeted could be used to stabilize plutonium." Although many companies have strict compliance procedures in place to help avoid proliferation, many do not. There are several procedures these platforms can put into place to minimize risk, and both national (and international) regulators have a role to play, as well as shareholders.
problem is, almost everything has the potential for dual-use. thorium for tube filaments for audiophools and ham radio power tubes. plutonium for.... yeah, that's it, degradation deep-space power modules, right. there might be room for a law to allow the customs boys to bring you questionable materials, and inspect the delivery address... .
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
That and they keep the really useful stuff for booms tightly regulated.
You might be able to build a dirty bomb in your basement. However even building a gun type fission bomb is really really tricking. you need highly accurate tools in a specialized radiological enclosure to start with. You can't just spin a hunk of Uranium on a CNC lathe and get the shape you want. you would kill everyone working on the project long before they finished it.
As for Chemical weapons they regulate large quantity purchases. you can buy smaller amounts and fly under the radar but then you have to store until you have a large enough supply. again requiring strict controls.
Even large scale diesel bombs like timothy Macve(?) used are harder to pull off now.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Oh yeah, the "dual use" bull. Do you have any faint idea how complicated it has become to get some chemicals? Because someone somehow found some way to use it either to make stuff you can smoke or stuff that makes other stuff go up in smoke. In the meantime we're sitting here with more and more useless stuff for PCB etching. Oh, and we're not talking about such elusive stuff like LAH (which is surprisingly easy to get compared to its "usefulness"), just try to get some HCl or H2O2 in Europe today.
Dual use my ass. Name any chemical and I'll find a way to make a bomb out of that crap. By that logic, you can't sell anything anymore. But I guess it only applies when Mr. Ordinary wants to buy some chemicals to avoid paying some corporation thrice the price because they slap a brand label on some chem mix. Then it's suddenly ok.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
So your argument is guilty until proven innocent?
Fuck off and die. Failing that, move to a country that doesn't even pretend to be free. I hear North Korea is nice this time of year.
Um, uranium isn't all that radioactive or even dangerous to handle. The only reason people actually wear gloves when handling it is to keep contaminants like oils from the hand off of them. Sticking it on a lathe isn't going to make a bomb, though. You could make a pretty poor dirty bomb because breathing uranium dust isn't healthy (the skin stops alpha and beta emitters pretty well, but the lungs don't), but it also isn't the best emitter. In fact, with a dirty bomb you want something with a high alpha emission rate like polonium. Spent reactor fuel contains all kinds of actinides with high emission rates, so nuclear waste makes a much better dirty bomb than raw uranium.
As for getting fissile uranium out of pieces of uranium, well it isn't particularly hard, but it is time consuming. You basically dissolve the uranium into a solution and then run it in a centrifuge and the heavier stuff moves to the walls and lighter stuff toward the center. You then remove the lighter solution and repeat over and over again to get more purity. You need to do this to a certain level for a reactor and a much higher level for a bomb. If you wanted to take it one step further, you could use reactor level uranium and build a breeder reactor that converts uranium to plutonium and then make a plutonium bomb. Just to get it to reactor grade requires a lot of centrifuges and/or a lot of time... I think I read Iran has something like 77000 of them just to create fuel grade nuclear material.
"You basically dissolve the uranium into a solution and then run it in a centrifuge and the heavier stuff moves to the walls and lighter stuff toward the center."
Not in liquid solution. You transform it into a gas, such as uranium hexafluoride. Then you run the gas through the centrifuges, which is indeed a huge, energy-intensive operation. Then you have to convert the UF6 back into uranium metal, which is about as chemically messy as the initial conversion to UF6.
The nuclear reactor route to transform it into plutonium isn't simple either, because you'll have to handle some very hot stuff as the fuel comes out of the reactor, chemically separate the plutonium from that highly-radioactive stuff, and if you leave it in too long you get enough undesirable isotopes of plutonium that the bomb could "fizzle" rather than explode properly.
But you're right that if the enriched uranium was in hand, machining it on a lathe would be challenging but not particularly dangerous because of uranium's mild radioactivity. By that point the really hard stuff is already done. I think most people know that getting ahold of the fissile pit for a bomb is likely the hardest part. If people have got that somehow, then keeping them from getting a bunch of other parts of alibaba or amazon isn't going to slow them down much.