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Buying Goods To Make Nuclear Weapons On eBay, Alibaba, and Other Platforms

Posted by timothy on from the we-gotcher-centrifuges-we-gotcher-krytrons dept.

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.

16 of 260 comments (clear)

  1. If so damn many people are making nukes by pooh666 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Why no booms?

    1. Re:If so damn many people are making nukes by peragrin · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.
    2. Re:If so damn many people are making nukes by Opportunist · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.
    3. Re:If so damn many people are making nukes by ganjadude · · Score: 3, Interesting

      exactly. Does anyone remember kids chemistry kits growing up? I had some AWESOME kits, I could melt coins in acid that came in mine, yes, acid was sold in chem kits that were marketed to 8 up and this was in the late 80s early 90s. i can only imagine how awesome chem kits were in the 60s

      --
      have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
    4. Re:If so damn many people are making nukes by Creepy · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    5. Re:If so damn many people are making nukes by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      "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.

  2. You know what else that stuff can be used for by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    NOT making nuclear weapons...

    1. Re:You know what else that stuff can be used for by cyrano.mac · · Score: 3, Insightful

      And meanwhile, an Australian can't sell for instance a Dutch (Philips) made photomultiplier tube on ebay. I can 't get some FET transistors from TI they told me, because they couldn't really identify me. Strangely enough, the next day the FET's were in the mail...

      Oh, well, next time i'll buy Chinese, German, Dutch or Japanese. But not from an American company.

      And which country has the most problems with weaponry, by far?

    2. Re:You know what else that stuff can be used for by Opportunist · · Score: 5, Interesting

      This. A billion times this.

      You have NO idea what I went through last time buying some chemicals for my PCB work. It seems that buying HCl, H2O2, Isopropyl alcohol and Acetone was kinda asking for it, but I honestly didn't know. Well, now I do. And I got a new door, too...

      And yes, those things are used exactly for what I said. HCl and H2O2 for etching, Acetone for cleaning the PCB of photoresist and the alcohol to dissolve the soldering flux.

      But now I know what else you can do with that crap. Thanks law enforcement, I wouldn't even have thought about that!

      --
      We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
  3. Well, by that logic by 50000BTU_barbecue · · Score: 4, Insightful

    the food eaten by the people working on making nuclear bombs is an item that can lead to proliferation. This is just scare-mongering to increase inspection of incoming parcels... so the government can charge import duties and taxes.

    Oh, and we're protecting you from people who build nuclear bombs in their garage, yup.

    What nonsense.

    --
    Mostly random stuff.
  4. Why? by Etherwalk · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Why stop it?

    Getting the government involved in regulating the site to preemptively prevent these transactions is stupid. Instead there should be a streamlined process for getting a warrant, and then you go after people who purchase the material. While mailing them a large cache of something that looks like the product but isn't and that has a locator.

    If you ban the sale altogether you just push it underground. If you use it to gather data you have actionable intelligence.

  5. Gallium is also a dopant in chipmaking by swschrad · · Score: 3, Informative

    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?
    1. Re: Gallium is also a dopant in chipmaking by smaddox · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Thermometers. They don't make them out of Mercury any more, due to toxicity. Most analog thermometers are now alcohol based, but Gallium is used in quite a few.

      I won't even bother listing all the uses for pumps and pressure gauges. This article is clearly trolling.

  6. Lump of metal != centrifuge by janoc · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Sorry, this is pretty much BS scaremongering.

    Buying a piece of metal that could be made into a centrifuge doesn't mean that you will actually succeed to make one. There is a lot of specialized equipment needed for that which is tightly controlled (try to export a high precision CNC machine, for example!).

    Most of this gear has lots of legitimate uses as well. Not to mention that if someone really wanted to obtain this sort of gear, I cannot imagine them shopping for it on Alibaba or eBay - they would be spending a ton of money for a product of unknown quality possibly from a mom&pop shop somewhere in China that sells everything from rubber bands, dresses up to car accessories, that is assuming it isn't a scam in the first place. There are better ways of obtaining it - e.g. through shell companies abroad acting as middlemen to avoid embargoes or from friendly nations.

    And before someone pulls out the "terrorist building nukes" bogeyman - that requires a lot more than building a few centrifuges from stuff bought on Alibaba. There are plenty of simpler, cheaper and easier accessible methods to wreak havoc than trying to build a nuke that even countries like Iran didn't succeed in so far, despite vastly bigger resources than some lunatics in a cave possess.

  7. I got gallium from my black market contact... by Drachs · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Code name, Amazon Prime

    http://www.amazon.com/Gallium-99-99%25-Pure-20-Grams/dp/B00BSRAH5M/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1414958244&sr=8-1&keywords=gallium

    I used it to make a novelty heart, which melted in her hands.

  8. Reversed conditional by Okian+Warrior · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Most of this gear has lots of legitimate uses as well. Not to mention that if someone really wanted to obtain this sort of gear, I cannot imagine them shopping for it on Alibaba or eBay.[...]

    I'm trying to become a rationalist, so here's (my take on) the fallacy.

    Police learn that "all drug labs use chemicals", so they think "all chemicals are intent to make drugs". If they see your home laboratory, you'll be arrested and have all your chemicals confiscated - even if you don't have the complete drug-making kit. I know of one home lab where this is exactly what happened. Frequently, having a scale is considered sufficient evidence of drug dealing.

    I've read several news reports of people being arrested for having "bomb making materials" where the kit was incomplete - in one case a box of [glass] canning jars in the back of a vehicle along with a bag of fertilizer. No fuel oil (for ANFO), nothing that could be a fuse, no apparent intent, and no apparent target. A guy's life got completely fucked up for no apparent reason.

    Another example: explosives are delivered by rocket, so rockets will be used to deliver explosives. We have to ban model rocketry!

    Sexual harassment is done by ribald speech, therefore all ribald speech is sexual harassment. (Even if there's no threat?)

    Other examples too numerous to mention.

    This is formally the Fallacy of the Reversed Conditional, and it's used in lots and lots of news articles to stoke fear and promote the writer's agenda.

    It's a problem in Bayesian probability. Consider whether the following reversals are valid or invalid:

    Probability that someone carries a purse, given that they're a woman (high or low), probability that someone is a woman, given that they're carrying a purse (high or low)? Is reversing this conditional valid?

    Probability that John is dead, given that he was executed (high or low), probability that John was executed, given that he is dead (high or low)? Is reversing the conditional valid?

    Two examples of reversed the conditionals, but only one is valid when reversed.

    We need to sort through the bias and clever manipulation of innuendo, and consider the arguments on their merits. Owning any of the cited tech is not evidence of bomb-making, and invasive tracking laws will not help stop nuclear proliferation.

    The fallacy is used for a reason: they want to impose invasive tracking for other reasons, using your emotions against you.

    Don't be fooled.