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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.
NOT making nuclear weapons...
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.
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.
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.