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Top-Secret US Replica of Iran Nuclear Sites Key To Weapons Deal
Lasrick writes Paul Richter at the LA Times has a very cool article describing replicas of Iran's nuclear facilities that the U.S. operates in order to study what Iran's technical capabilities are. "Using centrifuges acquired when Libya abandoned its nuclear program in 2003, as well as American-built equipment, the government has spent millions of dollars over more than a decade to build replicas of the enrichment facilities that are the pride of Iran's nuclear program. Since negotiations with Iran began in earnest, U.S. nuclear technicians have spent long hours tinkering with the machines to test different restrictions and see how much they would limit Iran's ability to convert uranium into bomb fuel."
Iran has been doing this for years.
At least our copies work.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Regardless of who's answer you believe, they would never drop it on Israel, and the reason why is simple. It is against Islamic law for a Muslim to cause harm to kill another Muslim.
Israel is surrounded by water and muslim countries. If anyone dropped a nuke on them, the follout is guaranteed to be blown over at least one muslim country regardless of wind direction (there's the simple answer), if not five or more. This would cause harm to or kill thousands of muslims, and any muslim country who did that would face an uprising that would make the Arab Spring look like a game of hackeysack.
A couple of things:
1) Little Boy would probably qualify as a "dirty bomb" by today's standards, since it fissioned just a small fraction of its uranium (~1.5%).
2) Little Boy was so dirt-simple that even North Korea should be able to manage one if they wanted to. The fact that the NK's haven't managed to set a nuke off with Little Boy's yield suggests that they're either trying to hard to be clever or dumb as posts.
I don't think Iran will have a problem duplicating Little Boy if they want to, and expect that they could duplicate Fat Man as soon as they can come up with the Pu. Note that the hard part of Fat Man is something that can be done without even having fissionables to test with - getting the compression charges to work properly is technically much more challenging....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Things have slowed down as replicating Iran's nuclear facilities also replicated Stuxnet....
The point of this exercise is to keep them from getting enough enriched uranium for one bomb
Most of their enrichment now is below 5%, wit attempts to get up to 20%
Weapons grade is over 85%
Wherever You Go, There You Are
With nuclear weapons critical mass is critical mass, you really can't cheat physics by using lower uranium concentrations or less mass
Refining uranium is a numbers game, and during ww2 the US was expending vast resources and numerous experimental approaches towards getting weapons grade material. Much more resources than a smaller country like Iran could afford. They also generated a significant amount of plutonium in addition to the uranium
Wherever You Go, There You Are
Sure you would. Me too, probably.
But what I wouldn't do is go somewhere to blow up random civilians. Even if it was effective. And I certainly wouldn't pretend that God wanted me to do it.
And let's be clear, Iran sponsors terrorism that has nothing to do with protecting itself, and has done so for years. They seem like a nice eccentric country to people who fail to realize that the whole "Revolutionary" in "Revolutionary Guard" is not just for Iran. The whole Iranian Revolution was fully intended to be a theocratic Shiite uprising across the region and beyond.
Revolutionary Iran is *expansionistic*, it has merely been checked in its ambitions. Don't be confused between them being stopped and them being an innocent regime that just wants to be left alone. Iran with nukes is more war, not less. And if there is going to be a war, I want the US to win it, because in the end, we'll at least try to do the right thing, and failing that, we'll leave.
That's not what non proliferation is at all. That treaty prohibits the signees from acquiring through trade, etc, nuclear components, weapons, etc. It says NOTHING about a company building its own nuclear tech from the ground up.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Isn't this sort of thing the reason government wanted all those supercomputers? To model this exact kind of thing? Or are all the supercomputers too busy sifting through everyone's phone calls and internet posts?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
1) Little Boy would probably qualify as a "dirty bomb" by today's standards, since it fissioned just a small fraction of its uranium
That's not what a dirty bomb is. A dirty bomb does not have a nuclear reaction. A dirty bomb isn't a weapon of mass destruction, it's a fear-based weapon for area denial.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
No, to cut costs they outsourced it to India, which outsourced it to Elbonia, which then outsourced it to Iran.
Table-ized A.I.
Regardless of who's answer you believe, they would never drop it on Israel, and the reason why is simple. It is against Islamic law for a Muslim to cause harm to kill another Muslim.
Israel is surrounded by water and muslim countries. If anyone dropped a nuke on them, the follout is guaranteed to be blown over at least one muslim country regardless of wind direction (there's the simple answer), if not five or more. This would cause harm to or kill thousands of muslims, and any muslim country who did that would face an uprising that would make the Arab Spring look like a game of hackeysack.
The amount of radiation depends on the size of the blast and the type of warhead used. The bombs that flattened Hiroshima and Nagasaki produced residual radiation, but it didn't last very long. Many of the radionuclides had brief half-lives that in some cases were measured in minutes. The bomb sites were highly radioactive for a few hours after the detonations, but the residual radiation decreased rapidly. Also, and contrary to popular belief, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki detonations did not cause genetic mutatinos. American military specialist who surveyed Hiroshima with Geiger counters weeks after the explosions found little residual radioactivity. So while there would probably be some radiation fallout in surrounding muslim countries and definitely a lot of people who die or become sick due to radiation in the target zones it would not be anything like what you imagine which seems to be wide stretches of land irradiated for tens of thousands of years and littered with the bodies of collateral muslim casualties so radioactive that they glow in the dark and don't decay because no micro organisms could survive in the intense radiation. Whenever somebody says nuclear strike people automatically default to thinking about cold war monster ICBMs carrying warheads in the 1 to 10 megaton range but you don't need to go that way. In fact Iran probably won't be able to because any warheads Iran is likely to create would be nowhere near the one megaton range. Realistic estimates I have seen for Iranian nuclear weapons top out at about 50 kilotons (as a reference the Hiroshima and Nagasaki weapons were in the 15-20 kiloton range). The fallout from a properly planned nuclear attack on Israel involving say half a dozen warheads in the sub 50 kiloton range would cause less fallout than that from US atmospheric nuclear tests in the 60s (the Yanks were setting off firecrackers way bigger than 50 kilotons). None of the fallout from those tests caused a civil insurrection in the USA that made the US civli war pale by comparison and this even after people became aware of what radiation can do to the human body. Personally I don't know which scares me more, Iranian Ayatollahs with nuclear weapons or right wing maniacs like Benjamin 'Bibi' Netanyahu and Avigdor 'Avi' Lieberman with their fingers on the nuclear trigger. At least the Americans and the Soviets during the cold war were open to reason and logic but these Middle Eastern fanatics, jewish or muslim, are completely blinded by hate, religious fanaticism and race-political ideology.
Yeah, except that the whole "but Israel is just as bad" is a cop out. Israel has its issues, no argument there, but Iran didn't go a good 50+ years with hostile countries around them trying to drive them into the sea.
Iran has no reason to sponsor terrorism that makes any sense other than wanting to push their own agenda. There are no security issues that it solves for them. All it has done is piss countries off that might have otherwise let things lie.
And if you still believe Israel is a problem, then how much more of a problem are they with nuclear weapons? Do we really believe that Iran with nuclear weapons is going to make that better?
It was a mistake to go into Iraq without a serious plan and commitment for dealing with the fallout, but it is what it is. Most of the people killing each other are native to the area. If they don't want to unite to deal with their own problems, there's little anyone is going to be able to do for them.
Nevertheless, an Iran with nuclear weapons is still a lot less safe for everyone else then without them. They have the one thing that the Russians never had: they really believe they're going to heaven if they die while taking us with them. I'm more afraid of them holding one nuclear weapon than I was of the USSR holding 8,000. At least the Russians didn't think they had a backup plan to overcome Mutually Assured Destruction. The Iranians aren't insane, but they will feel they can push the envelope more than the Soviets could. And with that much oil, we can't simply let them have it.
Are we discussing the behaviour of governments, or you personally? Because you start out by saying you'd never do something that the USA routinely does (drone strikes) and does in ways that no other country does. So if this is meant to be some kind of pissing match between the USA or Iran then Iran wins, as would basically any other country.
Iran with nukes is probably just Iran with nukes, same as lots of other countries that have nukes but don't invade random other places. But you keep on believing in American exceptionalism if it makes you feel better. The rest of us will mentally place the USA right where it belongs - rock bottom on the peace tables.
Israel is a tiny country surrounded by countries that have an avowed intention of destroying it. Comparing it to Iran, or almost any other nation on earth, is absurd.
Sounds like the same setup as was used for developing / testing stuxnet.
The "creation of Israel" by the United Nations? That creation? Israel is one of the few legitimately created countries on the face of the earth.