Slashdot Mirror
Feds Attempt To Censor Parts of a New Book About the Hydrogen Bomb
HughPickens.com writes: The atom bomb — leveler of Hiroshima and instant killer of some 80,000 people — is just a pale cousin compared to the hydrogen bomb, which easily packs the punch of a thousand Hiroshimas. That is why Washington has for decades done everything in its power to keep the details of its design out of the public domain. Now William J. Broad reports in the NY Times that Kenneth W. Ford has defied a federal order to cut material from his new book that the government says teems with thermonuclear secrets. Ford says he included the disputed material because it had already been disclosed elsewhere and helped him paint a fuller picture of an important chapter of American history. But after he volunteered the manuscript for a security review, federal officials told him to remove about 10 percent of the text, or roughly 5,000 words. "They wanted to eviscerate the book," says Ford. "My first thought was, 'This is so ridiculous I won't even respond.'" For instance, the federal agency wanted him to strike a reference to the size of the first hydrogen test device — its base was seven feet wide and 20 feet high. Dr. Ford responded that public photographs of the device, with men, jeeps and a forklift nearby, gave a scale of comparison that clearly revealed its overall dimensions.
Though difficult to make, hydrogen bombs are attractive to nations and militaries because their fuel is relatively cheap. Inside a thick metal casing, the weapon relies on a small atom bomb that works like a match to ignite the hydrogen fuel. Today, Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States are the only declared members of the thermonuclear club, each possessing hundreds or thousands of hydrogen bombs. Military experts suspect that Israel has dozens of hydrogen bombs. India, Pakistan and North Korea are seen as interested in acquiring the potent weapon. The big secret the book discusses is thermal equilibrium, the discovery that the temperature of the hydrogen fuel and the radiation could match each other during the explosion (PDF). World Scientific, a publisher in Singapore, recently made Dr. Ford's book public in electronic form, with print versions to follow. Ford remains convinced the book "contains nothing whatsoever whose dissemination could, by any stretch of the imagination, damage the United States or help a country that is trying to build a hydrogen bomb." "Were I to follow all — or even most — of your suggestions," says Ford, "it would destroy the book."
Though difficult to make, hydrogen bombs are attractive to nations and militaries because their fuel is relatively cheap. Inside a thick metal casing, the weapon relies on a small atom bomb that works like a match to ignite the hydrogen fuel. Today, Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States are the only declared members of the thermonuclear club, each possessing hundreds or thousands of hydrogen bombs. Military experts suspect that Israel has dozens of hydrogen bombs. India, Pakistan and North Korea are seen as interested in acquiring the potent weapon. The big secret the book discusses is thermal equilibrium, the discovery that the temperature of the hydrogen fuel and the radiation could match each other during the explosion (PDF). World Scientific, a publisher in Singapore, recently made Dr. Ford's book public in electronic form, with print versions to follow. Ford remains convinced the book "contains nothing whatsoever whose dissemination could, by any stretch of the imagination, damage the United States or help a country that is trying to build a hydrogen bomb." "Were I to follow all — or even most — of your suggestions," says Ford, "it would destroy the book."
wait until the IRS audits your publication profits.
Without knowing the pedigree of the material he looked at, it is impossible to know whether it was classified or not. Simply releasing classified material to the public does not declassify it, especially if the release was unauthorized.
Who do they think they are? They are the people who are paid to protect classified information doing the job they are paid to do, when asked to do that job by the author of the book. He asked, they had to tell him to cut things. They don't get the right to change the classification on material, that has to go through the classifying authority.
Quite a few years back, Tom Clancy wrote a book called "Sum of All Fears" about a bunch of terrorists building an H-bomb using Pu they recovered from an Israeli bomb lost during the '73 war.
Clancy's Afterward included this:
BLOCKQUOTE>It is generally known that nuclear secrets are not as secret as we would like - in fact, the situation is even worse than well-informed people appreciate. what required billions of dollars in the 1940s is much less expensive today. A modern personal computer has far more power and reliability than the first Eniac, and the "hydrocodes" which enable a computer to test and validate a weapon's design are easily duplicated. The exquisite machine tools used to fabricate parts can be had for the asking. When I asked explicitly for the specifications for the very machines used at Oak Ridge and elsewhere, they arrived Federal Express the next day. Some highly specialized items designed specifically for bomb manufacture may now be found in stereo speakers. The fact of the matter is that a sufficiently wealthy individual could, over a period of from five to ten years, produce a multistage nuclear device.
Based on what I learned about the subject as a young man, I see no particular reason to doubt him...
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Years ago, I remember reading about some dude who designed an A-bomb for his senior thesis.
His last stumbling block was the proper explosives for the implosion. So he called up the sales arm of some manufacturer, said he was a building contractor, and that he would need an explosive with $CHARACTERISTICS.... and that he was ready to buy in quantity.
The sales guy fell all over himself providing the exact info the dude needed.
He turned in his thesis, and then when no grade was published, he went to see his professor, who told him that DOE was considering classifying it.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Building a simple working atomic bomb is trivial given some expertise. The gun type design basically requires some uranium, a strong pipe and explosives. However:
. manufacturing the right fissile material is hard, expensive and very slow using a nuclear reactor that is hard to hide
. extracting the same material from the spent reactor fuel requires a huge amount of expertise (some of which isn't published), materials resources and time
. learning how to handle the material will take time
I don't think we'll have to worry about that scenario unless ISIS can maintain control of a large area for several decades.
There's a big difference between uranium and a working hydrogen bomb. The US won't use nukes unless someone else detonates one first.
That isn't how it worked out for Hiroshima.....For all our talk about how we are morally 'better' because we are a 'democracy', remember we are the only country that has use a nuclear weapon on an enemy.
Also, this author probably doesn't have a security clearance, so pretty much all the sources of info he is going to have access to is going to be by definition declassified. Unless he was getting some of the engineers who work our current batch of nuclear weapons drunk and taking notes, it seems pretty unlikely that he has any privileged info. You can learn quite a bit about nuclear and thermonuclear devices if you know which physics papers to read. The physics for hydrogen bombs and stars are the same thing.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Oh, the entire culture was obsessed with torture and killing. Do you realize how racist this sounds?
-josh
I think you have been reading the Hamas propaganda that pops up on Occupy facebook groups too much.
Lets get off the anti-Israel axe-grinding for a moment here. The US is not going to attack Iran, even if they decides to plop water poppers in the Strait again:
1: Iran is a sovereign power, with a distinct race (Persians are not Arabs). When the mullahs took over, Iran's top generals were killed. This enticed Saddam into invading... and Iranians pushed back by strapping bombs onto their kids and having them run under Iraqi tanks. This shows a will that makes the Alamo rally pale in comparison.
2: An attack on Iran would rally every Mecca-facing worshiper to attack the US and Israel. This is why the US did their best to keep Israel out of the first Gulf War when Saddam was sending SCUDs their way (SCUDs with chemical weapons.)
3: Iran is pretty damn powerful. They sell plenty of oil to China and Turkey. Even with sanctions, they are the top producing car maker in the region.
4: Iran is no "shit-o-stan". Attacking Iran would be like attacking Germany or France, with retaliation that a First World government would return with. Tehran's jubes are now fully working buried sewers.
5: If shit hit the fan, Iran would get China to help, stationing PLA nukes and garrisons. This was considered with Russia in the past, and could be done again. China is a thirsty country, and they would be more than happy to come in.
So, lets be real. Israel isn't going to sneak and grab territory, unlike the Hezbollah propaganda or the usual anti-Semite crap says.
Not very fucked at all actually.
Women and children are valued more because they are worth more.
Women can have kids in the future and may even be pregnant now, and children can grow up into adults.
> 2: An attack on Iran would rally every Mecca-facing worshiper to attack the US and Israel.
Suprisingly, it wouldn't. Iran is mostly populated by ethnic persian (farsi) people, who follow the shia muslim tradition. The large majority of muslims (most arabs and east asians) are in the sunni tradition. The difference is mainly about the succession of Prophet Muhammed by either his descendants or his disciplines. Sunni and Shia hate and war each other constantly, much like early modern era Catholics and Protestants did, with usually the 20% minority shias being on the receiving end of the stick. In fact, the sunni call shia "fire-worshipper pagans" because the shia tradition involves elements of the zoroastrian dualist philosophy. Sunni also mock the shia as disguised christians, because the shia tradition pays much respects to the tombs of early muslim preachers, leaders, visionaries and other holy men, much like the relic cult of saint in catholicism.
Anyhow, Iran's worst military and political enemy is Saudi Arabia, where the ruling al-Saud family subscribes to wahhabism, an extremist, outright feudal mindset branch of the sunni muslim faith. Because Saudi Arabia hosts Mecca and Medina, the two holiest places in islam, other sunni would need to follow suit, if the al-Sauds ever declared jihad against Iran.
Saudi Arabia is closely allied to the Zionist Entitry in politics and military, thus the pair conspire much to crush Iran. Saud wants to exterminate the shia muslim faith wholesale, while New-York-Tel-Aviv wants to remove iranian backing from the syrian and palestinian states, so that territory could be occupied by Merkava battle tanks for the creation of a "Greater Zion" as depicted in a map on the 10 agorot fractional coin of the new-sehkel.
On the other hand, the persian shia people of Iran are clever and they are not "lazy arabs". They are well organized, industrious and totally patriotic, not just in words (common arab trait) but also in action. It would be the start of a new world war to invade Iran. Thus, Tel-Aviv wants to outsource such job to CIA and the sunni muslims. Rest assured, after (if) Assad's Syria falls, the ISIS will immediately turn up in Iran to start a "popular uprising". Except they will be annihilated by the Iranian Republic Guard" and national militia in 3 days.