U.S intelligence pulls Iraqi atom bomb website

China View ^ | 2006-11-03

[SittinYonder]

BEIJING, Nov. 3 (Xinhuanet) -- Two days after announcing a top secret intelligence community website named "Intellipedia" the United States' top intelligence official took down a government website featuring captured Iraqi documents after concern was voiced it may provide too much information about how to make atomic bombs.

In a statement Thursday night, a spokesman for National Intelligence Director John Negroponte said his office has suspended public access to the website "pending a review to ensure its content is appropriate for public viewing."

"While strict criteria had already been established to govern posted documents, the material currently on the website, as well as the procedures used to post new documents, will be carefully reviewed before the site becomes available again," said Negroponte's spokesman, Chad Kolton.

The website, which contains Saddam Hussein-era documents, was pulled after The New York Times raised questions about the contents of the government site, called the “Operation Iraqi Freedom Document Portal."

The Times’website reported Thursday night that weapons experts say documents posted on the government site in recent weeks provide dangerous details about Iraq's covert nuclear research before the 1991 Persian Gulf war.

After urging from Republican members of Congress, Negroponte's office ordered the unprecedented release of millions of pages of Iraqi documents last March. Most of the documents were in Arabic and had been collected by the U.S. government over more than a decade.

The information had been posted gradually on public Internet servers run by the military until this week. Negroponte's office said the U.S. government had made no determination regarding the authenticity of the documents, their factual accuracy or the quality of any translations.

[SittinYonder]

I hate to use a Chinese news outlet, but ... Heard this on the radio this a.m. and this was one of only a few sources I could find confirming the story.

[SittinYonder]

Ping

[SittinYonder]

Apparently the Times wrote about it, but I don't subscribe to the NYT for obvious reasons.


(New York Times) U.S. Web Archive Is Said to Reveal a Nuclear Primer: Last March, the federal government set up a Web site to make public a vast archive of Iraqi documents captured during the war. The Bush administration did so under pressure from Congressional Republicans who had said they hoped to “leverage the Internet” to find documents that weapons experts say are a danger themselves: detailed accounts of Iraq’s secret nuclear research before the 1991 Persian Gulf war. The documents, the experts say, constitute a basic guide to building an atom bomb. ... The campaign for the Web site was led by the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Representative Peter Hoekstra of Michigan. Last November, he and his Senate counterpart, Pat Roberts of Kansas, wrote to Mr. Negroponte, asking him to post the Iraqi material. The sheer volume of the documents, they argued, had overwhelmed the intelligence community.


http://www2.ljworld.com/blogs/kansas_congress/2006/nov/03/nuclear/

[Rummenigge]

LMFAO ... free speach in america brought to you by china view and SittinYonder.

My favourite detail is that the UN did only recieve censored material from the same sources that where now spread over the planet.

Don't try and look in the caches of google or anywhere else - somebody really good in erasing data has taken care of this issue.

[roaddog727]

MSNBC.com now also reporting this.

http://famulus.msnbc.com/famulusgen/ap11-02-221139.asp?t=apnew&vts=11320060709

[SittinYonder]

Maybe if I'd read my pings once in a while I'd know what's going on in the world and not post unnecessarily.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1731259/posts

[FreedomProtector]

...had a Physics professor in college (undergraduate) who earned his PhD in nuclear physics (scholarship via air force) I will never forget one day in third semester physics, the topic of a nuclear bomb came up. He draw a conceptual picture of an overview of nuclear bomb. As expected, as curious students of physics, we began asking questions. As details of certain areas of the picture [particularly related to the trigger] were asked about, he would just smile and say, "We can't talk about that part", or "can't discuss that part".


related thread here:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1731413/posts?page=15#15

[massgopguy]

All you need to know on how to make an Atomic Bomb can be found at the Library of Congress. During the 80's a young man wrote a book called "Mushroom". He was checking out the books at LOC and the lady at the check-out remarked, "Oh, you must be making an Atomic Bomb". The information contained everything except the detonator. So he called Dupont and an engineer who took the call said, "the ARMY uses Kryton".

[Dilbert56]

A Princeton student did a paper on atomic bomb design. When he came to get his paper back to see his grade he was told the paper had been classified. His design, pulled together from unclassified sources, was apparently workable or close enough. This was twenty or thirty years ago, BTW.

[TigersEye]

Let's put a little meat on that link. ; )

JVERITAS Responds to the 11/3 NYT Article Regarding Iraq Nuclear Program.

And add another one...

Bush vindicated! Saddam Closer To Bomb Than Anyone Thought

[1035rep]

A post from jveritas

"On the subject of nuclear program, I translated and posted a document last month dated January 2001 that shows with a shadow of doubt that Saddam was personally involved with his nuclear scientist to re-build the nuclear program. In this document it states that Saddam personally approved his Iraqi Atomic Energy Agency to re-use nuclear equipments that include something called “Degussa Furnaces” that were used in the previous and prohibited Iraq nuclear program."

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1731259/posts

[CaptRon]

I was thinking about that myself.

[polymuser]

This story's getting legs. But not, as we see in other posts, as intended by NYT and MSNBC. Sweet irony, and totally deserved.

[N2Gems]

ping

[CottShop]

This is retarded- I thought that everyone in school learned how to make atomic bombs? As well as how to bow toward Mecca, how to observe Rammadan, how to make suicide belts etc?

Christian news and commentary at: sacredscoop.com ...

[Gandalf_The_Gray]

FYI:

---

Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, University of California, Livermore, "Summary Report of the Nth Country Experiment," W. J. Frank, ed., March 1967. Original classification: secret. [extract of heavily excised document]

This report describes an experiment that took place at a time when policymakers wanted to know how difficult it would be for a non-nuclear power to develop a nuclear weapons capability. Lawrence Livermore Laboratory paid two newly-minted physicists, with no access to or knowledge of classified information, to "produce a credible nuclear weapons design." After three "man-years", the two physicists had a design for an implosion nuclear weapon. The report's conclusions remain classified, but apparently the experiment was a success: it showed that any capable physicist could design a nuclear weapon.

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/nsa/NC/nuchis.html

---

Do a "Google" search on "Nth Country Experiment" and you'll get over 200,000 hits. Scary!

Regards,
GtG

[TexKat]

U.S. Web archive said to reveal nuclear primer

A dangerous cookbook The deletions, the diplomats said, had been done in consultation with the United States and other nuclear-weapons nations. Mohamed ElBaradei, the director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which ran the nuclear part of the inspections, told the Security Council in late 2002 that the deletions were "consistent with the principle that proliferation-sensitive information should not be released."

In Europe, a senior diplomat said atomic experts there had studied the nuclear documents on the Web site and judged their public release as potentially dangerous. "It's a cookbook," said the diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of his agency's rules. "If you had this, it would short-circuit a lot of things."

The New York Times had examined dozens of the documents and asked a half dozen nuclear experts to evaluate some of them.

Peter D. Zimmerman, a physicist and former United States government arms scientist now at the war studies department of King's College, London, called the posted material "very sensitive, much of it undoubtedly secret restricted data."

Ray E. Kidder, a senior nuclear physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, an arms design center, said "some things in these documents would be helpful" to nations aspiring to develop nuclear weapons and should have remained secret.

U.S. put nuclear kit on Web, experts say

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US posted nuke guide on Web

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U.S. Reportedly Put Key Nuke Data Online

US pulls website containing Saddam's nuclear secrets

Iraq Document Web Site Shut After Report of Access to Nuke 'How-To' Content

U.S. Website: How to Build an Atomic Bomb

You May Have Missed Your Best Chance to Build an A-bomb

[Sacajaweau]

The way I see it, we were looking for specific "hits" on the site. We got what we wanted.....including the NYTIMES.