Posted on 11/03/2006 8:05:28 PM PST by Mia T
INADVERTENT vs. WILLFUL NUCLEAR PROLIFERATION
WILLIAM J. BROAD, THE NEW YORK TIMES, 2006
But in recent weeks, the site has posted some 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.
Last night, the government shut down the Web site after The New York Times asked about complaints from weapons experts and arms-control officials. A spokesman for the director of national intelligence said access to the site had been suspended "pending a review to ensure its content is appropriate for public viewing."
.... Among the dozens of documents in English were Iraqi reports written in the 1990s and in 2002 for United Nations inspectors in charge of making sure Iraq had abandoned its unconventional arms programs after the Persian Gulf war. Experts say that at the time, Mr. Hussein's scientists were on the verge of building an atom bomb, as little as a year away....
INADVERTENT vs. WILLFUL NUCLEAR PROLIFERATION: TIMES BLINDED BY SELECTIVE HORROR, FAILS TO SEE STORY'S INHERENT CONTRADICTIONS
Its overview of the disclosures, "Restricted Data Declassification Decisions," dated January 1999 and more than 140 pages long, lists such things as how atom bombs can be boosted in power, key steps in making hydrogen bombs, the minimum amount (8.8 pounds) of plutonium or uranium fuel needed for an atom bomb and the maximum time it takes an exploding atomic bomb to ignite an H-bomb's hydrogen fuel (100 millionths of a second).
No grade-B physicist from any university could figure this stuff. It took decades of experience gained at a cost of more than $400 billion.
The release of the secrets started as a high-stakes bet that openness would lessen, not increase, the world's vulnerability to nuclear arms and war. John Holum, who heads arms control at the State Department, told Congress last year that the test ban "essentially eliminates" the possibility of a renewed international race to develop new kinds of nuclear arms...
"The United States must stand as leader," O'Leary told a packed news conference in December 1993 upon starting the process. "We are declassifying the largest amount of information in the history of the department."
Critics, however, say the former secrets are extremely valuable to foreign powers intent on making nuclear headway. Gaffney, the former Reagan official, disparaged the giveaway as "dangling goodies in front of people to get them to sign up into our arms-control agenda."
Thomas B. Cochran,:..."In terms of the phenomenology of nuclear weapons...the cat is out of the bag."
William J. Broad
I think the Times editors are counting on this being spun as a "Boy, did Bush screw up" meme; the problem is, to do it, they have to knock down the "there was no threat in Iraq" meme, once and for all. Because obviously, Saddam could have sold this information to anybody, any other state, or any well-funded terrorist group that had publicly pledged to kill millions of Americans and had expressed interest in nuclear arms. You know, like, oh... al-Qaeda.
The New York Times just tore the heart out of the antiwar argument, and they are apparently completely oblivous to it.
The antiwar crowd is going to have to argue that the information somehow wasn't dangerous in the hands of Saddam Hussein, but was dangerous posted on the Internet. It doesn't work. It can't be both no threat to America and yet also somehow a threat to America once it's in the hands of Iran. Game, set, and match.
UPDATE: The article is up here.
Having now read it, I can see that every stop has been pulled out to ensure that a reader will believe that posting these documents was a strategic blunder of the first order.
But the story retains its own inherent contradiction: The information in these documents is so dangerous, that every step must be taken to ensure it doesn't end up in the wrong hands... except for topping the regime that actually has the documents.
(By the way, is it just me, or is the article entirely devoid of any indication that Iran actually accessed the documents? This threat that, "You idiot! Iran could access all the documents!" is entirely speculative. If the government servers hosting the web site have signs that Iranian web browsers accessed those pages, it's a different story; my guess is somebody already knows the answer to that question.)
I'm still kinda blown away by this paragraph:
Is this sentence referring to 1990, before the Persian Gulf War? Or 2002, months before the invasion of Iraq? Because "Iraq is a year away from building a nuclear bomb" was supposed to be a myth, a lie that Bush used to trick us into war.
And yet here is the New York Times, saying that Iraq had a "how to manual" on how to build a nuclear bomb, and could have had a nuke in a year.
In other news, it's good to see that the New York Times is firmly against publicizing sensitive and classified information. Unless, of course, they're the ones doing it.
ONE LAST THOUGHT: So Iraq had all the know-how, all the plans, all the designs, "charts, diagrams, equations and lengthy narratives about bomb building." Unless they were keeping these documents around as future material for paper airplanes, all this stuff constituted a plan of action for some point in the future; but to complete creating these weapons, they would have needed stuff. I don't know an exact list of what they would have needed, but articles like this one give a good idea. Sounds like you need a firing mechanism (the right kind of firearm would suffice), some fairly common industrial equipment like a lathe, material for the bomb casing, some fairly common conventional explosives, all of which would have been easy to get in Iraq. Oh, and, of course, the nuclear material itself.
They would have needed something like... um... you know... what's that stuff called? Oh, that's right.
Yellowcake.
But we know Iraq would never make an effort to get yellowcake. Joe Wilson had tea with officials in Niger who said so.
Shocker: New York Times Confirms Iraqi Nuclear Weapons Program
For more than a half decade, the Clinton administration was shoveling atomic secrets out the door as fast as it could, literally by the ton. Millions of previously classified ideas and documents relating to nuclear arms were released to all comers, including China's bomb makers.
William J. Broad
So I have real concerns, specifically about a plant in my state near where I live, Indian Point....
So we need to resolve... questions of... proliferation... before we go forward with nuclear power.
hillary clinton
Missus clinton's sudden concern about proliferation, therefore, is a decade too late and a dollar too cheap. 3
The clintons turned the dilemma of the nuclear age--how to exploit nuclear energy's peaceful and productive potential while preventing the spread of nuclear weapons-- on its head: They exploited nuclear proliferation for their own gain even as they prevented the realization of nuclear energy's peaceful and productive potential.
Moreover, by ignoring terrorism for those eight years,4 the clintons caused the nuclear dilemma to become even more acute, complex and deadly with the concomitant rapid rise in non-state actors' involvement in the proliferation of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction (WMD).
Contrary to the clintons' quaint theories,5 rogue states routinely violated their Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons nonproliferation obligations, setting up a perfect symbiosis for non-state actors--particularly terrorists--seeking to acquire and use nuclear or other WMD. The non-state actor is the rogue state's perfect WMD delivery-system: there is no return address.
"I remember exactly what happened. Bruce Lindsey said to me on the phone, 'My God, a second plane has hit the tower.' And I said, 'Bin Laden did this.' that's the first thing I said. He said, 'How can you be sure?' I said 'Because only bin Laden and the Iranians could set up the network to do this and they [the Iranians] wouldn't do it because they have a country in targets. Bin Laden did it.'
I thought that my virtual obsession 2 with him was well placed and I was full of regret that I didn't get him."
bill clinton
The clintons, almost singlehandedly, therefore, made proliferation of WMD today's preeminent threat to international peace and security.
Some call the clintons quislings, Manchurian Candidates, bought off in Little Rock by Riady and company6 decades ago (and much too cheaply, according to their Chinese benefactors7), trading our national security for their political power. This argument is persuasive but incomplete; the clintons, certifiable megalomaniacs, are driven ultimately by their solipsistic, messianic world view and that by which ultimately quashes all else -- their toxic legacy.
William J. Broad suggests (Spying Isn't the Only Way to Learn About Nukes, The New York Times, May 30, 1999)8 that the clintons had another reason to empower China and disembowel America. Broad argues that they sought to disseminate our atomic secrets proactively in order to implement their postmodern, quite inane epistemological theory, namely, that, contrary to currently held dogma, knowledge is not power after all -- that, indeed, quite the contrary is the case. (One has only to look to Iran, North Korea or Pakistan to see the absurdity of the clintons' premise.)
Broad writes in part:
Since 1993, officials say, the Energy Department's "openness initiative" has released at least 178 categories of atom secrets. By contrast, the 1980s saw two such actions...
Its overview of the disclosures, "Restricted Data Declassification Decisions," dated January 1999 and more than 140 pages long, lists such things as how atom bombs can be boosted in power, key steps in making hydrogen bombs, the minimum amount (8.8 pounds) of plutonium or uranium fuel needed for an atom bomb and the maximum time it takes an exploding atomic bomb to ignite an H-bomb's hydrogen fuel (100 millionths of a second).
No grade-B physicist from any university could figure this stuff. It took decades of experience gained at a cost of more than $400 billion.
The release of the secrets started as a high-stakes bet that openness would lessen, not increase, the world's vulnerability to nuclear arms and war. John Holum, who heads arms control at the State Department, told Congress last year that the test ban "essentially eliminates" the possibility of a renewed international race to develop new kinds of nuclear arms...
"The United States must stand as leader," O'Leary told a packed news conference in December 1993 upon starting the process. "We are declassifying the largest amount of information in the history of the department."
Critics, however, say the former secrets are extremely valuable to foreign powers intent on making nuclear headway. Gaffney, the former Reagan official, disparaged the giveaway as "dangling goodies in front of people to get them to sign up into our arms-control agenda."
Thomas B. Cochran,:..."In terms of the phenomenology of nuclear weapons...the cat is out of the bag."
...[F]ormer Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said the "extensive declassification" of secrets had inadvertently [?!] aided the global spread of deadly weapons.
Broad would have us believe we are watching "Being There" and not "The Manchurian Candidate." His argument is superficially appealing as most reasonable people would conclude that it requires the simplemindedness of a Chauncy Gardener (in "Being There") to reason that instructing China and a motley assortment of terrorist nations on how to beef up their atom bombs and how not to omit the "key steps" when building hydrogen bombs would somehow blunt and not stimulate their appetites for bigger and better bombs and a higher position in the power food chain.
But it is Broad's failure to fully connect the dots -- the clintons' wholesale release of atomic secrets, decades of Chinese money sluicing into clinton campaigns, the clintons pushing the test ban treaty, the clintons' concomitant sale of supercomputers, and the clintons' noxious legacy -- that blows his argument to smithereens and reduces his piece to just another clinton apologia by The New York Times.
But even a Times apologia cannot save the clintons from the gallows. The clintons can be both absolute (albeit postmodern) morons and traitors. The strict liability Gump-ism, "Treason is as treason does" applies.
The idea that an individual can be convicted of the crime of treason only if there is treasonous intent or *mens rea* runs contrary to the concept of strict liability crimes. That doctrine (Park v United States, (1974) 421 US 658,668) established the principle of 'strict liability' or 'liability without fault' in certain criminal cases, usually involving crimes which endanger the public welfare.
Calling their position on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty "an historic milestone," (if they must say so themselves,) the clintons believed that if they could get China to sign it, they would go down in history as the saviors of mankind. This was 11 August 1995.
According to James Risen and Jeff Gerth of The New York Times, "the legacy codes and the warhead data that goes with them" -- apparently stolen from the Los Alamos weapons lab by scientist, Wen Ho Lee aided and abetted by bill clinton, hillary clinton, the late Ron Brown, Sandy Berger, Hazel O'Leary, Janet Reno, Eric Holder and others in the clinton administration (not to mention congressional clinton accomplices Glenn, Daschle, Bumpers, Harkin, Boxer, Feinstein, Lantos, Levin. Lautenberg, Torricelli et al.) -- "could (especially when combined with the supercomputers that clinton sold to China to help them finish the job) be particularly valuable for a country, like China, that has signed onto the nuclear test ban treaty and relies solely on computer simulations to upgrade and maintain its nuclear arsenal. The legacy codes are now used to maintain the American nuclear arsenal through computer simulation.
Most of Lee's transfers occurred in 1994 and 1995, just before China signed the test ban treaty in 1996, according to American officials."
Few who have observed the clintons would argue against the proposition that these legacy-obsessed megalomaniacs would trade our legacy codes for their rehabilitated legacy in a Monica minute and to hell with "the children."
TIMES BLINDED BY SELECTIVE HORROR, FAILS TO SEE STORY'S INHERENT CONTRADICTIONS
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 new evidence of the prewar dangers posed by Saddam Hussein.
U.S. Web Archive Is Said to Reveal a Nuclear Primer
The New York Times
November 3, 2006
Spying Isn't the Only Way to Learn About Nukes
For more than a half decade, the Clinton administration was shoveling atomic secrets out the door as fast as it could, literally by the ton. Millions of previously classified ideas and documents relating to nuclear arms were released to all comers, including China's bomb makers....
Spying Isn't the Only Way to Learn About Nukes
The New York Times
May 30, 1999
Among the dozens of documents in English were Iraqi reports written in the 1990’s and in 2002 for United Nations inspectors in charge of making sure Iraq abandoned its unconventional arms programs after the Persian Gulf war. Experts say that at the time, Mr. Hussein’s scientists were on the verge of building an atom bomb, as little as a year away.
NRO
Jim Geraghty
HILLARY GOES NUCLEAR
PROLIFERATION IN THE AGE OF CLINTON
Spying Isn't the Only Way to Learn About Nukes
The New York Times
May 30, 1999
Nuclear is now very much in the news as a potential power source because of its lack of contribution to global warming. If you look at nuclear energy, which currently provides 20 percent of our energy with virtually no emission of greenhouse gases, we do have to take a serious look, but there remain very serious questions about nuclear power... in a world with suicidal terrorists.
Remarks at The National Press Club
May 23, 2006
illful nuclear proliferation, the product of clinton naiveté, corruption and obsession with legacy,1 was the predominant clinton policy for eight long years.2
Sunday, Sept 3, 2002
Larry King Live
THE (oops!) INADVERTENT ADMISSIONS OF BILL + HILLARY CLINTON
NOTE: There would be an analogous treasonous miscalculation in the Mideast: the clintons failed to shut down Muslim terrorism, then in its incipient stage and stoppable, because they reasoned that doing so would have wrecked their chances for the Nobel Peace Prize. Indeed, according to Richard Miniter, Madeleine Albright offered precisely the Nobel-Muslim factor as a primary reason for not treating the bombing of the USS Cole as an act of war.9
FOOTNOTES
COPYRIGHT MIA T 2006
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Who ever said liberals are smart?
bump ;)
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BTTT! for later -- off to town.
have fun ;)
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I can't decide what part of the Leftist Idiot mentality allows this.
Is it the "If we'll be nice to them, they'll be nice to us" delusion?
Or, is it the "We are the cause of all the evil in the world, so we deserve to be taken down" delusion?
Or, is it the "If we (Clintonites) feed them this $**+, they'll dump truckloads of cash into our offshore accounts" greedtality?
Your opinion?
bump
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