Posted on 09/22/2007 7:30:07 PM PDT by Libloather
Israelis seized nuclear material in Syrian raid
Uzi Mahnaimi and Sarah Baxter
September 23, 2007
Israeli commandos seized nuclear material of North Korean origin during a daring raid on a secret military site in Syria before Israel bombed it this month, according to informed sources in Washington and Jerusalem.
The attack was launched with American approval on September 6 after Washington was shown evidence the material was nuclear related, the well-placed sources say.
They confirmed that samples taken from Syria for testing had been identified as North Korean. This raised fears that Syria might have joined North Korea and Iran in seeking to acquire nuclear weapons.
Israeli special forces had been gathering intelligence for several months in Syria, according to Israeli sources. They located the nuclear material at a compound near Dayr az-Zwar in the north.
Evidence that North Korean personnel were at the site is said to have been shared with President George W Bush over the summer. A senior American source said the administration sought proof of nuclear-related activities before giving the attack its blessing.
Diplomats in North Korea and China believe a number of North Koreans were killed in the strike, based on reports reaching Asian governments about conversations between Chinese and North Korean officials.
Syrian officials flew to Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, last week, reinforcing the view that the two nations were coordinating their response.
The public face of Bush Administration officials regarding North Korea's nuclear test is a mask of utter seriousness, or "grave concern." Behind the mask, folks are laughing their heads off. Meanwhile, the world's dumbest nuclear scientists - namely, those in North Korea - are terrified of what Baby Kim will do to them when he finds out the truth.
Essentially, we have a replay of the total fiasco of Baby Kim's headline-garnering missile test launch last July. In Climbing Fujiyama, you learned that:
The public reaction by both the Japanese and American governments - serious anger - is tempered by the private one. In the White House and the Kokkai (Japanese Parliament), there is a lot of laughter. GW really had to suppress his smirk in a press conference when he noted that the dreaded Taepodong-2 (which the press calls an "Intercontinental Ballistic Missile capable of reaching the US with its 6,000 kilometer range") blew up 40 seconds after launch.
"What a bunch of bozos," is the private assessment here in Tokyo and in DC. "All their missiles failed. It's even more of a spectacular flop than their Taepodong-1 test back in 1998, where the first two stages went off ok until the third stage blew up. These clowns can now barely get their popguns off the launch pad."
Yet everyone has to bite their tongues and resist the overwhelming temptation to publicly ridicule the North Koreans and laugh in Baby Kim's face. Doing so would make it much harder to get international sanctions on Pyongyang.
You have to become a member over at Wheeler's site to read the rest....
Rep. Duncan Hunter of Calif. is calling for Federal funds to be taken away from Columbia University if the Iranian Hitler is allowed to speak there.
No they didn’t and the pentagon knows that for sure.
http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/world/dprk/nuke.htm
As of February 2005 Defense Intelligence Agency analysts were reported to believe that North Korea may already have produced as many as 12 to 15 nuclear weapons. This would imply that by the end of 2004 North Korea had produced somewhere between four and eight uranium bombs [on top of the seven or eight plutonium bombs already on hand]. The DIA’s estimate was at the high end of an intelligence community-wide assessment of North Korea’s nuclear arsenal completed in early 2005. The CIA lowballed the estimate at two to three bombs, which would suggest an assessment that the DPRK either had not reprocessed a significant amount of plutonium from the 8,000 spent fuel rods removed from storage in early 2003,
http://www.cfr.org/content/publications/attachments/North_Korea.pdf (Jan 2006)
... ‘this much material would give NK the ability to produce 6-8 nuclear weapons’....
(it includes a 1990 Soviet KGB report to the Soviet Central Committee on North Korea’s nuclear program...The KGB report asserted that “”According to available date, development of the first nuclear device has been completed at the DPRK nuclear research center in Yongbyon”
Oh, yes. If the material in question was Amerian, they could tell what reactor it came from..
See #106
The North Koreans claimed their test was so successful it released no radiation. With no witnesses and no radiation leakage, do we just have to take their word for that the "test" wasn't a fake?
No. Since the gases produced by a chemical explosion are much cooler than those of a nuclear one, the difference will show up in the "sharpness" of the seismic pulse reading - how sharp and steep the leading edge of the reading rises. Since such sharpness is dispersed over distance, only sensors placed very close to the explosion can determine if it has the requisite sharpness to be nuclear - such as those placed by the US Navy on the floor of the Sea of Japan right off the coast of North Korea.
Those sensors' readings are classified and will remain so - yet the initial reaction of folks at the Pentagon tells me that the explosion was indeed nuclear, that it was not a fake but rather a colossal failure.
PELOSI IS SYRIAN’S BURQA GIRL — http://youtube.com/watch?v=iumR_WB3HO0
We saw why back in March, 2004 with Is North Korea Faking It?:
The North Koreans don’t really know what they are doing, were pushed too hard to reprocess uranium fuel rods into plutonium, and left the rods in too long.
The longer you leave the rods in the reactor, the more uranium will be converted into plutonium — but the ratio of isotopes changes.
You need plutonium that is 90% of the 239 isotope to get the reaction to assemble fast enough for a nuclear explosion. More than 10% of the 240 or 242 isotopes and the reaction “fizzles.”
So it looks like what happened Monday is this:
The (at least) 3 to 4 kilos of plutonium in the North Korean bomb contained too much 240/242, which produced so many extra neutrons when the packed explosives went off that the reaction disassembled (”fizzled” or went off prematurely), resulting in a yield of less than 3% of what it should have been.
Which means that Baby Kim and his scientists are the laughingstock of all the scientists at the Pentagon, and the world community of weapons physicists. It’s safe to say that Baby Kim won’t take his being laughed at with a great deal of grace and equanimity. So it’s probably a safe bet that the lifespan of his scientists (and their families) may be soon abbreviated.
This would be very good news. Once Baby Kim kills them off, it will be hard to find replacements - and impossible to get ones smarter and more competent. Far more likely is that he’ll get ones even dumber than the ones he has now.
Even better news is that the North Korean plutonium stockpile is worthless. Too polluted with P240/242, bombs can’t be made of it, so it can’t be sold as such to other rogue states.
So don’t expect the slightest concessions from Bush and Condi. They have to pretend that North Korea is in fact right now an exceedingly dangerous nuclear threat in order to get the international sanctions on it required to prevent it from becoming such a threat one day.
But behind the diplomatic pretense there is laughter - and via discrete back channels, Baby Kim is being made aware of it. What happens when the world’s greatest egomaniac becomes a joke? This is going to be interesting to watch,
“A Devsix big ole bump!”
Ta, Ta, Ta, Twwwwooo Times.
And St. Michael’s light protect and guide them.
Well, there's a possibility we could all die a fiery death in a meteor impact tomorrow, but I'll keep worrying about car crashes and heart attacks, thanks.
We can distinguish between Chinese, Russian, Pakistani, Iranian and North Korean sources. Those are the only nations I would ever suspect of deliberately giving nuclear materials to a terrorist group to use on us, and among them only Iran or North Korea would be so foolish as to try it under their current regimes. Pakistan might, but only if the government falls into radical Islamist hands. All of those nations are fully aware that there would be severe repercussions if any of their material saw use in a dirty bomb or nuclear detonation.
-ccm
I have a theory...I think that as part of the agreement with North Korwea recently discussed in the press in vague terms, that the North Koreans agreed to cough up intellignece about the nuclear material it suppl;ied to Syria and to Iran, and this raid was a result of conformation of the location of the material from Korean sources.
Note that when Korea stated that they were going to be off of the terrorism list after the talks, the US responded by saying “not so fast, Charley.” in diplo speak, of course. I think it was to see whether the intelligence would pan out.
This may lead to part of the inelligence proof that we will obviously need to convince the public that the US must use military force in Iran to stop them from using the nuclear materials. The proof must be solid to support that action in the current political environment.
At this time, thjere are a series of atrticles coming out disclosing various kinds of secret plans, and I believe this is part of the psy-ops preparatory to a strike early next year.
All speculation on my part...
Therin lies the rub. Who’s to say it’s deliberate? I’m pretty sure the US has had a program in the past where we supplied third world nations with nuclear fuel for peaceful purposes. I believe our reasoning for doing so was to eliminate the incentive for third world nations to try to learn how to produce their own fuel.
Also, after the collapse of the USSR, I remember reading stories of “disappearing” nukes. Who knows where all the nuclear fuel is and where it originally came from. We could get hit with something that came from our own government.
This is an alarming development coming outta of the Mideast.
It’s time. We should attack while Immanutjob is in NY.
We should then arrest him and put him on trial for crimes committed against our embassy.
“And yet Bush claims that the DPRK have agreed to eliminate their nukes. What a joke of a President.”
—
Well, KB, would we be better with Her Thighness? After all, she couldn’t remember any details about the Rose billing records, FBI files, didn’t know anything about Bubba’s extracurricular activities and didn’t believe any of that. She was hoodwinked, apparently, by the Chinese money connections in the ‘90’s, then again with Norman Hsu. Never heard of George Soros. And who is William Danielczyk, anyway?
Who’s a joke? You are.
to watch....
NK hasn’t made a move without China’s nod since the Korean War. NK is China’s pit bull on a leash. All of the nuke and missile technology that NK has was provided by China for disbursement to our enemies.
Your speculation is missing an important ingredient. Why would the North Koreans voluntarily provide information and leave their people in a position to be killed. They are not suffering an abundance of nuclear type engineers are they?
Based on this report, and North Korea being one of the only countries to protest, it would seem they did not take the loss too well.
And the word is that North Korea is hosting a Syrian pow wow to come up with a way to retaliate.
That does not sound like they are working with the US.
Where's Nancy Pelosi?
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