Posted on 07/24/2015 9:29:44 AM PDT by Kaslin
After long and difficult negotiations, an agreement was recently concluded in Vienna between Iran and six Western powers, including the United States, to curb that nation’s nuclear weapons program.
The discussions highlight two stark facts: First, that however difficult the negotiations, implementing the terms of the agreement will be equally if not more challenging. And second, that atomic weapons are relatively easy to manufacture by nations with sufficient scientific and technological expertise.
On this last point, it is worthwhile remembering the events of 70 years ago in order to better understand the issues of today. On August 6 and 9, 1945, the United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Second World War with all of its horrors and brutalities was at last brought to an end. Those early weapons, produced in secret during the war and at great expense, were the products of one of the greatest scientific and technological enterprises of all time. We know it today by its popular name, the Manhattan Project, and it was driven by an Army general named Leslie R. Groves and under him, the development of the bomb by his scientific director, J. Robert Oppenheimer. This unusual and unexpected partnership made possible not only the comparatively simple atomic bombs of World War II, but subsequent generations of increasingly powerful thermonuclear weapons.
We should also note that just over seven decades ago, the United States was fighting a war on multiple fronts and with private industry converted to meeting the needs of a massive war effort by producing everything from uniforms to bombers, artillery shells to tanks. Despite this all-out effort, the nation also spent two billion dollars employing thousands of talented scientists and engineers and hundreds of thousands of civilian workers, and building a network of production plants solely for an enterprise that had no sure guarantee of working: the creation of a new and destructive weapon based on the power of splitting atoms. And yet, that is exactly what America did when it created the Manhattan Engineer District in 1942, and over the next two and a half years, constructed, among other installations, a colossal plant to process uranium in Oak Ridge, Tennessee; giant reactors in Hanford, Washington, to generate plutonium; and an isolated laboratory high in the Jemez Mountains of New Mexico to design and build the bombs themselves.
By good fortune, the man running the Manhattan Project was General Groves, an Army engineer who before the war oversaw construction of the new Pentagon building in record time and under budget. Smart, ambitious, and a gifted administrator, he ran the project with indefatigable energy. Also fortunate was his choice of the scientist to lead the design and development of the new bomb at the laboratory in New Mexico, the brilliant theoretical physicist, Robert Oppenheimer. Although he lacked administrative experience, Oppenheimer made up for this with an unusual intellectual versatility and ability to inspire.
Named after the mesa top it occupied, the Los Alamos Laboratory worked its way through difficult theoretical questions and challenging engineering hurdles over a period of two and a half years. Two versions of an atomic bomb were designed and built and given the nicknames Little Boy and Fat Man. In August 1945 the boy fell on Hiroshima, the man on Nagasaki. Most Americans at the time believed their use ended the war. The atomic bomb undeniably changed the course of history, and one of its legacies is that the principles and techniques developed at Los Alamos for creating a nuclear explosion are still applicable today. That knowledge—the “secret” of the atomic bomb—would not stay secret very long. Even in 1945, Groves and Oppenheimer understood that the genie was out of the bottle.
Today, eight nations are known to possess nuclear weapons: China, France, India, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Other countries no doubt hope to acquire them. The recently completed negotiations in Vienna are only the latest attempt to keep the list at eight, but realistically, the fight to halt the further spread of weapons will no doubt continue far into the future.
This is the legacy of the Manhattan Project and of the partnership between general and physicist.
A little scary that the US was able to enrich Uranium and build a bomb in less than 3 years.
Imagine how quickly the Iranians can do it with an instruction manual and ‘permission’ to acquire more centrifuges.
You got that right.
I’ve thought this too, many times. Either our scientists/engineers were superhuman in 1943,44,45 or the Iranians are slow.
Why does it take the Iranians this long ? Haven’t they been working on this for about 10 years?
Certainly it’s not our “inspections” holding them back. I just wonder why it’s so hard for them to do it. Recall Netanyahu said about 2-4 years ago in his speech to congress that the Iranians would have a nuke March of the next year and showed his bomb drawing at the podium?
Anyone have any ideas why we were able to make one quickly and the Mullahs aren’t?
For example:
After long and difficult negotiations, an agreement was recently concluded in Vienna between Iran and six Western powers, including the United States, to curb that nation’s nuclear weapons program.
The agreement does not curb Iran's nuclear weapons program. This is nonsense.
The discussions highlight two stark facts: First, that however difficult the negotiations, implementing the terms of the agreement will be equally if not more challenging.
Ridiculous.
If the terms of the agreement had not deliberately permitted every conceivable avenue for ambiguity and outright deception on the part of the Iranians, then implementing it would be child's play: "We want to inspect your nuclear facilities. Now. Make sure there's somebody there to open the door."
And second, that atomic weapons are relatively easy to manufacture by nations with sufficient scientific and technological expertise
Rubbish. They are not easy to manufacture. The simple truth is that the Iranians would be no closer to producing a bomb today than Germany was in 1941, except for one fact: They agreed to a previous treaty called The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Under the NNPT they were given access to highly sensitive, superior technology from Russia and the West, in exchange for a promise that they would not develop nuclear weapons.
Get that?
They stole the technology to develop nuclear weapons from the West by violating a treaty.
Period.
Now, we have "negotiated" an even weaker treaty, with an even weaker set of controls and protocols than the one they violated to get their nuclear program in the first place.
The author of this piece is a fool who has no idea what he's talking about. A high school kid with a basic understanding of physics cannot produce a nuclear weapon any more than a bunch of camel jockeys wandering around the desert can. The theoretical physics behind first generation nuclear weapons is indeed trivial. But the scientific and engineering challenges required to manufacture and handle the materials and package them in a deliverable weapon is not. The Iranians cheated to get that information.
They will cheat again to actually produce a weapon, and mere words on a piece of paper negotiated by an effeminate poseur and his gigolo flunky will not even slow them down.
They started with nothing but a chalkboard and a place to mine. And it took them 3 years.
Today we are told that Iran can start with;
A) students sent to physics, engineering, and science universities all over the earth.
B) the advantage of existing designs,
C) CAD/CAM and modern electronics, materials and computers,
D) experienced atomic scientists for sale,
E) All the raw materials available inside Iran.
And Obama tells us it may take decades
All the smart Persians moved to the US. And not only are not-so-smart left behind, they are also Muslims, not a culture that celebrates technical intelligence.
“A high school kid with a basic understanding of physics cannot produce a nuclear weapon any more than a bunch of camel jockeys wandering around the desert can.”
Iran isn’t talking high school students, or Camel jockeys. There are physicists and engineers, who attend fine universities. And they can pay atomic engineers from China, Russia, Europe, and I dare say,, even the USA.
They have all the raw materials, the knowledge is widespread. And have many shortcuts Manhattan could only dream of.
They probably already have it and simply haven’t tested yet.
As for a deliverable warhead, they simply have to claim it is. All they actually need is one gadget type that successfully detonates. That is the real goal rather than one that can be delivered.
That makes you invasion proof. The reason they want it is not for Tel Aviv, or to detonate an EMP over Denver and all the other silliness out there.
The Iranian nuke has one and only one purpose. It is to keep the 1st Armored Division from rolling into Tehran, or to prevent a Marine Division from landing on their gulf coast. They saw what happened to Saddam, to Moamar Kaddafy, etc. The Mullahs need something to ensure they will never be invaded and hanged.
The Mullahs as suicidal thing is a fraud. They are willing to send disturbed individuals, a handful of true believers, and those trapped by circumstance into suicide bombings. But if they were actually willing to go up in flames, they could attack Israel this afternoon.
The ultimate grand mistake of Obama (though “mistake” implies that he didn’t want them to get the bomb) was not supporting the Iranian uprising right after he took office. It was at the tipping point, and he put his thumb on the scales on the side of the Mullahs. That is Obamas most evil act.
Iran was nearly a nation that escaped the Mullahs grip, Obama stopped that.
Read my previous post. The truth is, contrary to what the author thinks, it's not that easy to build a bomb.
I’ve thought this too, many times. Either our scientists/engineers were superhuman in 1943,44,45 or the Iranians are slow.
Our project was not just an American project, but the collaboration of two of the greatest scientific powers on Earth: The US and Britain, along with the help of scientists, mathematicians, and engineers that Hitler had foolishly driven from the continent.
The American scientists who worked on the bomb, just the ones I can think of off the top of my head included, besides Oppenheimer, Nobel Prize winner I.I. Rabi, Nobel Prize winner Hans Bethe, Edward Teller and Stanislaw Ulam -- two great physicists who later designed the Hydrogen Bomb, Nobel Prize winner Ernest O. Lawrence, Nobel Prize winner Arthur Compton, Nobel Prize Winner Enrico Fermi -- probably the greatest combined experimental and theoretical physicist since Archimedes, Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman -- one of the greatest physicists of all time.
Anyone have any ideas why we were able to make one quickly and the Mullahs aren’t?
What Thomas Jefferson said of the people who assembled in Philadelphia for the writing of the Constitution could equally be applied to the scientists who participated in in the Manhattan project. It was, Jefferson wrote, "an assembly of demigods."
The knowledge is not widespread. This is a myth.
Because they’re not trying to make the same bomb we made. On the nuclear bomb scale the ones we used to win WWII were pikers, very small yield, especially as a ratio to the amount of uranium used. They were kiloton bombs. Compared to the modern age of thermonuclear and hydrogen bombs they were muskets and everybody else is using M107s. By and large the countries trying to join the nuclear club are trying to skip ahead. Mostly because they know they won’t really get away with testing low yield early nukes. Scientific knowledge doesn’t really like you trying to skip ahead though. They’re trying to figure out trigonometry without ever bothering to pass pre-algebra first. It can be done, but it’s a hard road.
“A little scary that the US was able to enrich Uranium and build a bomb in less than 3 years.
Imagine how quickly the Iranians can do it with an instruction manual and ‘permission’ to acquire more centrifuges.”
I fear Iran probably already HAS the Bomb. They PROBABLY now HAVE the moderately enriched U-235 gun barrel type, too simple to need to test, as in fact the US never did. (Our Trinity test 07/16/1945 was the plutonium 239 implosion design, replicated and dropped at Nagasaki, but Hiroshima’s bomb was never judged necessary to test, as it needed no krytrons.) Iran can initiate a supercritical fission reaction with 20% enrichment levels, with the right quantity and geometry of U-235, although the device would be lighter and more compact with 90%+ enrichment. I would NOT trust them without immediate full, UNRESTRICTED inspections. What ELSE are they hiding? Sanctions forever until we get REAL inspections!
Israel likely has nuclear weapons as well but they practice a policy of deliberate ambiguity where they will neither confirm or deny possession of nukes.
South Africa had six completed but untested nuclear weapons, and a seventh under construction. These were dismantled prior to the end of Apartheid.
No. The Iranians want a truck-delivered bomb able to be driven into Tel Aviv(or nearby inside Palestinian territory, but not inspected by Israel.
They want to blow up Israel.
But the second weapon to be detonated will be over top of Mecca. The third over top of Medina.
And THAT threat is what Saudi Arabia fears. Not blowing up any millions of people in Israel.. But blowing up that rock in Mecca.
Dunno how good a ground blast would work. Wouldn’t be fun for any involved but nukes are set to airburst for a reason.
Later read.
It is widespread. All you need is 2 sub critical masses of fissionable material, an artillery tube, and some explosive. It won’t be pretty, but it will work.
Iran will have an atomic device inside of 2 years. Hell, the Norks and the Pakis developed them. Iran is technologically superior to both of them put together.
L
Ah, that makes sense, thanks.
At the same time, if they were in a rush, one would think they’d want to make some quickies that are the size of the Hiroshima bomb, no? They could destroy NY City with one of those, though it’d probably be at ground level (less effective than the 900’ high Hiroshima blast).
Point well taken, and thank you for clearing things up a bit.
At the same time, isn’t most of the “science” involved already done in Iran and from now it’s a matter of spinning a lot of centrifuges to purify the high-yield stuff?
Does it really take 10 years of spinning centrifuges to get the amount needed?
And if so, how did we do all the centrifuge spinning on relatively short order in 1943,44,45?
Sure they probably could. But those are kiloton bombs. They couldn’t even destroy 1 borough of NY with one of those, not even a big chunk of one. Primary blast radius for Hiroshima was a mile, but it was also a mostly wooden city, and brick buildings in the radius survived. In a brick and steel place like NYC, especially with a ground burst, it’s really not going to do much real damage. Psychological damage would be the biggest effect, and exactly what Iran wants to avoid, that would get us revved back up for more than long enough to kick their butts.
Here:
http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/
You can check out the results (it even defaults to NYC), though they’re just in pure circles and with ground bursts especially that’s not entirely accurate. It’ll give you a good feel for it. Nukes have a much bigger reputation than their actual effectiveness, which is exactly what the best armed countries on the planet want. Not that they’re not nasty, they just aren’t AS massive as people tend to think.
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