Posted on 11/16/2001 1:11:24 PM PST by blam
THURSDAY NOVEMBER 15 2001
Bin Laden's nuclear secrets found in al-Qaeda's Kabul safe houses
FROM ANTHONY LOYD IN KABUL
Times reporter finds blueprint for 'Nagasaki bomb'
Singed files left by fleeing terrorists
OSAMA BIN LADEN’S al-Qaeda network held detailed plans for nuclear devices and other terrorist bombs in one of its Kabul headquarters.
The Times discovered the partly burnt documents in a hastily abandoned safe house in the Karta Parwan quarter of the city. Written in Arabic, German, Urdu and English, the notes give detailed designs for missiles, bombs and nuclear weapons. There are descriptions of how the detonation of TNT compresses plutonium into a critical mass, sparking a chain reaction, and ultimately a thermonuclear reaction.
Both President Bush and British ministers are convinced that bin Laden has access to nuclear material and Mr Bush said earlier this month that al-Qaeda was “seeking chemical, biological and nuclear weapons”.
The discovery of the detailed bomb-making instructions, along with studies into chemical and nuclear devices, confirms the West’s worst fears and raises the spectre of plans for an attack that would far exceed the September 11 atrocities in scale and gravity.
Nuclear experts say the design suggests that bin Laden may be working on a fission device, similar to Fat Man, the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. However, they emphasised that it was extremely difficult to build a viable warhead.
While the terrorists may not yet have the capability to build such weapons, their hopes of doing so are clear. One set of notes, written on headed notepaper from the Hotel Grand in Peshawar and dated April 26, 1998, says: “Naturally the explosive liquid has a very high mechanical energy which is translated into destructive force. “But it can be tamed, controlled and can be used as a useful propulsive fuel if certain methods are applied to it. A supersonic moving missile has a shock wave. That shock wave can be used to contain an external combustion behind the missile . . .”
The document was one of many found in two of four al-Qaeda houses which had been used by Arabs and Pakistanis and even reportedly by bin Laden himself. The houses — two in the Karta Parwan district and the others further to the east — were abandoned on Monday night as Taleban units and their allies fled the city in the face of the Northern Alliance advance.
Attempts had been made to burn the evidence, but many documents still remained. They included studies into the development of a kinetic energy supergun capable of firing chemical or nuclear warheads, external propulsion missiles, preliminary research on the creation of a thermonuclear device, as well as a multitude of instructions for making smaller bombs.
There were also studies into Western special forces’ hostage rescue techniques, phone numbers for industrial chemical and synthetic producers, flight manuals, aerodynamic research, and advanced physics and chemistry manuals.
The houses were checked after being identified by local people. Afghan looters had concentrated on removing more appetising objects, ignoring foreign language documents that were of no use to them.
Bin Laden has said it is his “religious duty” to obtain a nuclear bomb. In an interview with the Pakistani journalist Hamid Mir last week, he claimed that al-Qaeda had nuclear capability and said: “I wish to declare that if America used chemical or nuclear weapons against us then we may retort with chemical and nuclear weapons as deterrent." Intelligence agencies already have indirect evidence from defectors, middlemen and scientists of Bin Laden’s obsession with obtaining or producing a nuclear device.
Al-Qaeda agents are known to have spent more than £1 million trying to obtain enough fissile material to make a “dirty bomb” that, if detonated with TNT in a populous area, could kill thousands and contaminate it for decades.
Intelligence sources told The Times last month that bin Laden and al-Qaeda had acquired nuclear materials illegally from Pakistan. And at least ten Pakistani nuclear scientists have been contacted by agents for the Taleban and al-Qaeda in the past two years, according to reports.
The knowledge that bin Laden has components for a nuclear weapon is believed to lie behind the warnings from President Bush and Tony Blair that he would commit worse atrocities than the suicide assaults in America if he could.
The Prime Minister’s official spokesman said: “Bin Laden would have killed 600,000 people on September 11 if he could have done. This simply underlines again why he has to be stopped.
Golly gee whiz. The principle of the thing has been out in the open for decades. Tom Clancy gave a highly detailed description of a more advanced nuke in one of his books.
Seriously, I wonder if these Taliban clowns had something else up their sleeves.
They were stupid, yes, but they weren't idiots. They had to know we would come in there.
Can this be a 'plant' designed to make us thing they have nukes?
Ever see "Princess Bride"?
"That's what you expected me to do!"
Interesting that some of the material left behind was about aerodynamic research. But I best be quiet. Wouldn't want to upset the rationalists at FR.
The Times of London, that is. ;^)
All this strikes me as nothing more than boys with toys. Combine:
- a sexually inadequate younger sibling, with
- a raft of step-mothers, with
- a devotion to a violent political movement masquerading as a religion, with
- all the toys that oil can buy, and
... of course you have trouble.
Cut off the oil money and the whole movement will die.
Islamoterrorists will not fight for their beliefs.
Look at what the Taliban did when we pricked them ... look at what the Iraqis did.
They are paper tigers all, second only to the Chinese.
Put Iraq under trusteeship. Every Muslim nation, cult, mob, "street", nut, potentate, prince, Mullah(sp?), etc. will get in line Jack Flash.
Only money and toys matter to any of them. This religion thing is a sham.
Sheesh..it's amazing who can pass as an expert these days. I got very detailed drawings and descriptions of that device from my school library in sixth grade.
THURSDAY NOVEMBER 15 2001
Al-Qaeda's $1m hunt for atomic weapons
BY DANIEL MCGRORY
OSAMA BIN LADEN infamously described it as his “religious duty” to get his hands on a nuclear bomb, convinced that his enemies would think twice about attacking him or those he claimed to support if he had such a device. In his headquarters in Kabul in January 1999, he calmly announced during an interview: “It would be a sin for Muslims not to try to possess the weapons that would prevent the infidels from inflicting harm on Muslims.”
Intelligence services have no doubt that he has been as good as his word. For the past eight years, bin Laden’s agents have travelled the world, spending more than £1 million in trying to acquire the ultimate weapon of terror. What nobody can say for sure is how far they succeeded.
“We know about the failed deals, the double crosses and the bungled attempts,” one Western source said. “But what if they did get something?” There is evidence of bin Laden trying to manufacture his own crude bomb, and proof of how his lieutenants plotted to steal warheads from Pakistan. Only now, after the atrocities of September 11, have rival security agencies begun to pool their intelligence, and concluded that bin Laden had recently stepped up his nuclear quest.
The belief is that he was after radioactive material that could be packed with TNT, so when it detonated it would contaminate a densely populated area for decades — a “dirty” bomb.
He is in a race with others, Saddam Hussein included, to acquire some of the fissile material that has gone missing. Russia was forced to confess it has “mislaid” more than 300 “suitcase bombs” made before the fall of communism. These devices, designed to stop advancing troops, have a power equivalent to 1,000lb of conventional explosives, which is about half the size of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Russia made 3,000 of these, but in 1996, when Moscow tried to account for them, it realised how many were missing. The following year Russian and US intelligence reports revealed their suspicions that the Russian mafia had sold several of these devices to rogue regimes or terrorist groups, including al-Qaeda.
Earlier this month, the International Atomic Energy Agency voiced its fears that bin Laden had got hold of some of the fissile materials for which it could not account. The Vienna-based agency has recorded 175 cases of trafficking in nuclear materials since 1993. Eighteen involved small amounts of highly enriched uranium or plutonium, the crucial material needed to make a nuclear bomb.
At least one of these cases directly involved a known al-Qaeda operative. Jamal Ahmed al-Fadl, who defected from al-Qaeda and helped to convict former colleagues for the 1998 bombing of US embassies in East Africa, says he tried to buy enriched uranium in Sudan. He claimed to have bought the materials for $1 million from a close associate of a senior army officer and says he was paid a £6,000 bonus by a delighted bin Laden. Mr al-Fadl concedes he had no way of knowing if the materials were authentic, but says they were sent to bin Laden’s training camps in Afghanistan.
A Bulgarian businessman says that he met bin Laden earlier this year after being asked to help to get hold of highly radioactive material. The businessman, a former intelligence officer, says he was offered £137,000 to set up an environmental company as front to buy nuclear waste, but refused. The following day he was visited by a Pakistani scientist who asked if he could buy spent nuclear fuel rods from the Kozlodui nuclear electricity plant in Bulgaria.
The al-Qaeda intermediary, who said he was a chemical engineer, is one of several Pakistani scientists questioned since September 11 about their links with bin Laden. Two others were said to have built a flour mill in Afghanistan which intelligence experts suspected hid a more sinister purpose and so was high on the list of targets for the US airstrikes.
In September 1998 Mamdouh Mahmud Salim, alleged to be a high-level aide to bin Laden, was arrested in Germany after trying to buy low-grade nuclear reactor fuel. A Pakistani intelligence agent working for al-Qaeda, named as Mohammed Abbas, placed an order with an undercover US agent posing as an arms dealer for six nuclear switches and a quantity of plutonium after announcing over lunch in New York that he meant to “kill all Americans”.
And you picked a doozy! Good one!
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