[MJY1288]

Boot Hill: Thanks again for the clearification, I've always taken the position that it's better to remain silent and thought a fool, than to speak up and remove all doubt. And that's why I didn't challenge the claims made by palmer, I had my doubt's, but I wasn't informed enough to speak on the subject. Thanks to you and your sources, I am now.

palmer: I would imagine you would like to defend or explain your statements, I will wait until you do before I respond to the apparent disionformation you posted

[Boot Hill]

MJY1288 says:   " I had my doubt's, but I wasn't informed enough to speak on the subject. "

It was the honorable thing to do.

Regards,

Boot Hill

[palmer]

I'm sorry, I posted in haste without checking my facts. I assumed there would be a large amount of radiation coming from nuclear materials in sufficient quantity and proximity to form a critical mass. Then I assumed that all we would need is high efficiency gamma ray detectors similar to those used for astronomy.

My critical error was not realizing how few high energy photons are produced by the nuclear material, only a few photons per second per gram of material. Those photons are scattered in all directions so the signal will decrease with the sqaure of the distance. So detection not only requires close proximity, but it takes time (5 or 10 minutes) to gather enough photons to make a measurement.

Here's a paper with a practical example: gamma ray measurements of a soviet cruise missile warhead. The bottom line: the detector has to be within at most 20 meters of the warhead.