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.
THURSDAY NOVEMBER 15 2001
Deadly secrets left by fleeing Taleban
FROM ANTHONY LOYD IN KABUL
THE al-Qaeda men had left in a hurry on Monday night. They took with them their weapons and explosives but there was not time to load all the documents on their vehicles and in their haste they allowed the tops of the bundled sheets to spill across the corridor floors.
Someone had tried to burn this residue but the flames were weak and left the job unfinished.
Another unknown person scattered anti-personnel mines across the ground near the house, either by accident or intent. Then they fled.
When looking through the documents they left behind, it becomes apparent that most are no more than the bomb-making literature one would expect a terrorist organisation to possess. It is only when the neat, handwritten notes of a mathematician or scientist turn their focus to the detailed studies of mach speeds, conical areas, liquid rocket fuel and plutonium — atomic number 94 — that the hair begins to crawl on the back of your neck.
For whatever other dark business may have occurred in the al-Qaeda safe houses in Kabul, a lot of time and effort had been devoted within them to researching the creation of an atomic device.
There is an intelligence vacuum in the city at present. A few “spooks”, American and British, have moved into the capital and are doubtless going about their work, but none had so far visited the four al-Qaeda houses I saw yesterday. Each had been ransacked by Afghan civilians and Mujahidin in the wake of the Arabs’ fast departure on Monday night, but looters were interested only in the stocks of medicine and clothes left behind. The Afghans have more immediate appetites than carrying away literature and documents written in the alien languages of Arabic, German, Urdu and English.
I was taken to the first house, a two-storey building in the Karta Parwan quarter of the city, by a British cameraman familar with Kabul after years of experience in the country. It lay opposite an induction centre for Pakistani and Arab recruits coming to Afghanistan to learn their trade.
“Two years ago the Talebs moved some Arabs, Egyptians and Pakistanis to the house after the induction centre became too full,” Wakil, 46, a former policeman who lived next door, said.
“There were about 60 or 70 of them who lived here. At any one time there would be up to 20 while the others rotated through the front lines. They kept to themselves and were not friendly but I knew their watchman, an Afghan named Baten Shah. He used to tell me a bit about them.”
The documents lay strewn around the top floor, along with copies of aircraft magazines advertising flying instruction manuals, navigation instruments and flight charts.
There was a lot of propaganda and religious material embossed with symbols, including Islamic flags smashing through the Union Flag and Stars and Stripes, and the blackened claws of Israel, America, Britain, France and the United Nations ripping at a map of Saudi Arabia.
Lying among Canadian passport applications, journals, letters and English language courses, the majority of the al-Qaeda documents were simple guerrilla instructions on the use of infantry weapons and manufacture of bombs, as well as studies of American special forces, the SAS and Western hostage-rescue techniques.
The majority of the bomb-making instructions were easy to understand and used domestic items, including Alka Seltzer tubes, condoms, wax, mousetraps and cigarettes as contact switches to initiate charges.
These sound innocuous enough, but the notes included details on how to put the items to use so that a victim opening a book or turning a door handle would be blown to pieces.
There was an abundance of material related to bridge and road blowing, and some sinister notes examining the air-conditioning systems of apartment buildings.
The handful of local Afghans and street children who were idly looting the first house were so oblivious of its significance that when I asked if they knew any other houses where Arab fighters had lived they were happy to show me. Of the four buildings I explored, two in Karte Parwan and two further east, one had been lived in by Chechens, one by Yemenis (allegedly including family members of Osama bin Laden), and two by a mixture of Arabs and Pakistanis.
Even the diagrams of “E” cell microcoulometer and electrochemical delay switches seemed banal beside the physics and chemistry manuals devoted to molecular matter, the thermal expansion of gases and fluid pressures.
Yet it was the studies of rocket fuel, thrust capabilities and concept models of a missile with radar stealth ability and load capacity to a speed of mach 2.4 that were most unnerving for the layman. Some were written on headed paper from the Hotel Grand in Peshawar, others from the Pearl Continental in Karachi; most on blank paper or in log books. They were extensive, precise, extremely detailed: the work of a man or men with highly advanced scientific and design understanding.
The vernacular quickly spun out of my comprehension but there were phrases through the mass of chemical symbols and physics jargon that anyone could understand, including notes on how the detonation of TNT compresses plutonium into a critical mass producing a nuclear chain reaction and eventually a thermo-nuclear reaction.
This was only what was left behind by frightened men escaping the advance of the Mujahidin. The sensitive material is still with them.
The basic principles of both fission and fusion weapons are well known. You can probably get detailed diagrams in your local library. Tom Clancy has described them both in great detail in one of his books - The Sum of All Fears, as I recall.
But having this information doesn't mean that you can make one.
And furthermore, you don't need "fissile material" to make a "dirty bomb", only a nuclear one.
Doncha' wish that these so-called journalists had spent a little more time studying physics and a little less time smoking dope in college?
and bump too.
THURSDAY NOVEMBER 15 2001
Experts doubt nuclear ability of terrorist cell
BY MARK HENDERSON, SCIENCE CORRESPONDENT
THE notes left in an al-Qaeda base in Kabul suggest that Osama bin Laden may be working on a fission bomb similar to that dropped on Nagasaki, though experts said it was unlikely that he had the capacity to build one.
Fat Man, the Nagasaki bomb, was a plutonium implosion device, in which TNT is used to compress a radioactive core to the point at which it turns critical and produces a thermo-nuclear reaction. The al-Qaeda notes describe the construction of such a device.
The principles involved are neither complicated nor secret but it remains extremely difficult to use them to construct a viable warhead.
Al-Qaeda would first have to acquire at least eight kilogrammes of plutonium, and would also need scientists with more expertise than is found in the notes. Construction of a bomb requires very sophisticated facilities, including precision machine tools of a sort that they are unlikely to have access to in Afghanistan.
Most nuclear experts believe that construction of such a bomb is impossible without state support, and even Saddam Hussein, who had scientists with the know-how, plutonium and machine tools supplied by Matrix Churchill, failed to construct one.
John Large, a nuclear consultant, said the plans clearly pointed to an implosion bomb. “This is the Fat Man model, in which a piece of plutonium the size of an orange is surrounded by a beryllium sphere and wrapped in conventional explosive,” he said. “The whole thing is the size of a football.
“The TNT explosion is directed by lenses to coalesce and compress the core to the size of a pea, turning it critical. The basic mechanics are simple and well known, but the key to successful nuclear weapons technology is precision of timing and assembly.
“You need to synchronise the explosives incredibly finely, and the design of the lenses must be very precise indeed.”
The International Atomic Energy Agency, the nuclear watchdog, believes the risk of a terrorist group building a nuclear device is slim. “While we cannot exclude the possibility that terrorists could get hold of some nuclear material, it is highly unlikely they could use it to manufacture and detonate a nuclear bomb,” said Mohamed ElBaradei, its Director General. “Still, no scenario is impossible.”
Dr Large said the discovery was still worrying. “Even if they can’t build a nuclear bomb, they are toying with the idea of using radioactive material, and this might suggest they are also considering a radiological dispersion device or ‘dirty bomb’,” he said. In a dirty bomb, nuclear waste is wrapped around conventional explosives. It could kill dozens of people, contaminate a large area and trigger panic.
With this information, we now must kill every Taliban member, al-Qaeda member, those who have financed and provided shelter to these Islamic terrorists and of course OBL, Omar, their scientists and the rest of the Islamic Terrorists in other Islamic states. We must not leave a single one of these Islamic asps to plot more violence on us!
It has been very obvious that GW and Tony have known about this for a long time. They have shown this data to the other leaders of the free world, and those leaders have joined our war on terrorism!
Time to declare war on al-Qaeda. Then kill all of these people and lock up all of their supporters in the US, the UK and Europe. Then try their supporters for sedition!
When one of our home grown supporters of OBL on the left or right supports OBL and the Islamic terrorists, it is time to take them out of the terror game that they are backing!
You are either with us or against us. No polite discussions or blurry exceptions!
They planned to kill as many of our children and grandchildren as possible. Now it is time to kill all who are associated with these Islamic terrorists who would use weapons of mass destruction on us! This is our Jihad, now!
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