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.
I think there was a BBC (not sure) report on the 12/13th of November, just as Kabul fell. In the report, NA soldiers took the reporters to a Kabul house that was full of documents, bombs, mines, guns, etc. One of the documents had a business card attached to it, the company was CANADIAN and was in the flight simulator business. The person's name was islamic but I didn't catch the company name. Anyone happen to have/seen this clip??
If it were a realistic possibility, it would be nothing to joke about. But I believe the chances that OBL has a workable device are quite remote.
That's my studied opinion. I hope I am right.
Clymer Post?
I would guess you are profoundly frustrated over the failure of the West to collapse at the stroke of midnight on January 1, 2000. Hope springs eternal.
That is my concern. If he truely does have access to millions of dollars, there are countries that have what he would need and would sell to him in a nano-second.
You can also depend on something being planned VERY different from anything he says.
While our attention is on ObL what is Iraq doing? They need to be watched very carefully.
OK, this proves it, reporters are just stupid. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were about 15Kt, not 1t. And I doubt these suitcase nukes would be .5t. IIRC, our smallest tacticals are about .5 Kt.
If these suitcase nukes really are .5t, then... BIG F'N DEAL! OOO, they might get to put another SMALL HOLE in the side of a FRIGATE! We're DOOMED!
This is backwards. The plutonium-239 is arrayed in sub-critical segments around a beryllium/polonium pellet. The entire assembly is encased in a tamper that, in the Nagasaki bomb was made from U-238.
The conventional explosive segments -- TNT in Fat Man -- that drive the plutonium toward the core have to be detonated within a few nanoseconds of each other. The entire reaction from trigger to fission to explosion requires only about 560 nanoseconds.
Yep.
Saddam is now MUCH MORE dangerous;
he HAS the Nukes and other WMDs.
This is merely information they left behind and made a half-*ssed effort to destroy. They don't care if we know and they know that we know anyhow. The Pakistani nuclear scientist are the key.
Surrey business card found in Kabul
Salim Jiwa
The Province
Wednesday, November 14, 2001
The discovery of documents in the Afghanistan home of a member of al-Qaida -- Osama bin Laden's terror group -- has renewed interest among U.S. intelligence agencies in the activities of two former Surrey residents.
Reports from Kabul yesterday said journalists found a business card containing the Surrey address and the name Amr Mohamed Hamed in a home abandoned by a member of al-Qaida. Also discovered was the address of a company identified as 4-U-Enterprises Ltd. on 135th Street in Surrey.
The ransacked Kabul hideout also contained documents relating to flight training and flight simulation. It is not clear whether the training documents are linked to Hamed or his business partner and fellow terrorist Essam Hafez Marzouk, who also lived in Surrey prior to mid-1998.
A 1999 Province investigation found that Marzouk was a trainer for bin Laden and had lived in Surrey before his arrest in Egypt after being linked to the terror group Al Jihad. He was sentenced to 15 years of hard labour.
Muslim community sources told The Province at the time that Hamed was killed in a bin Laden camp when then U.S. president Bill Clinton unleashed a hail of cruise missiles on al-Qaida bases in retaliation for the East African embassy bombings in 1998.
Hamed and Marzouk were listed as directors of 4-U-Enterprises Ltd. when the company was founded in April 1998, shortly before the two left Canada.
Canadian authorities have conducted an exhaustive investigation of both Marzouk and Hamed and their friends but have yet to find any links to any terrorist plots in Canada.
A BBC reporter who entered the home in Kabul found Hamed's business card among other documents.
sjiwa@pacpress.southam.ca
You just broke the 11th commandment of Free Republic. You implied that the Chinese were not guilty of something. Get ready for the flames.
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