eeeee-haw!
Posted on 07/07/2002 12:44:10 AM PDT by JohnHuang2
You may suppose that last September the world saw the worst-ever act of terror. Wrong! The British – with our assistance – deliberately created a firestorm over Dresden, Germany, on the eve and early morning hours of St. Valentine's Day, 1945. That was worse.
You may suppose the world first saw a mushroom-shaped cloud over Hiroshima. Wrong again. The mushroom-shaped cloud over Dresden could be seen for more than a hundred miles.
We deliberately turned the medieval city of Dresden into a blast furnace. The British bombers dropped almost a million small incendiary bomblets that night, starting hundreds of thousands of small fires. American bombers dropped thousands of tons of explosives the next day. The super-hot gases of combustion from all those fires rose, creating a columnar updraft to the upper atmosphere. The resultant low-pressure area at the columnar base caused air to be sucked in, surface winds exceeding several hundred miles per hour, feeding more oxygen to the furnace.
Why did the Brits do it? The war in Europe had already been won. Germany was in ruins. Dresden had thus far escaped bombing, but for good reason. Dresden was in no sense a military target. Hence, the sole purpose of the fire-raids on Dresden was to terrorize the millions of Germans who weren't in Dresden. Hundreds of thousands who were there – many of them refugees, wounded German soldiers and British prisoners of war – were incinerated.
A few months later, we dropped Little Boy on Hiroshima – also not a military target – in order to terrorize millions of Japanese. Because Hiroshima was largely constructed of rice-paper and bamboo, the firestorms – and casualties – caused by one nuke were comparable to what it took almost a million incendiary bombs to accomplish at Dresden.
That's what makes a nuke the terrorist's weapon of choice. With something like Little Boy, he doesn't need thousands of bombers and millions of incendiary bombs. Of course, your terrorist probably couldn't create much of a firestorm over Manhattan if he detonated Little Boy at Ground Zero. Not much of Manhattan is constructed of rice-paper and bamboo. So, your terrorist probably couldn't expect to kill as many people in Manhattan as were killed at Dresden or Hiroshima. But his mushroom-shaped cloud would certainly get the attention of folks in Connecticut and New Jersey.
Where would an Islamic terrorist get a Little Boy – an unsophisticated, easy-to-construct, highly-enriched uranium bomb? Well, not from Saddam Hussein. He doesn't have nukes. Nor – contrary to what the warhawks have implied – does he have the HEU makings. But Gen. Musharraf has dozens of HEU nukes in Pakistan – many more sophisticated than Little Boy. And what is more important, he has the HEU makings for many more.
Now, nation-states having nukes – including Pakistan – probably know whether or not any of their nukes are missing. All you have to do is count. But some nation-states having the makings for nukes may not know whether any HEU is missing.
Establishing and operating an effective cradle-to-grave fissile Materials Protection, Control and Accounting system is no slam-dunk. The MPC&A system the Russians inherited from the Soviet Union was poor. Other successor states – such as Kazakhstan – inherited practically no MPC&A system at all.
That is why the MPC&A assistance provided to nation-states of the former Soviet Union by the various Nunn-Lugar-Domenici acts has been – and continues to be – so important. The recent $20 billion Bush-Putin agreement – announced at the G-8 Summit at Calgary – properly continues to focus on cooperative U.S.-Russian cradle-to-grave MPC&A of Soviet-era fissile materials, all of it subject to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty full-scope safeguards and physical-protection regime.
What about Pakistan? Pakistan is not an NPT signatory, and hence is not fully subject to the NPT regime. Sen. Lugar reportedly plans to introduce legislation that would authorize a U.S.-Russian effort to cooperatively assist the Pakistanis to establish an effective cradle-to-grave MPC&A system.
What about Iraq? Iraq is an NPT signatory and is fully subject to the NPT regime. As of January, the International Atomic Energy Agency could report that Saddam has never produced appreciable amounts of HEU on his own. Terrorists can't get nukes from Saddam until Saddam first gets his hands on the HEU he needs to make them. So when you hear a warhawk say we've got to invade Iraq because of reports that Saddam has provided Islamic terrorists with "weapons of mass destruction," you'll know it's most likely a crock of wheat smut.
eeeee-haw!
Are you insinuating that Israeli nuclear weapons can fall into the hands of Islamic terrorists somehow? Too much Tom Clancy in your coffee...
B.S. not that easy to construct. You can't just take a chunk of TNT and whittle it with your pocket knife to the right geometry. Setting it off is an even greater technical obstacle, with timing in the nano second range necessary to achieve critical mass. Amature attempts to make a fision bomb, would result in nothing more than a dirty bomb.
Perhaps Prather should ask you.
Regards
J.R.
BTW someone told me they moved or are moving the "civilian version" museam off Wyoming Drive on Kirtland AFB to down near the old town museam location in Albuquerque ??? True/false ??
Stay Safe !
They moved the museum into the old REI building down near Rio Grande and Mountain, all the outdoor exhibits (missiles and planes) are still at the old site on KAFB. They are going to build a permanent site at Baloon Fiesta park.
Take care, Slim
Yeah, but (assuming Tijeras_Slim and I are recalling properly) that was the Fat Man bomb that ended up being used on Nagasaki. They were two quite different sorts of bombs.
Well, they still are I guess. Heh.
Nonetheless, it is well to bear in mind that Dwight Eisenhower and Curtis LeMay, who was generally viewed as being among the most hawkish of U.S. commanders, opposed the use of the atom bomb in 1945, both believing that, in LeMay's words, a few more conventional bombings would have sufficed to "bring Japan to her knees".
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