"Kill them, kill them all"
Posted on 09/08/2002 11:41:52 PM PDT by kattracks
Edited on 07/12/2004 3:57:00 PM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
Vice President Richard B. Cheney said yesterday that Saddam Hussein is "actively and aggressively" trying to build a nuclear bomb, and two key senators disclosed that U.S. officials have warned the Iraqi dictator that he and his country face "annihilation" if he deploys a weapon of mass destruction.
(Excerpt) Read more at washtimes.com ...
"Kill them, kill them all"
Building # 100,001 is much easier than building #1.
Then once you've got it, you still need to know how to work on a metal (Uranium and Plutonium are metals) that is extraordinarily brittle and hot, yet needs to be machined to tolerances more demanding than aircraft parts. How many nations on this planet can even manufacture mere aircraft parts? Not many.
Actually most aircraft parts have extremely sloppy tolerances. I know first hand that Cessnas will happily chug along with ice or goose sized holes on the wings. Unless you mean the tolerances for jet engine parts. Mass producing is hard, yes, but any decent physics grad. student can do .0005" without much trouble. Furthermore, I wouldn't be surprised if pre-machined parts are on the market. Everything else is in Moscow. I saw CD ROM's of the Moscow police databases for sale on the street. Officier's names, home addresses, case info.
Refining U235 is a nasty process, and getting Plutonium requires a breeder reactor. Then once you've got it, you still need to know how to work on a metal (Uranium and Plutonium are metals) that is extraordinarily brittle and hot, yet needs to be machined to tolerances more demanding than aircraft parts. How many nations on this planet can even manufacture mere aircraft parts? Not many.
Why refine? Russia and Central Asia are awash in these materials.
Then once you've got all of that figured out, you've got to have electronics that can withstand intense radiation, and in at least one case, must be extraordinarily well-timed.
Either half of Iraq has kidney stones or they have been buying medical equipment to scavenge electronics for a plutonium implosion device. A U-235 gun requires no electronics at all. You could build one that employed a flint-lock if you had a perverse sense of techno-irony.
Oh, and you have a fixed amount of time to use it, 'les the natural decay (read: half-life) of the uranium, tritium, or plutonium reduces the fissionable mass below the critical mass level,
Obviously you overengineer for a long shelf life. Bio's are obviously readily available (ask the anthrax mailer) and can be employed without the restraint the mystery man mailer has exhibited.
Trouble is (for them, not us), they're building #1. While it may well be based on plans provided by an outside source, as al-Qaida found out, you better know where those plans are coming from.
(From Southack)Then once you've got it, you still need to know how to work on a metal (Uranium and Plutonium are metals) that is extraordinarily brittle and hot, yet needs to be machined to tolerances more demanding than aircraft parts. How many nations on this planet can even manufacture mere aircraft parts? Not many.
Actually most aircraft parts have extremely sloppy tolerances. I know first hand that Cessnas will happily chug along with ice or goose sized holes on the wings. Unless you mean the tolerances for jet engine parts. Mass producing is hard, yes, but any decent physics grad. student can do .0005" without much trouble. Furthermore, I wouldn't be surprised if pre-machined parts are on the market. Everything else is in Moscow. I saw CD ROM's of the Moscow police databases for sale on the street. Officier's names, home addresses, case info.
Depending on the design, tolerances are somewhat fungible. Of course, the looser the tolerance, the larger the bomb must be in order to work.
Regarding working uranium/plutonium, they ARE extremely hard to work. Not only are they brittle/hot (and in the case of plutonium) toxic, but they are EXTREMELY dense (very hard to cut) and their densities are variable (under certain non-explosive conditions, a non-critical mass of uranium/plutonium will reach critical mass).
I don't know where the reference to Moscow police databases come from, though.
(More Southack)Refining U235 is a nasty process, and getting Plutonium requires a breeder reactor.
Why refine? Russia and Central Asia are awash in these materials
And there's honor amongst thieves? Ask al-Qaida just how trustworthy their nuclear sources were. From what I remember, the Russian Mafiya gave them some materials that was just radioactive enough to do a few clicks on the ole' Geiger counter.
There's not all that much fissionable uranium that is naturally-occuring (and no natural plutonium). In order to make a functional nuclear device, you need somewhere near 99%-pure uranium or plutonium (and that 99% had better be the right isotope). (More Southack)Then once you've got all of that figured out, you've got to have electronics that can withstand intense radiation, and in at least one case, must be extraordinarily well-timed.
Either half of Iraq has kidney stones or they have been buying medical equipment to scavenge electronics for a plutonium implosion device. A U-235 gun requires no electronics at all. You could build one that employed a flint-lock if you had a perverse sense of techno-irony.
But you can't load a uranium gun bomb onto a missile and have anything resembling a decent yield. Without a reliable and timely detonation, the remainder of nuclear weapons designs are nothing more than radioactive firecrackers with not all-that-much conventional explosives to do serious damage.
Or, Guns Up!
...or French, or Russian (stolen), or Chinese, or Pakistani? We could get a regular Vegas handicap line going here.
The USSR refined enough of both for thousands of devices. These materials are now guarded by starving lice ridden Russian soldiers too young/malnourished to shave.
But you can't load a uranium gun bomb onto a missile and have anything resembling a decent yield. Without a reliable and timely detonation, the remainder of nuclear weapons designs are nothing more than radioactive firecrackers with not all-that-much conventional explosives to do serious damage.
Little Boy's design was so straightforward it was never tested. No timing is required unless you want to add neutron triggering for more yield. 10-20 ktons is pretty much a "firecracker" by modern standards but is more than enough to jack up an urban area. No missle required, thousands of cargo containers enter the US everyday from around the world. If we can't even get a pea shooter in a cockpit in 365 days, how long will it take to get Geiger counters at all of our ports.
Bio's are simpler, more available, and more dangerous. I wouldn't be surprised by the democratization of u-235 guns as well.
The lady sure knows how to turn a phrase.
The Second Amendment...
America's Original Homeland Security !!
Molon Labe !!
Something just dawned on me. Maybe it is the 'N' word that has our "allies" backpeddling from supporting us in the slapdown of Saddam. Perhaps behind the scenes our people have informed our "allies" that we will not have a protracted urban military campaign in Iraq because we will be going in with tactical nukes first, against the manufacturing facilities of WMD. That would explain also why we have such a low number of ground troops in the theater so near 'WhupAss' Day.
Yeah, and we'll send them Jerry Jones and the Cowboys and we'll keep the Texans.
We've had Geiger counters (and other detection devices) in our major ports (and other places) for years, and since 9/11 we've even been giving hand-held detectors to Coast Guard and police all along both coasts.
Nonsense. Bio's are useless as weapons of war, more complicated to work with than U-235 gun-type nukes, and far less dangerous.
The only thing that bio's do is scare little old ladies who don't know any better. Heck, AIDs doesn't even scare little old ladies anymore, much less West Nile or anthrax.
I seem to remember smallpox pretty much cleared North America for the settlers.Both Western European and Chinese civilizations were massively destabilized by pathogens several times in their histories. The lefties have done a pretty good number on Africa with malaria by impededing their access to DDT.
Seen what their doing with mousepox recently ? You can do the same with smallpox.
No one has ever demonstrated the cause of AIDS in any meaningful scientific way.
You're over-simplifying the ease of construction of this technology. It's simply NOT something that everyone is going to be able to build in their backyard.
Just consider the neutron generator required for the U-235 gun-type bomb. You've got to have Polonium for that generator, and that's one of the most rare elements on Earth.
Moreover, the half-life of Polonium is only 138 days, which severely limits deployment times and methods. Consider that a team that wants to walk into a country or ship such a device on a slow boat could easily use up 60 of those days. Thus, the idea that such nukes could be "sleepers" (i.e. buried or hidden for years) in our own country, is really out of the question.
Gun-Triggered Fission Bomb
The simplest way to bring the subcritical masses together is to make a gun that fires one mass into the other. A sphere of U-235 is made around the neutron generator and a small bullet of U-235 is removed. The bullet is placed at the one end of a long tube with explosives behind it, while the sphere is placed at the other end. A barometric-pressure sensor determines the appropriate altitude for detonation and triggers the following sequence of events:
Little Boy was this type of bomb and had a 14.5-kiloton yield (equal to 14,500 tons of TNT) with an efficiency of about 1.5 percent. That is, 1.5 percent of the material was fissioned before the explosion carried the material away.
True, but that disease is still militarily insignificant. Africa still stands just as before, with the same military dispositions. Heck, people can even be cured of Malaria. Witness Chris Mathews.
Leave biological devices for the little old ladies to worry about. At best they spread little more than fear.
I'm not worried about everybody. I'm concerned about all the pissed off middle eastern grad. students I used to study physics with.
I'm concerned about the tens of thousands of unemployed Russian Biopreparat scientists.
You need 10-20 bright, resourcefull people and perhaps 50-100 million bucks.
Not all that rare these days.
And please don't call me gloomy. I'm just offering my view of the future of warfare. Its all about bang for the buck.
Obviously there is more than one way to generate neutrons.
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