Posted on 09/28/2002 2:12:10 PM PDT by Diogenesis
SMOKING GUN LINKS URANIUM to GERMANY WHILE IRAQ's PR Ritter Stokes Islamic Hate.
This is a MUST-SEE.
======== Turkey ===========
In Turkey, captured weapons-grade urainum ~33 pounds.
Detained two men from an east European country, cost ~5 million dollars
========== London =====
Meanwhile in London, Scott Ritter, former American, inflames one hundred thousand.
No doubt about it. If it can be proven that Ritter has been paid off to lie to the American public about Iraq's WMD program, he should suffer the suitable penalty for treason -- death.
As a man of science, Zawahiri was interested in the use of biological and chemical warfare. In a memo from April of 1999, he observed that "the destructive power of these weapons is no less than that of nuclear weapons," and proposed that Islamic Jihad conduct research into biological and chemical agents. "Despite their extreme danger, we only became aware of them when the enemy drew our attention to them by repeatedly expressing concern that they can be produced simply," he noted. He pored over medical journals to research the subject, and he met with an Egyptian scientist in Afghanistan, Medhat Mursi al-Sayed, whose Jihad name was Abu Khabab. C.I.A. officials believe that Khabab prepared the explosives for the bomb that hit the Egyptian Embassy in Islamabad. Khabab supervised elementary tests of nerve gas; satellite photos purportedly show corpses of dogs scattered about one of the camps near Tora Bora, and Al Qaeda training videos recently acquired by CNN show that poison gas had been tested on dogs. "We knew from hundreds of different sources that Al Qaeda was interested in biological and chemical weapons," says Richard A. Clarke, who was the Clinton Administration's national coördinator for counterterrorism in the National Security Council and is now in charge of cybersecurity for the N.S.C. Clarke told me that in one of the camps human volunteers, wearing protective clothing, were exposed to chemicals in tests similar to ones that the U.S. Army has conducted. During the invasion of Afghanistan, American forces discovered a factory under construction, near Kandahar, that intelligence officials say was to be used for the production of anthrax. A sample of anthrax powder was reportedly found in Zawahiri's house in Afghanistan. According to reports from Israel and Russia, bin Laden paid Chechen mobsters millions of dollars in cash and heroin to obtain radiological "suitcase" bombs left over from the Soviets. He declared in November, 2001, "We have chemical and nuclear weapons," and vowed to use them "if America used them against us."
I was just wondering the same thing, and I'll be tuning in to Tony Snow tomorrow to find out (at 7:00AM PST).
The past guides us in the decisions we make tomorrow....I decide NEVER AGAIN!
http://www.fas.org/bwc/news/anthraxreport.htm
This fas.org webpage details the facts surrounding the anthrax attack which our nation sustained nearly one year ago. The dates were interesting reading, as well as the facts surrounding some of the threats.
Originally, based on discussion around Free Republic, I had concluded that the anthrax attack could not have been launched by a fellow American citizen. However, many of the scientific clues substantiate the index of suspicion that a person in the US did the attacking.
It's very interesting reading. FAS seems to suggest that the perpetrator was an American. I'm not so convinced because if the anthrax was US in origin, where did he store the stuff? It's not an innocuous amount of stuff to store. FAS does appear to agree that the source was a government financed source, though perhaps not US.
the largest mercury switch, is similar in shape but not nearly as preciscely formed inside as these tube things seized were. I have nothing but guesses at this point.
Damn the terrorists.
I doubt that guy, whoever he is, has any more circulation problems.
U-238 can be gradually enriched into plutonium in a special "breeder" reactor, absorbing particles emitting by a running reactor (actually, a tiny portion absorbs neutrons and then undergoes beta decay, emitting electrons and turning into plutonium - left running long enough this builds up and can be extracted from the remaining U-238 around it). But in itself it is not useful for bombs.
When the article says "weapons grade uranium", that means a sample of uranium that is around 90% U-235, seperated out of a much larger amount of uranium ore. The seperation process is quite difficult, and is the step the Iraqi's have not managed to solve on a large scale themselves. So U-238 getting to Iraq, while obviously not helpful, doesn't get them a bomb or solve the problem holding them up. Enough U-235 of high enough purity does. Or plutonium.
I hope that helps.
U-235 - the component of weapons grade uranium that makes it effective for bombs, by allowing a rapid enough reaction to build up to a chain reaction - is about 10 times as radioactive as U-238. U-235 has a half-life on the order of hundreds of millions of years. U-238 has a half-life on the order of 4 billion years.
So the size of the sample and a measurement of the level of radioactivity combined can tell you roughly how much U-235 there is, compared to U-238. You put in X U-238 and Y U-235, X + Y equals this much material, rate(238) times X plus rate(235) times Y equals this much measured radioactivity, solve your 2 equations for X and Y. Not hard.
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