Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

To: Nogbad
Sorry, correction 15 KILO 700 gram heavy uranium inside.
59 posted on 09/28/2002 2:52:10 PM PDT by Nogbad
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 57 | View Replies ]


To: Nogbad; Dog; Woodman; Robert_Paulson2
Sorry correction again:

Uranium weighing 15 Kilos 700 grams inside (the cylinder).

My Turkish isn't that great, and I need a dictionary, which slows me down.
My wife can do a better translation when she gets home (an hour from now).

68 posted on 09/28/2002 2:59:37 PM PDT by Nogbad
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 59 | View Replies ]

To: Nogbad
Any engineers care to conjecture about the 15.7 kg mass?

This is approximately 34.5 lbs.

Just found another interesting Google hit

http://www.pointofhonor.com/articles/suitcase.htm

QUOTING the page:

A man portable nuclear weapon would be the size of an average piece of luggage weighing between seventy and one hundred fifty pounds. Much of that weight is probably some sort of radiation shielding to prevent detection and to protect the people deploying the weapon. The weapon would have some sort of integrated explosive. Most likely, the traditional safety devices will not be present due to weight considerations. The fissile material is probably Plutonium in order to provide a higher yield from a smaller physical warhead. There would have to be an arming mechanism, perhaps a key or a series of buttons.

Such a device might have a yield in the .2 to .5 kiloton range (although, recent reports suggest a 10 kiloton). Not enough to bust a city, but certainly adequate for strategic targets like listening posts, regional air traffic control centers, major power plants, hydro-electric dams, large highway interchanges or strategic locks and dams.

Rumors suggest such weapons were designed, manufactured and perhaps deployed. The likely American sites where these weapons are hidden appear to be Montana, Brainerd, Minnesota and upstate New York. The most persistent rumors imply the KGB in the mid to late seventies ordered the production of at least 132 weapons, and may have sanctioned the production of as many as 300 weapons. Official statements acknowledging the existence of such weapons surface from time to time, they are generally followed by murkier denials from the same people.

The Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti — Committee for State Security – KGB was a combination paramilitary force and the Russian version of the Central Intelligence Agency. The KGB is not remembered as a fraternal organization seeing to the needs of widows and orphans. The KGB was a vicious service that repressed its own civilian population and conducted exotic assassinations against defectors and western targets.

Is it conceivable that the procurement of nuclear weapons could take place outside the force structure of the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces? Suppose the rumors are true. The KGB Chairman in the late seventies was a man named Iurii I. Andropov. He later became the Communist Party Secretary and presided over the shoot down of Korean Airlines Flight 007 and the aggressive deployment of mobile missiles throughout Eastern Europe. It seems credible that Andropov’s KGB was capable of ordering the development of such weapons.

The weapons were most likely designed and developed at Arzamas-16. Arzamas-16 was a closed city from 1946 to 1996. This means it literally disappeared from Russian maps and its location was a state secret. It is still the premier Russian nuclear design lab and is the sister city to Los Alamos. For example, Andre Sakarov—the father of the hydrogen bomb worked at Arzamas-16.

The suitcase bomb is not the type of weapon that can be launched from a cannon, mounted on a missile or dropped from a bomber. It is not the kind of weapon conventional military forces would sponsor. It is a weapon fairly useless in a storage barracks somewhere in the Siberian wilderness, which leads us to the next uncomfortable conclusion: For a portable nuclear weapon to be useful, it would need to be close to its target. The targets were not inside the Soviet Union, but in Japan, South Korea, West Germany, France, England, Israel, Iran and America.

A better moniker would be the clandestine nuclear weapon. The delivery system is maybe two people and Chevy Nova. Seem improbable? Then ask yourself, how difficult would it be to move a small nuclear weapon across the Canadian or Mexican borders? If a weapon of this nature could easily moved across an open international border, it would effectively short circuit the billions invested in surveillance and detection systems.

81 posted on 09/28/2002 3:14:01 PM PDT by bonesmccoy
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 59 | View Replies ]

Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article


FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson