Posted on 12/14/2002 4:25:43 PM PST by TheErnFormerlyKnownAsBig
PAPER: Osama bin Laden has bought nuclear firepower from renegade KGB agents, Tony Blair and George Bush have been warned... Developing...
True, but it wasn't a boosted subcritcal device either. In fact it was a uranium device, using a gun type mechanism to ram two subcritical masses together to create a critical mass. They were so sure it would work, they never tested it before dropping one on Japan.
That would be quite a trick, having vaccum tubes splitting atoms in order to release their core neutrons instead of the electrons normally emitted by tubes, moreover, how do you get a fragile piece of glass to function inside of an exploding (the conventional first stage) bomb?
I agree with you. But that is the second reference to the use of a vaccuum tube I've seen. Moreover, the article implied that turning on the Vaccuum Tube was one of the FIRST steps, which is totally counterintuitive since the Manhattan Engineering District's near obsession was with premature release of Neutrons causing a 'fissle', i.e. the device blowing up before sufficient fuel was consumed to release total yield.
I read a book entitled Day of Trinity about thirty years ago about the Trinity test...and the author claimed that the construction of the initiator was the only thing still classified.
But Richard Rhodes [?] in his book The Making of the Atomic Bomb speculates as to its structure, and that Polonium, (the first element the Curies isolated) could have been used. This is indeed a short lived element.
Southack, if the Vaccuum Tube turned on first is accurate, perhaps the designers have solved the 'fissle' problem with explosive assembly of the 'critical mass' in situ.
I would be *HIGHLY* skeptical of any claims of an "anti-radiation drug".
It would take something akin to actual magic for there to ever be such a thing.
The best description of a dose of lethal radiation is a body-wide shotgun blast consisting of trillions of submicroscopic pellets. The "holes" are so tiny you can't see them, but there are so many that your body is totally riddled with them, and your bodily systems fail from massive damage by countless pinpricks.
It's just that the "shot" load is made of neutrons and other atomic particles instead of lead.
So you can see why no medicine of any sort is likely to save you, no matter whether it's taken before or after exposure.
The only "anti-radiation" treatment I've read about that is any use at all has a very limited application -- it contains a lot of iodine, which fills up the "reservoirs" in your thyroid, preventing it from absorbing any radiactive iodine you might subsequently end up ingesting. This is useful because otherwise your thyroid would soak up the radiactive iodine and store it, and it would sit there in your throat continuing to irradiate you for days and weeks to come. Instead, it floats around your bloodstream for a while and hopefully gets excreted instead of stored.
So that's worth trying if you're exposed to light amounts of fallout, but it's no use at all for the many other ways that radiation can kill you. In medium or heavy fallout, or in direct exposure to a blast, you'll either die from the external radiation ripping through your body in lethal amounts, or from radiactive particles and dust which you couldn't help inhaling (and lodging in your lungs) or swallowing. And no drug or medication would be able to protect you from those.
Vaccum tubes emit electrons.Nuclear triggers must emit neutrons.
The difference is not subtle.
President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair have been warned Osama bin Laden has 20 suitcase nuclear weapons obtained for cash from former KGB agents, the London Sunday Express reports in tomorrow's editions.
Last October, WorldNetDaily broke the story of bin Laden’s suitcase nukes, detailed in a new book by an FBI consultant on international terrorism.
The book,''Al Qaeda: Brotherhood of Terror,'' by Paul L. Williams, says bin Laden purchased 20 suitcase nuclear weapons in 1998 from former KGB agents for $30 million. The deal is reportedly one of three in the last decade in which al-Qaida purchased small nuclear weapons or weapons-grade nuclear uranium.
Williams says bin Laden's search for nuclear weapons began in 1988 when he hired a team of five nuclear scientists from Turkmenistan. These were former employees at the atomic reactor in Iraq before it was destroyed by Israel, Williams says. The team's project was the development of a nuclear reactor that could be used ''to transform a very small amount of material that could be placed in a package smaller than a backpack.''
''By 1990 bin Laden had hired hundreds of atomic scientists from the former Soviet Union for $2,000 a month – an amount far greater that their wages in the former Soviet republics,'' Williams writes. ''They worked in a highly sophisticated and well-fortified laboratory in Kandahar, Afghanistan.''
This work continued throughout the 1990s, the author says.
In 1993, according to the book, Jamal Ahmed al-Fadl, a bin Laden agent who turned into a Central Intelligence Agency source, purchased for al-Qaida a cylinder of weapons-grade uranium from a former Sudanese government minister who represented businessmen from South Africa. The purchase price was $1.5 million and the uranium was tested in Cyprus and transported to Afghanistan.
Al-Fadl reported that, at the time of this transfer, al-Qaida was already working on a deal for suitcase nukes developed for the KGB.
Williams says the Russian Mafia made another mysterious deal with ''Afghani Arabs'' in search of nuclear weapons in 1996. The Russians who sold the material now live in New York.
Then again in 1998, Mamdouh Mahmud Salim was arrested in Munich and charged with acting as an al-Qaida agent to purchase highly enriched uranium from a German laboratory.
That same year, according to Williams, bin Laden succeeded in buying the 20 suitcase nukes from Chechen Mafia figures, including former KGB agents. The $30 million deal was partly cash and partly heroin with a street value of $700 million.
''After the devices were obtained, they were placed in the hands of Arab nuclear scientists who, federal sources say, 'were probably trained at American universities,''' says Williams.
Though the devices were designed only to be operated by Soviet SPETZNAZ personnel, or special forces, al-Qaida scientists came up with a way of hot-wiring the bombs to the bodies of would-be martyrs, according to the book.
Suitcase nukes are not really suitcases at all, but suitcase-size nuclear devices. The weapons can be fired from grenade or rocket launchers or detonated by timers. A bomb placed in the center of a metropolitan area would be capable of instantly killing hundreds of thousands and exposing millions of others to lethal radiation.
Yossef Bodansky, author of ''Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America,'' and the U.S. Congress' top terrorism expert, concurs that bin Laden has already succeeded in purchasing suitcase nukes. Former Russian security chief Alexander Lebed also testified to Congress that 40 nuclear suitcases disappeared from the Russian arsenal after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Williams quotes an anonymous federal official as saying: ''The question isn't whether bin Laden has nuclear weapons, it's when he will try to use them.''
In addition to the suitcase nukes, Williams reports that al-Qaida has also obtained chemical weapons from North Korea and Iraq. Williams says the FBI confirmed to him that Saddam Hussein provided bin Laden with a ''gift'' of anthrax spores.
Williams says al-Qaida also includes in its arsenal plague viruses, including ebola and salmonella, from the former Soviet Union and Iraq, samples of botulism biotoxin from the Czech Republic, and sarin from Iraq and North Korea.
In 1996, the late Alexander Lebed, Russia's former chief of national security, asserted that Russia may have ''lost'' up to 100 one-kiloton ''suitcase-sized'' bombs, which he called ''ideal weapons to conduct nuclear terrorism.''
The Russian government immediately denied the weapons ever existed, but Alexei Yablokov, a former senior adviser to Yeltsin, told a U.S. congressional hearing that the weapons had been developed by the KGB in a project kept secret from the Russian military.
Indeed. They need the very thing that the Iraq "peaceful" nuclear plants produce as a by-product, tritium.
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