US Couple Arrested For Transmitting Nuclear Secrets In Sting Operation 372
DesScorp writes "Recalling the famous Rosenberg nuclear spy case of the '50s, the US Justice Department has arrested a couple working at a 'leading nuclear research facility' for giving nuclear secrets to Venezuela. Pedro and Marjorie Mascheroni 'have been indicted on charges of communicating classified nuclear weapons data to a person they believed to be a Venezuelan government official and conspiring to participate in the development of an atomic weapon for Venezuela,' the department said in a statement. If convicted, the couple would receive life in prison."
FTFA (Score:2)
75 and 67 years old? Jeebus.
Re:FTFA (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't understand why people (continue to) try to sell government secrets. The risk of getting caught far outweighs the potential reward; especially if you can't spend any of it without drawing attention.
If you want to sell "secrets", join a bank.. nobody gives a shit about leaked customer information.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
At that age, 'life in prison' probably isn't much of a deterrent. The potential reward may well outweigh a decade of imprisonment.
Re:FTFA (Score:5, Insightful)
At that age, 'life in prison' probably isn't much of a deterrent. The potential reward may well outweigh a decade of imprisonment.
especially if the reward isn't for you, and is for family members/loved ones
Re:FTFA (Score:4, Insightful)
Au contraire: the time life you have left, the more valuable it becomes. That's 0 more birthdays, holidays, or weekends spent with the grandkids, and they with you. You didn't just gamble with your own future, but everyone who cares about you as well.
The thing that surprises me (though I guess it shouldn't, given the number of incidents) is that while I might expect someone working at McDonalds to be both stupid and desperate enough to try to do something like that, I would have hoped that someone working at a nuclear research facility with access to TS information would be neither stupid nor desperate.
And the irony is that knowing *how* to make a nuclear weapon isn't even a well kept secret.. AT ALL. Someone offering to pay lots of money for that information should have been a huge red flag, even absent any other moral, ethical, or practical concerns.
Re:FTFA (Score:5, Insightful)
And the irony is that knowing *how* to make a nuclear weapon isn't even a well kept secret.. AT ALL.
True in some senses. Most junior high kids interested in the physical sciences could describe a gun type or spherical type fission bomb. One might even get the concept of the implosion lens (make the shockwaves match up & stuff).
Knowing the general theory isn't exactly the same as: make a hemisphere of diameter X out of alloy Y, or: blend explosives A, B, C, D in the gradient {a, b, c, d}, or perhaps: the tritium concentration must be above n mass percent, or maybe: the neutron flux shall be Z or thou shalt surely fail in epic fashion.
We went through a lot of atolls worth of data to get the specifics of our top secret data. Depending on what's leaked you've eliminated a lot of obvious R&D (especially to the IAEA) and given somebody a highly advanced warhead (Firefox 3 vs Lynx 1).
Some people claim that the declassified or otherwise published data has not been altered and has pretty precise blueprints, but until someone verifies that through a DIY atol removal, I think there's a decent chance that at least some of the information has been cleverly and subtly altered before public release. Otherwise I'd have expected quite a few more nuclear powers given the easy information. [wikipedia.org]
Re:FTFA (Score:5, Interesting)
This is so true. Anybody with a general understanding of radioactive isotopes is likely going to be able to make something akin to the "Little Boy" or the "Fat Man" bombs that were used on Japan. In the realm of nuclear bombs, those were puny little things that were unbelievably heavy and inaccurate as well. It is sort of hard to miss a target the size of a city, so that wasn't a problem when they were used.
The trick, as you have pointed out, is to make the bombs small enough to be practical in terms of their delivery and to perhaps amplify the yield to give a genuinely powerful punch. Getting the size of a warhead to a manageable size is the key to much of the research, and to be able to know how to compress the fissionable metal sufficiently to initiate the chain reaction.
I've seen some magazines, notably an old issue of Analog, that even had a special supplement labeled "give this to your local terrorist" that went into depth about how to make nuclear weapons... at least some crude enough to get the job done. It also gave a rather detailed description of centrifuges necessary to get the material to a concentrated form from material found in a nuclear power plant... with a rather gruesome description of the medical problems nuclear materials workers need to be concerned about unless you have gobs of money necessary to build the proper facilities to get everything put together.
That is ultimately the largest problem with nuclear weapons: It needs the resources of a major nation-state in order to get one put together. You can trade real estate for cost.... which isn't too bad if you are a 3rd world dictator. Something like that sticks out like a sore thumb if it is done by a group trying to stay covert. Certainly no country is going to be unaware that nuclear bombs are being developed within that country, and it will never happen in a place like Somalia or Tuvalu.
Even once the bomb is built, unless that country is prepared to use the bomb immediately (with the massive consequences for doing that), the bombs become even more expensive in terms of basic security (making sure somebody other than the leaders of that country are not going to use those weapons) and maintaining the infrastructure necessary for simply hanging onto those weapons. Basically, there isn't a strong compelling reason to even have these weapons unless you are in a life or death struggle for national survival or are one of the top major economic and military powers in the world.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
If you can get your hands on fissionable material you can build a bomb. Getting your hands on the fissionable material is the hard part. The rest is just engineering.
Fortunately, no. Or else Iran would have had a bomb 20 years ago. Heh perhaps the shah would have used one on the paedophile khomeini. There are many known locations where you can pick fissionable material off off the ground. One of those is even in Iran.
The problem is that for a neutron cascade ("the bomb"), you don't need fissionable material. What happens in a nuclear bomb starts with one nucleus falling apart. This produces 2 fast neutrons. IF both of those neutrons hit the correct fissionable material,
Re:FTFA (Score:4, Insightful)
So in a bomb you must make sure that there are enough U235 nuclei in the vicinity. That translates to concentration. How much concentration ? 98% pure at least, preferably more (if you want to be sure it blows up).
Little Boy used roughly 90% enriched uranium.
In general, the required isotopic purity is closer to 90% than to 98%.
The only known way to separate them is to vaporize them into a highly positively charged plasma, then throw that plasma into a strong magnetic field, where the flow will start to rotate around the center of the field. This will create a minute difference in isotope concentration : less than 0.1% more U235 in the center, slightly over 0.2% more on the other side (the problem is thermalization, constantly remixing the isotopes). That's what's happening in those big tubes the US dislikes so much.
Centrifuge enrichment does not happen in plasma. It uses uranium hexafluoride, which sublimates above 93*C. It is a regular gas like carbon dioxide or oxygen, only heavier.
There's also an obsolete thermal diffusion process, but it takes roughly 100x more energy (!). The last thermal diffusion facility in Europe, Eurodif, will free up some 3000 MW of power when closed. Its job will be done by a new centrifuge enrichment plant that takes only 50 MW.
It is not known exactly how efficient this process is. But it is known that about 200 kg of ore (5% uranium) is needed to create 1 kg 95% U235 (which is what the first nuclear power plants ran on). Undoubtedly it's at least 10 times that for 98%, but ... (the "losses" of this process are the fuel for it. You use the less pure output to fire a nuclear reactor to power the whole purification system, which eats a LOT of power).
Your numbers are far off. U-235 makes up only 0.7% of natural uranium, the rest is U-238 which is not fissile. Furthermore most uranium ores are far less concentrated than 5%. Common ore grades are in the 2000-500 ppm range, or 0.2%-0.05%. To get 1kg of 90% U-235, you need roughly 100 tons of 2000 ppm ore and 167 kg of pure natural uranium (assuming that the tailings contain 0.16% U-235, which is very low but possible; actual tailing concentration is 0.25%-0.3%)
Fissionable uranium, explosion-grade, is not easy to get. Not even if you're sitting on tons upon tons of fissionable material.
That is true, but has little relevance for modern nuclear weapons. All nuclear weapon states except Pakistan use plutonium weapons, which are less costly and much smaller than high enriched uranium weapons. Plutonium can be produced from natural or low enriched uranium in specially designed reactors, then separated chemically. Some plutonium is produced in LWR reactors, but can't be used in nuclear weapons due to its isotopic composition: weapons plutonium needs 90-93% Pu-239, whereas LWR spent fuel contains ~60%.
Re:FTFA (Score:4, Informative)
The Wikipedia article is intentionally not useful for designing anything.
However, we do have an online textbook (at roughly upper-division engineering/physics college student difficulty level) on the subject:
http://www.nuclearweaponarchive.org/Nwfaq/Nfaq0.html [nuclearweaponarchive.org]
In terms of what's been published online -
* There's a book with precise dimensional drawings and measurements on the Little Boy type Uranium gun type bomb. Not online, but purchasable at Amazon. It's not "a blueprint" but any competent draftsman / mechanical engineer could produce blueprints to build from, given the book.
* The dimensions and materials of all the layers of the Fat Man / Mark 1 type nuclear weapons are published in numerous sources. The precise shape of the lens in the outer layer has not been, though a rough back-of-the-envelope version of the equation for the lens shape is published. A precise and buildable lens shape would require someone with a fair talent in explosives engineering and shockwave engineering, especially someone aware of what the published equation left out, but the Fat Man design is fundamentally so brick-solid-simple that one could get the lens fairly imprecise and still have a functional weapon.
Some effort has gone into not actively publishing newer weapon design details in public. But that's not nearly the same as "they're not out". A number of more modern weapons are understood to at least close to the level Fat Man and Little Boy are. There are accurate internal component photos declassified for some weapons and parts. There are detailed hands-on descriptions of some parts, by people who worked on them. Check out the Wikipedia article on the B61 bomb, for example; the fission and fusion components were shown in a declassified film (but not the explosives to compress the fission parts).
Re: (Score:2)
The problem is not that these people are *stupid*; rather, it's that they think they're smarter than they are. They convince themselves that they're smart enough not to get caught.
Also: knowing how to make a modern nuclear weapon is a lot harder, and a lot more of a secret, than you'd think. A dirty bomb of the sort we dropped on Hiroshima? No, not necessarily. A hydrogen bomb? That's an order of magnitude more difficult, and requires a huge amount of engineering effort to shape everything properly. There a
Re: (Score:2)
Unless they see it on just slightly(*) grander scales - most generally, securing their valued group / etc. And close to the end of their own life anyway.
(*)Without checking, tell me in which year and city your great-grandmother from the side of your father & grandmother was born...
And that was just a blink of an eye ago, all things considered. We often don't think that much about our recent ancestors; likewise about future descendants.
Re: (Score:2)
Or if you're not doing it for the money, but for ideological reasons.
Re: (Score:2)
Money is not the only reward. They could be doing it for moral, political, nationalist, patriotic reasons, watever.
Re:FTFA (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:FTFA (Score:5, Insightful)
People leaking such secrets might as well think that's exactly what they're doing, saving lifes (just on the "wrong" side) - wasn't there a thing how most "traitors" of such kind are motivated not by money?
The risks aren't what they were before (Score:5, Funny)
The Rosenberg couple received *death* in prison.
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They'll be better looked after in prison than on Social Security. No joke.
This is the truth, why was this marked as Troll?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Because it contradicts the "welfare queens and retirees suck up our tax money" meme, and might even imply that the amount paid by Social Security is insufficient.
People buy lottery tickets too (Score:2)
and many think they will hit it big alleviating them from having to save for their retirement.
Re:FTFA (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a problem with your understanding of the crime. Us normal folks (those without DoD clearances, who'd never be offered millions for anything we know) only hear about the people who are caught.
Think of it as smaller crimes. Have you ever known someone who was a drug dealer or user? You don't have to answer that. :) Sure, we see the news where drug dealers and users are arrested, killed, etc, etc, etc. What you don't necessarily know about is that for every name or face that shows up in the news, there are thousands of people involved with that industry. The reason for the publicity of such events isn't to slow down those who are actively doing it, it's to persuade people who may get into that line of work that it's horribly dangerous.
By the sound of the story, they were framed. A retired couple, one who was laid off years ago. The other probably wasn't making great money. Between the two of them, they had sensitive information and knowledge. The FBI sting involved pretending to be a foreign national offering up almost 1 million dollars.
If you were an old retired couple, barely making ends meet with your pension, doesn't a million dollars in cash sound like a nice way to live the rest of your life? As it appears, they didn't actively pursue such a sale. The FBI staged the whole international secrets crime.
So, what comes of all of this? The couple may end up in prison for the rest of their lives. Other government workers will think twice about giving up any sort of information for any amount of cash. The smart ones (the ones who don't get caught) will still commit crimes such as this. The stupid ones (the ones who do get caught) will make headlines again when they work out a deal with the FBI to commit such a crime.
All the FBI managed to do was bust a couple who probably wouldn't have committed the crime in the first place. We all have our price, it just matters how gullible you are, and how much it would cost to buy you off. Would I accept $1 million? Probably not. $1 billion and guaranteed protection in another country? I'd have to think about it.
Sadly enough, we're arresting people now for actions that were encouraged of skilled people years before. The United States accumulated many great scientists and military experts. Surely many of them were bribed in one way or another. Much of that will never make it to the history books.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
if you knew the technology might be used against someone you love, you would never sell out, at any price
And what if you knew that the technology probably wouldn't be used against someone you love, and dang, a million bucks is a lot of money. Never underestimate the power of humans to rationalize what they want to get. While there probably are people who won't compromise under any circumstance, a common trick is to present the negotiation in a way that allows the target to rationalize ignoring the downsides.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I think the odds of Venezuela starting a nuclear war with the USA are pretty slim. For a million dollars I'd call it an acceptable risk.
Re:FTFA (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, that's about the right age. 10 and 2 the day the Bomb was dropped on Japan in 1945. 17 and 9 the day the H-Bomb was tested in 1952. 24 and 16 the day the Russkies launched Sputnik in 1959. Perfect timing for a young adult or child to get inspired by the prospects of a career in science and engineering, and to subsequently find themselves in their 30s (or 20s) at a weapons lab building the World's Biggest Fireworks during the heyday of Cold War bomb design.
(What, you think NASA built all those rockets just to beat the Russians to the moon? Manned spaceflight, satellite phones, GPS, and Google Maps are all spinoffs from things that were fundamentally cold war-era military projects: a fleet of reliable ICBMs, communications systems, navigation and targeting systems, and spy satellites.)
The present-day stockpile stewardship has led to lots of interesting advances (with civilian applications) in supercomputing, solid state physics, and helped out with the monitoring/cleanup of old nuclear sites, but when it comes to practical applications, most of the folks are going to be old. (Any young adult growing up today - in the post-test-ban treaty era - that considers a career in this direction is aware they'll still be dealing with very interesting problems... but that the closest they'll ever get to knowing if it really works is in the form of analyzing the results from subcritical tests or from computer simulations.)
I don't have a need to know if there are many (or any) young nuclear weapons designers today, but I suspect that since we haven't fielded a new design in decades, that much of weapons design is rapidly approaching the "lost knowledge" stage, and the demographic is akin to that grizzled (but brilliant!) old guy who still knows how to fix a mechanical typewriter or tune a carburetor.
Much like the WW2 vets, the people of the Manhattan Project aren't going to be around much longer - and the second generation of weaponeers (who worked on the bombs that brought us the Cold War) is also getting pretty damn long in the tooth. Here's hoping the young'uns at the labs - even if they can never talk about the lost knowledge they've preserved - are at least taking steps to preserve the stories of the people who came before them. Because there are (and shouldn't be!) publicly-accessible papers on much of this research, it's even more vital that the labs who did the engineering (and who are entrusted with the responsibility of keeping it under wraps) to take steps to record, preserve, and secure the history for the next generation of engineers.
Fuck these two asshats for leaking secrets. But here's a pseudonymous note of civilian thanks to the vast majority of you old fogies who did keep true to your oaths. You did some damn fine engineering while keeping secret the things that needed to remain secret. We random civilian nerds will never (and given the state of the world, probably should never!) have a chance to fully appreciate just how good the engineering was, but from what you have been permitted to declassify so far... yeah, pretty damn good. You gave us a world in which Fallout 3 was a fun video game, not a reality TV show. Thanks!)
Re: (Score:2)
Well that was non sequitur.
CITE PLEASE (Score:5, Insightful)
[needs citation]
1. I bet I know a lot more people in the gun rights movement than you, and I don't know one -- NOT A SINGLE ONE -- who thinks the way that *you* think they do.
2. You say "there are a lot of people in the US who think that *everyone* should have a gun." Really? So there are "a lot of people" who think psychopaths should have guns? Convicted felons on parole?
3. They may think that only people here legally should have guns, but that is a perfectly defensible position. I have NEVER, EVER seen ONE SINGLE INSTANCE of someone saying that guns are bad for illegal Mexicans, but fine for other illegals.
4. In the same vein, please support you assertion that "lots of people" believe everyone should have the right to bear arms in self defense except Muslims.
5. Failing all this, do you think it might be possible -- just *possible -- that in fact you just got up in front of everyone and tried to pass off your own personal bias as fact?
- AJ
Re: (Score:2)
How do you feel about legal Mexicans having guns?
Or legal Muslim Somalians and Yemenites?
Or people arrested and convicted for non-violent charges?/quote? As long as they are responsible and take proper precautions with their weapons, then sure, I don't have a problem with them having guns. Are you claiming I should have a problem with these people?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
How do you feel about legal Mexicans having guns?
Having worked with Mexican guys in the Army who carried loaded weapons on a daily basis, I really don't have a problem with it. I know of at least one Mexican immigrant who was a MOH recipient, since I read his autobiography.
Or legal Muslim Somalians and Yemenites?
Can't say about Yemenites, but having worked with Somalis in the Army, etc, etc.
Or people arrested and convicted for non-violent charges?
Again, I've worked with guys who have non-violent charges on their records.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I already about my experiences with the above groups, but racism, historically and currently, is squarely a phenomenon of the gun control movement. As this black guy with a gun [blackmanwithagun.us] explains:
[after] the Civil War ended in 1865, States persisted in prohibiting blacks, now freemen, from owning guns under laws renamed “Black Codes.” They did so on the basis that blacks were not citizens, and thus did not have the same rights, including the right to keep and bear arms protected in the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, as whites. ... most States turned to “facially neutral” business or transaction taxes on handgun purchases. However, the intention of these laws was not neutral. An article in Virginia ‘s official university law review called for a “prohibitive taxon the privilege” of selling handguns as a way of disarming “the son of Ham,” whose “cowardly practice of ‘toting’ guns has been one of the most fruitful sources of crime. Let a negro board a railroad train with a quart of mean whiskey and a pistol in his grip and the chances are that there will be a murder, or at least a row, before he alights.” ...
That article has a pretty solid timeline of racist gun control, going all the way up to 1995.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I'm a European, and this sounds very odd to me. Nothing I remember from history classes (and yes, I usually paid attention).
Are you sure you're not confusing "everybody" with the aristocracy, that was supposed to be able to support the king in times of war?
Also, remember that Europe is a divided place. If you think we've managed to squeeze many countries into a small area here today,
Re:FTFA (Score:5, Informative)
You did some damn fine engineering while keeping secret the things that needed to remain secret.
You know, a funny thing I've noticed is that there are a lot of people in the US who think that *everyone* should have a gun. But when you pressure them a little, it turns out that they don't think that *really* everyone should have a gun. Those damn illegal Mexicans, for example, they shouldn't be allowed guns. Or those Muslims, no guns for them. So really what they want is for only the people they think are the right sort of people to be able to have guns.
I believe the argument is that every US citizen who can qualify on a shooting range with a gun should be able to carry one. So non-US citizens would not meet that criteria.
Now, consider that a nuclear weapon is really just another kind of gun...
You fail completely with this statement. The method of operation is different. The energy release is orders of magnitude different. Ignoring the difference in energy magnitudes, a nuclear weapon is really just another kind of BOMB. Note that this is different than a gun. Is it legal for you to own a bomb in the US?
Re: (Score:2)
Is it legal for you to own a bomb in the US?
I don't know, let's find out. You can pass lots of laws that don't pass Constitutional muster.
But that's beside the point. If I have a nuclear bomb, just who is going to tell me no?
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You could wire it up to go off if your heart stops and drive around on a motorcycle with it in the sidecar. Just watch out for some pizza delivery dude named Hiro Protagonist.
Re:FTFA (Score:5, Insightful)
You know, a funny thing I've noticed is that there are a lot of people in the US who think that *everyone* should have a gun. But when you pressure them a little, it turns out that they don't think that *really* everyone should have a gun.
Agreed. But its much more fundamental a problem than that. There are a lot of people in the US that think that:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
only applies to Americans.
Re:FTFA (Score:5, Insightful)
I hope you are not an American, as your ignorance about your own constitution is amazing.
The American constitution does not give you any rights. The American constitution points out that you are born with rights, simply by being human, then sets out some specific things the government may NOT do as they would infringe your rights.
The USA constitution does NOT give you rights. It protects your rights from your government.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:FTFA (Score:4, Interesting)
Guns? Well, there are clearly three sorts of people when it comes to guns: those that are frightened of them, those that know how and when to use them and those that are quite willing to use them anytime.
Nuclear weapons are a bit simpler. There are only two sorts of people when it comes to them: people that value this life and people that only value the afterlife. I'd say the folks that only value the afterlife are fucking dangerous and shouldn't be allowed to have anything more complicated than a safety razor.
The leaders in the USSR valued this life for themselves and their population too much to throw it away on the possibility of leading the world into a new era of socialist superiority. The leaders of Iran apparently value only the afterlife and likely consider killing someone as advancing them along the path to their reward. We have seen much evidence of this and nothing that contradicts this view.
The real question is how many people of the Muslim faith agree with that outlook. I don't care what they are praying about if they are afraid of losing their lives and the lives of their children. If they consider their lives better spent as martyrs and the lives of their children to be of no importance as long as they have a nice secure afterlife they are dangerous and unfit for the community of Man.
Oh, and Christians that only value the afterlife are equally as dangerous. It has nothing to do with the specific brand of religion, just the attitude towards the living and the attitude towards whatever possible afterlife you might believe in.
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The question is how many nation have used nuclear weapons so far to actually kill people?
And which are they?
Maybe those are the ones that should not be permitted to have any.
I dub thee Sir Flamebait of Wrongston (Score:5, Insightful)
You know, a funny thing I've noticed is that there are a lot of people in the US who think that *everyone* should have a gun. But when you pressure them a little, it turns out that they don't think that *really* everyone should have a gun.
Who really says that? I've never heard any gun advocate (nut or not) say anything like that. In fact all gun owners I know are usually more thoughtful and respectful people than the populace at large and certainly not fascist as you paint them to be.
It seems like you are on a bigot hunt, when all you had to do was stay home and look in the mirror. You can be just as bigoted against peoples philosophical standpoints as you can against race...
TFA: Venezuala was not involved (Score:5, Informative)
If you read the TFA, you will learn that the government of Venezuela was not involved at all. The accused didn't sell secrets to anyone but an undercover FBI agent. While trying to sell nuclear secrets to a foreign government is definitely a problem, it's not true that they were "giving nuclear secrets to Venezuela".
Re:TFA: Venezuala was not involved (Score:5, Insightful)
But for the U.S. it's demonize two birds with one stone: The Feds get to play up the fear of nuclear terrorists, and plant the next-after-Iran seed in the public's mind as well.
Even though Venezuela wasn't involved at all, just watch how many "news" outlets echo the "Venezuela's stealing U.S. secrets and building nukes" part of the headline.
So it's win-win for the U.S. government. Who among them cares whether it's true?
"US Couple Arrested For Transmitting Child Pornography To President Obama."
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Nuclear weapons Venezuela ? (Score:2, Insightful)
What the hell would Venezuela want nuclear weapons for anyway??
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what about the time homer simpson let that kid in (Score:2)
what about the time homer simpson let that kid in the foreign exchange in to the plant and give him all kind of plans as well?
Could be worse (Score:5, Funny)
As frightening as a nuclear Venezuela is, I'd be more scared by a nuclear Vuvuzela.
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As frightening as a nuclear Venezuela is, I'd be more scared by a nuclear Vuvuzela.
I'd be willing to pay you 500$ if you can provide me with the actual plans for such a device. Consider it as a deterrent against my early-bird neighbour's lawnmower.
Yu don't just walk into a store and buy plutonium. (Score:5, Funny)
They wanted me to build them a bomb, so I took their plutonium and in turn, gave them a shiny bomb-casing filled with used pinball machine parts.
Sad clueless desperate people. (Score:5, Insightful)
It appears that in a desperate attempt to fund their FUSION research, they tried to contact foreign governments with information on building a FISSION bomb (plans downloaded from the Internet) so the FBI obliged by providing a fake Venezuelan contact to trap them.
This is just sad.
Venezuela (Score:5, Insightful)
Note that this story says absolutely nothing about whether or not Venezuela actually has any nuclear programme or ambitions. The only "Venezuela" in this story is a fake one, made up to sting these traitors.
But this story does tell us something about how Americans have been led to believe that Venezuela does aspire to get a nuke. It's not clear exactly what it tells us about that, but it tells us something about it.
What nuclear secrets? These. (Score:4, Insightful)
The big secrets are out. Everybody understands generally how an atomic bomb works. There remain smaller secrets, along the lines of construction tips. Machining plutonium is very difficult; in addition to being radioactive and poisonous, it has weird physical properties - it expands when heated, but doesn't contract fully when cooled, because the crystalline structure changes. The detailed techniques for doing that and compensating for the changes aren't public knowledge. Exactly how plutonium behaves when compressed by a shock wave is still being studied. [llnl.gov] The tricks by which atomic bombs are made smaller and more efficient are not well known. There are neutron reflectors, tampers, and such. The data from the experimental work to develop those items is still classified.
Developing that data independently requires a sizable research operation. All the big nuclear powers had to build big R&D operations to struggle with those problems. (Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea probably used leaked data from one of the big powers.)
The interesting question with this guy is whether this guy fed the FBI real classified data, or just faked up some plausible design numbers.
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nuclear secrets really aren't. The nth country experiment showed that over 40 years ago. Trying to keep the knowledge locked away is futile, the only hope is to control the fissile material.
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The devil is in the details. While the basics of making a uranium bomb are fairly common knowledge, the nitty, gritty details of making a proper plutonium bomb are well kept secrets. Get it wrong, and things don't really work. Or it blows up in your face, taking a small city with it. It is very complex and requires some very precise manufacturing capabilities that are beyond the abilities of most countries in the world to get right.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
> Or it blows up in your face, taking a small city with it.
So make it in the city you want to blow up.
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Thus killing 2,423,158 birds with one stone? Hmmm...
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I believe, that a crude but working plutonium implosion weapon can be fairly easy modeled even on a fairly modest supercomputer.
Precision manufacturing? Yes, but it's also much more accessible now (think laser cutting).
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And as you point out its much easier to build a Uranium device than a Plutonium device, yet most countries put such effort into the latter. Yes I know, higher yield, smaller size but still
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Do you really understand how big a critical mass uranium bomb is? It is easy to make and the concepts have been pretty much disclosed and well tested. Should be easy, if you could get the uranium.
But you are looking at something that weighs 5,000 pounds at least. The Hiroshima bomb weighed more like 10,000 pounds. And this wasn't fancy instrumentation to see how well it worked. Just about all of the real creative work done since 1945 has focused on smaller, lighter subcritical mass weapons.
Yes, if some
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Maybe not that many countries actually want those things / are a bit different than your (almost) portrayal...
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Who cares how futile it is, if you can delay potential nuclear armageddon for a century or two?
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From what you heard, everyone in the world loves Americans.
Re:for those of you who charge hypocrisy (Score:5, Informative)
It wouldn't be nearly as bad if it were, say, Canada or Brazil.
Canada is already a nuclear power, we just don't have nuclear weapons. But we could build them in a very short time frame, as we have the infrastructure to do so.
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But it isn't bad at all, the whole situation is a fiction created to lure in potential "traitors" - Venezuela is not involved at all (TFS describes it decently clear, and TFA completelly)
Though, I imagine, it's convenient to spread the news that way... (instead of "...trying to sell to a foreign state", which would suffice)
Now 50+% of Americans might start to think that Venezuela wants to build the bomb (basically stolen from superior us, on top of that)
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Yeah, so much bullshit. Nobody can stand Chavez anymore [wikipedia.org].
Since he's in power, poverty rate has plummeted from 42% to 28%. Oh, the horror. He nationalised mineral resources and now the poor foreign oil companies can no longer take all the oil they want for free. This is outrageous. For the first time in their lives, millions of Venezuelans have health care and education. I don't know how they can't stand so much misery.
Really, Chavez has to go before Venezuela ceases to be a third world country. I don't
Re:what id like to see (Score:5, Insightful)
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I can think of nothing more psychopathic than several former leaders of the USSR. And the bombs did not go flying!
I think that has to do with those rational enough to have a team to finance, build and deliver a nuclear device are sane enough to want to avoid the inevitable retaliation that would follow any kind of atomic or nuclear attack. For example several Arab nations have a serious h
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> Imagine if they had harmed our nation as a whole rather than as a somewhat confined attack.
'They'? I'm quite sure most of the people suffering (or dying) had nothing to do with the particular attack that I assume you are referring to.
Re:what id like to see (Score:5, Insightful)
Those "psychopathic" leaders from the USSR only cared about one thing. POWER! That's all the cared about. However, launching a full scale nuclear war would render their cities into smoldering ruins with nothing to show for it. Basically, between the US and USSR, it was a classic game of chicken.
Now with religious (Islamic) leaders at the helm... Well, they might actually burn the world to win Jihad against sinners in the eyes of Allah. Real honest-to-God religious convictions at the helm of a nuclear arsenal is not what you want.
Power is all that matters. (Score:2)
Power is all that matters. Thats all anyone cares about, thats all governments care about, thats all that matters because might is right.
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Re:what id like to see (Score:5, Interesting)
That assumes that everyone is equally rational, which we know is not the case. It would only take one psychopath to end the world and laugh as everything around him burned to the ground.
That's why you don't give political power to psychopaths. The preferred cure is prevention. If they somehow achieve power and show signs of being psychopaths, and nuclear weapons might be involved, then the people of Venezuela should understand that sometimes a rabid dog needs to be put down.
It's not like there is any shortage of politicians. There are plenty more where that one came from.
A better long-term solution would be to institute a system like the US Constitution except that all political offices are limited to one short term, assigned by lottery from a random selection of all adult citizens, and conducted like a military draft in that refusing to serve could result in imprisonment. Anyone who has ever held office at any level of government is disqualified from ever being selected again either voluntarily or involuntarily. There would still be popular elections occurring at every quarter of a term of office (so every year if it's a 4-year term), but they'd be for the purpose of deciding whether someone holding office should be removed prematurely and replaced by a new random selection. Corporations and organizations would be strictly forbidden from participating in this process at any level, backed by the penalty of having the entity dissolved and all assets seized and sold off at auction. That's because with the elimination of a need to campaign, any participation by them must be corruption and cannot be called a *wink wink nudge nudge* campaign contribution.
Maybe that idea is flawed and maybe it isn't. The point though is to remove "politician" as a career and to recognize that the people who want power so badly that they'll campaign, accept corruption, etc. in order to obtain it are not to be trusted with it. It would remove the notion of a ruling class and replace it with a notion of civic duty, much like the way we view jury duty. I think what we'd find is that average working people are not eager to obtain nuclear weapons and play silly games based around flirting with utter destruction.
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While this sounds nice theoretically, you would be amazed at the amount of horrible damage one idiot could cause in a single year.
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While this sounds nice theoretically, you would be amazed at the amount of horrible damage one idiot could cause in a single year.
I greatly prefer the horrible damage caused by genuine temporary idiocy to the immeasurable damage caused by carefully calculated incompetence in the style of "Problem, Reaction, Solution" currently perpetrated ad nauseum by our ruling class. Any day. Without question. No contest about it.
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I'm not defending the status quo at all. And I like the basic premise for your system here. I just think it would need a bit more polish, maybe some sort of competency exam to keep out the truly stupid/malicious/insane.
And there is the small problem of the bloody revolution we would need to have in order to throw out the current rulers and get it implemented.
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That's why you don't give political power to psychopaths.
Silly me! i thought it was a requirement.
A decadent and/or broken people won't allow reasonable people to rule. Children of divorce are unlikely to respect them. Reasonable people won't give them the phony sense of worth (the one that comes from "us and them") that they want, so reasonable people won't appeal to them. They aren't sexy. They haven't spent a good portion of their lives learning how to manipulate and market and tell you what you want to hear (how to cater to your base nature, your ego). They haven't mastered the art of doing one
Re:what id like to see (Score:5, Insightful)
is more realistic approaches to nuclear nonproliferation. face up to the fact that all countries will inevitably achieve nuclear weapons capability in the near future, and act accordingly with the international community through political and economic incentives to assure all countries are well appraised that, while attractive in the face of gridlock warfare or political strife, the ending outcome of nuclear war is negative for all parties involved. Arms will always proliferate, the question is, how do we proliferate peace.
Put it this way:
A. There are some countries who should not be allowed nuclear weapons because they will probably use them.
B. There are some countries who should not be allowed nuclear weapons because they may lose track of them (thus making those weapons available to nations of type A -or- to certain (ahem!) non-governmental organizations who will probably use them.
The Cold War was a dangerous game (and we're not out of the woods yet: many of those weapons still exist and so do the ideological differences for that matter) but the leaders of both sides weren't willing to die for their ideology. That basic rationality is no longer a given, as these weapons proliferate to less politically stable nations.
This (badly mistaken) idea that it's acceptable for anyone to steal nuclear weapons technology because, well, heck, they'll get it eventually is just wrong. Yes, they might get it eventually, but the odds of that happening are reduced if they aren't forced to make the same investment that we and the Soviets made. And you never know: if it comes down to that, they may decide they have better uses for the money. And if not, if they do get nukes but have to take a few years to figure out how, well, that's a few more years of relative safety for the rest of us.
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I'm confident the leaders of major world powers wouldn't ever have to die for their ideology. The days of the king having the balls to lead his troops into war and hav
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How, exactly, would that work? Also, the tracking and the detecting is, I believe, what the IAEA has been doing for decades, and Kim Jong Il still got the bomb.
somebody will find the fissile material (Score:2)
dig it up and refine it secretly, so not even satellites could see it happening
and all you really need i think is some thick walls of lead, a nice shipping container on a ship headed to a port that handles millions of shipping containers, and boom. how do you detect a bomb through thick walls of lead?
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I believe what the poster was saying (and I agree with) is that as a State the USSR was unwilling to sacrifice its population to win a war against the US.
Iran clearly has no such compunctions. They are willing to sacrifice their population over an election. There are a number of other states and non-governmental groups that would be more than happy to start a nuclear war because regardless of the lives lost their ideology would survive.
Unfortunately, there is no technology that allows for remote sensing o
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I believe what the poster was saying (and I agree with) is that as a State the USSR was unwilling to sacrifice its population to win a war against the US.
Yes, unlike some of the other drain-bamaged individuals here, you take my meaning correctly. More to the point, the Soviet leadership was probably willing to sacrifice some percentage of its population, but it most certainly wasn't willing to sacrifice itself. Now, one of the tenets of waging a nuclear war is that you don't take out the other side's leaders, because then there won't be anyone left to say "stop, we give up" and have the authority to make it stick. It's unlikely that we would have specificall
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exactly (Score:2)
the usa should not have nuclear weapons. no nation should
so you should be spending your time pestering those with nukes to get rid of them. not condoning even more nations getting them!
its like "my neighbor has a meth lab. i won't try to get my neighbor to get rid of the meth lab. instead, i will simply support my other neighbor getting his own meth lab, so that its fair"
seriously?
and yet that is some people's reasoning on why nuclear proliferation is ok. its insane
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In addition to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there have been more recent efforts, most notably by Paul Wolfowitz (as Deputy Secretary of Defense), to make nuclear weapons something the US will consider using regularly.
On the upside, the latest nuclear treaty between the US and Russia should help. As far as what us normal people can do about the threat of nukes, here's the instruction guide [typepad.com].
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there is only two countries that has for sure used and continues to use nuclear weapons in the form of depleted uranium weapons
Depleted uranium rounds are not nuclear weapons. They could have made them out of tungsten, a nonradioactive material, and they'd still have almost the same killing power. Depleted uranium is cheaper and has some slight material advantages.
As to the danger of Sarah Palin? I doubt someone who doesn't know what nuclear weapons are would have a clue.
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Get the fuck over it. I could build a zippe type centrifuge cascade with alluminum rotors given a cnc lathe and $20,000.
I see. So, in your learned opinion, the only aspect of nuclear weapons development that counts is the fuel? Are you serious? Really, please do a little Googling on the history of weapons development before you come back here. Russia stole a lot of information from us during the Cold War, and a lot of that was data (math and simulations) on how to maximize yield (among other things), not just how to purify fissionable materials.
There's a lot going on here, a lot of information that can and should remain s
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Maybe he just thought he could sell the fusion research for a lot *more* cash...
Re:what secrets are these? (Score:5, Insightful)
Any 14 year-old could probably make an atomic bomb with a critical mass of uranium or plutonium. Such a bomb would be huge and require lots of shielding to be safe to handle - like attaching to an aircraft or loading into a shipping container.
On the other hand, what is required to detonate a subcritical mass is a little bit tricky. It is clearly possible because the US has thermonuclear weapons that are smaller than the core of the first atomic bombs. I'm not sure that A. Q. Khan even had that information, although he was US-trained.
If you want to put a bomb in a shipping container, the Hiroshima bomb would be good enough. If you want to put a bomb into an Amazon box and ship it somewhere in the US that might require a bit more expertise and that is much harder to come by.
Re:what secrets are these? (Score:4, Informative)
Err, a bare-sphere (no neutron energy manipulation or reflective shielding) critical mass of a plutonium-239 core is only 10kg and with the density of plutonium that translates to a sphere smaller than an orange (9.9cm to be exact).
The reason the original plutonium weapons were so huge is because of low purity of the fissionable materials available, massive over engineering resulting from poor understanding of materials and nuclear processes etc
No such thing exists. All nuclear explosions are accomplished by achieving criticality in some fission material. The critical mass however varies with shape and external factors such as shielding materials capable of changing energies of neutrons or reflecting them back onto their source, temperature of the material, its degree of compression etc.
Re:what secrets are these? (Score:4, Informative)
Err, a bare-sphere (no neutron energy manipulation or reflective shielding) critical mass of a plutonium-239 core is only 10kg and with the density of plutonium that translates to a sphere smaller than an orange (9.9cm to be exact).
A bare sphere of critical mass will not produce an (efficient) nuclear explosion, however. It will immediately begin disintegrating itself, and as soon as the mass drops below critical (due to chunks of radioactive fuel blown out), the process stops. The efficiency of such device is very, very low.
Hence you either need a lot more than critical mass (so that, even with low efficiency, the overall yield is high enough), or you need some way to raise the density rapidly and keep it there for at least some time while explosion is going on. The latter is what implosion-type devices do, but their assembly requires some very high precision to get everything right; throw it even a little bit off balance, and it will fizzle. The former approach works even with crude activator such as a gun assembly, but the amount of material needed for it is quite prohibitive. For example, Little Boy, which used this method, contained over 60kg of U, of which less than kg actually contributed to fission - the rest was just blown into radioactive dust. Very inefficient.
To conclude: implosion-type devices require some advanced engineering to assembly, while more crude activators need significantly more radioactive fuel (which is damn hard and expensive to obtain). So we aren't going to see 14 year olds assembling nukes in their basements anytime soon.
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They didn't have to actually BE any significant secrets. Just secret enough.
It sounds like the man had a vendetta and a chip on his shoulder and wrote out more of an essay or rant than blueprints. Afterall, if you are just handing over plans, you don't need three months to type it up and have your wife edit the document. No, that sounds like a rant ala the Discovery Channel shooter or the Unabomber.
So the old man was probably off his rocker as well, and his grand scheme to sell bomb ideas may have been
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The issue isn't about the general availability of the knowledge. Its about having signed confidentiality agreements as a condition of employment at a 'leading nuclear research facility'.
If I, or your hypothetical 14 year old kid sat down and drew up workable plans for a nuclear weapon, we could sell them to whomever we want. Just as long as we hadn't signed any sorts of secrecy agreement as a government contractor or employee of the same. And we based our designs on publicly available knowledge.
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We can only hope the operation was a total vocal cordectomy.