Former New Mexico Scientist Jailed for Trying to Develop Nuclear Bombs in Venezuela

[MohRokTah]

It's surprising the sentence was so light.

Former New Mexico Scientist Jailed for Trying to Develop Nuclear Bombs in Venezuela

A former Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist was sentenced to five and a half years in prison Wednesday after pleading guilty in trying to help Venezuela develop a nuclear weapon, ABC News reports via The Associated Press.

Pedro Leonardo Mascheroni and his wife, Majorie Roxby Mascheroni, both pleaded guilty back in 2013. They admitted to helping develop a nuclear weapon for Venezuela by working with an undercover FBI agent who acted like a representative of the country.

Majorie received 366 days in prison for conspiring with her husband to sell nuclear secrets, and he faces up to five and a half years in prison with 10 years of supervised release.

Mascheroni was under investigation for nearly a year before his indictment. The FBI later took away computers, letters, photographs, books and cell phones from the couple's home in Los Alamos.

...

Link

[leveymg]

1. This was another FBI entrapment operation - WARNING site linked has ADWARE

My anti-spyware/anti-virus popped up that warning. The computer froze for a moment when I didn't navigate away right away.

Please repost a link to another site. Preferably one we might have heard of before.

[MohRokTah]

2. My AV has no problems with Latin Post.

Here's an ABC link to the AP story:

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/los-alamos-scientist-nuke-spy-sting-sentenced-28540411

[leveymg]

3. My AVAST! popped up that rare warning. More often it indicates "Malicious Threat"

Thank you for the other link.

[leveymg]

5. Here's the kicker: " The U.S. government is not alleging Venezuela sought U.S. secrets."

Somehow, that sentence doesn't appear in the version you initially posted. Misleading - a bit?

[MohRokTah]

7. I don't believe so.

It was clear this was an FBI sting operation on a rogue nuclear scientist.

You can't have a US scientist becoming an Abdul Qadeer Khan. It's better to sting them and get them behind bars than risk them actually developing weapons for any non-nuclear nation or group.

[leveymg]

9. The issue I have isn't with the sting, per se - it's the misrepresentation of Venez gov't complicity

If you knew about the more complete, accurate ABC report, why did you post the less complete, more misleading article?

Is someone trying to lend the false impression that Venezuela is developing nuclear weapons? Has that nasty whiff of Iraq War WMD propaganda about it. Glad we cleared this up before anyone else got the wrong impression.

[MohRokTah]

10. Oh, I didn't really get that from the Latin Post article

They clearly showed it was an FBI sting. Of course Venezuela had nothing to do with it.

[leveymg]

11. Glad we cleared that one up.

If there was any evidence had been part of an actual Venezuelan Gov't nuclear weapons program, we would have heard about this -- everywhere -- years ago, when the arrest and indictment actually occurred.

By the way, A.Q. Khan was a CIA-Saudi facilitated program all along going back to the early 1970s. See, http://journals.democraticunderground.com/leveymg/280

[seveneyes]

4. "he was motivated with the idea of cleaner and less expensive nuclear weapons"

A noble goal. Unlike an inert element, nobility requires more than a desire to unleash the natural energy contained within every motion of our existence.

[hunter]

6. I wouldn't be surprised if it's related to some sort of dementia.

FBI entrapment of an elderly mad scientist isn't anything to brag about.

Instead of prison, non-violent criminals ought to be kept in "assisted living" situations where they can be supervised. Taking away all this guy's research materials and separating him from his wife seems to me cruel and unusual punishment.

And who knows? Maybe they are still doing useful science...

[MohRokTah]

8. I wouldn't be surprised either.

You simply cannot allow the potential for a nuclear weapon to be developed by any non-nuclear nation because of a rogue mentally ill nuclear scientist. Had he contacted his local FBI office when the undercover group first approached him, they'd know he was on the up and up.

[hunter]

12. I'm not sure there are any great secrets about fission bombs anymore.

Enriching uranium or extracting plutonium made in nuclear reactors is very expensive, very complex, and very difficult to keep secret. Once you know the thing can be done the rest is big money and big engineering which is hard to hide.

The only reason Israel and apartheid South Africa got away with it is that they were being protected by other members of the "nuclear club," most especially the U.S.A..

The sorts of nuclear secrets being protected today tend to be mundane things, like the level of disrepair in our nuclear "arsenal," or accidents and experiments not yet disclosed that exposed civilians to radiation or contaminated the environment with radioactive and non-radioactive toxins.

If anyone has developed a "clean" nuclear weapon, let's say something like a fusion bomb that doesn't require a fission bomb to set it off, then that might be the sort of nuclear secret demanding extreme measures of protection.

Otherwise I think we should be a lot more concerned about racists, religious extremists, and other crazy fucks; in the U.S. Air Force especially.

This guy may be a danger to himself and others (one of my grandmas was that sort of elderly person...), but I think it's extremely unlikely he's got any great "nuclear secrets" that would help some disorganized nation or criminal entity build a nuclear weapon.

Amoral nuclear physicists are a dime a dozen on the international market and easily grown domestically. Why would any "bad guy" want to hire some eccentric and possibly demented old guy to build them a bomb?