A couple million Julius and Ethel Rosenbergs: On the nuke leak...

[originalpckelly]

The most serious breach of national security to al-Qaeda or for that matter anyone, has occurred. It is directly the result of the Republican's and their delusions, in a last ditch effort to prove Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, the government released a massive database of Arabic documents, which contained the last secret roadblocks to building a nuclear bomb.

There is just no way this could be worse except giving al-Qaeda a nuke or something. Our side was publicly derided for destroying national security with the revelation of the NSA warrantless surveillance program, but any terrorist worth their salt knew they were being spied on.

However, this knowledge about nuclear triggers was shared amongst a very small club of nations. And inside those nations, amongst a very, very, very small club of scientists. Even the NYT having this info is awful, because their security could be compromised by an al-Qaeda hacker. And that's only if al-Qaeda (or some other anti-American group) wasn't monitoring this website.

If America is nuked by al-Qaeda, it really will be on the heads of every freeper who lobbied to have this info released.

This is so beyond politics, because this may very well destroy America. The only advantage we had to win was our vast size in comparison to the terrorists, but with nuclear weapons in the hands of suicide bombers, only a few attacks would be needed to end us.

And there is no concept of mutually assured destruction with a suicide bomber filled terrorist group.

Our world has really changed. God have mercy on our souls.

[MadMaddie]

1. I would say this very act is an act of "Treason" against this country

The Rosenbergs suffered for their acts....and so shall the people behind this leak of classified information....

[originalpckelly]

4. I don't blame the employees who couldn't go through and read...

48,000 pages of documents. I blame the stupid right-wingers in Congress and on the web, and on talk radio for lobbying and then passing a law which mandated the release of those untranslated documents. I blame the President who signed the law.

I don't blame the poor people, who now feel like shit, for just following their orders.

[MadMaddie]

12. I agree with you..

[slaveplanet]

2. While the documents were certainly valuable

intelligence, the even worse tragedy is the way they treated the scientist they received the documents from. He was ready to work a deal to corral many of the 200 other top Iraqi scientists under the US's wing. The way Bushco handled things it caused the scientists to scatter and become unaccounted for. Documents=valuable, contents of scientist's minds(thus denying it to the enemy)=priceless.

‘The proliferation risk is higher than it was before, and a chaotic situation means this technology is going to spread,’ says Robert Baer, who spent 21 years as a case officer with the CIA in the Middle East. If the administration had been serious about neutralizing Saddam's weapons program, he says, ‘the troops would have been securing equipment at weapons sites as they invaded, and they would have been looking for scientists.... It tells you that this war had nothing to do with WMDs.’”

(...)

But the thought of his former colleagues still weighs heavily on his mind. One day as we were eating falafel from plastic plates in the food court near his new American home, sitting anonymously among the shoppers, he asked me why he was still the only Iraqi scientist whom the United States had seen fit to take out of harm's way.

"There are a number of people who could be brought here, at least temporarily, and make positive contributions to this society," he said. "These are very educated and skillful scientists. Surely this great nation could absorb a few more talented people."

(...)

One of the few that has been made public is that of Dr. Paris Abdul Aziz, a mild-mannered engineer who oversaw a staff of more than 200 working on the nuclear centrifuge program. I met him in Obeidi's garden, and he told me that in the days after the invasion, he had gone to Saddam's former Republican Palace to offer cooperation to the U.S. military on behalf of himself and other top nuclear scientists. But U.S. officials only wanted to know if he knew where Saddam was hiding and where they might find WMD stockpiles. They never asked him back for another interview. Today, no one seems to know where he is. ‘We've been trying to get in touch with these guys for months,’ Albright says. ‘But by now they're probably so jaded and suspicious that they want nothing to do with the U.S.’” (Idem.)

“An even greater concern is the flight risk posed by scientists one level down: the technicians who have precise, hands-on knowledge of how to manufacture WMD com­ponents. Their expertise is priceless, especially to a covert program looking for engineers who know how to put the pieces together.

http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2005/09/armageddon-3.html

[originalpckelly]

3. I know how sensitive the firing mechanism is, it is the nuclear bomb...

without it, you have a hunk of radioactive junk. And these people have the fucking equations!!!!! That is just the worst fucking thing!!!!! The math is a major secret.

And Sean Hannity, Rick Santorum, and Rush Limbaugh all advertised to terrorists that this website existed. They all crowed about it because they thought they could go through and show Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. But all they released were designs, you actually have to build the weapons. And Saddam never would have been able to because of the sanctions on him.

And even given the choice between Saddam actually having a bomb or al-Qaeda, I'd pick Saddam any day. He was a person whom could be motivated by the concept of mutually assured destruction, a suicide bomber doesn't give a damn about their own lives. They may even WANT TO DIE!

That how fucking bad this is. It just doesn't get any worse.

[MadHound]

5. Please, calm down, stop hyperventilating, this really isn't a big deal

Frankly the information on how to build a functioning atomic bomb has been available for decades now. Hell, back in the late seventies a high school student in Ohio drew one up, and did a model, all as part of a high school project. Officials from the Pentagon, DOE and NRC who inspected his project were very impressed, stating that all the kid needed was the plutonium and it would go boom

Information for building the bomb, and various triggers, is publicly available information that can be accessed in decently sized public libraries and most major college libraries. No, it generally isn't available in Arabic, but given that many of the worlds' citizens learn English as a second language, does this really make much difference? No, it doesn't.

Face it folks, this is part of the price we're having to pay for letting the nuclear genie out of the bottle. We've been living with this knowledge for fifty years now, what Bush did was of no great importance in the greater scope of things.

[originalpckelly]

6. No, you're wrong, read the NYT piece:

"The documents, roughly a dozen in number, contain charts, diagrams, equations and lengthy narratives about bomb building that nuclear experts who have viewed them say go beyond what is available elsewhere on the Internet and in other public forums. For instance, the papers give detailed information on how to build nuclear firing circuits and triggering explosives, as well as the radioactive cores of atom bombs."

So no, this isn't the same thing. No, I won't stop, because this is that big of a deal.

[MadHound]

7. Do you believe everything you read in the paper?

I feel sorry for you if you do. Indeed, if this is the case, I recommend that you go do some research on how easy, and cheap, the CIA has found it to be for them to put agents in the newsroom, not merely watching, but indeed writing and publishing articles.

And who are these "nuclear experts" that the times are talking about? Pretty damn vague identification there, don't you think? Stop believing every damn thing that you read, OK. Use your head for something besides a hat rack.

Look, I am a nuclear expert, I've worked in the nuclear industry for years now. And I can state with authority that there is plenty of publicly available information from which you can build a nuclear bomb. It's been out there for years and decades, buried back in the stacks of large public and college libraries. Hell, go to your local university library, and you can probably pull up schematics of the bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I know that they're still available in my local university library. Take a look at these schematics and you will see just how damn easy it is to build such a device. The basics are simple, an amount of plutonium as the core, surrounded by carefully placed high explosives, all carefully time to go off at the same time. Basic, simple, easy to do, especially with the technology we possess today.

Lots of nuclear material regarding the bomb, fission, etc. etc. has been declassified and published over the last half century. And it is still out there, floating around, for all who have a mind to find. As I've said earlier, if it wasn't illegal, I would be willing to bet lots of money that I could build a nuclear bomb based soley on material that came from publicly available sources. As I said earlier, a high school student did this in the late seventies, his story was even told in Reader's Digest at the time. Don't believe me, go find somebody whose collection of RDs goes back that far and start reading.

It has never been the lack of knowhow that has prevented people from building a bomb, it has always been the lack of fissionable material that has prevented widespread proliferation of the bomb.

[WilliamPitt]

8. So...

...all the fissionable material laying around unguarded and unsecured in the former Soviet Union, combined with these directions - and yes, kemosabe, I do take these revelations seriously even though they're in the Times - does not make you nervous?

Hm.

[MadHound]

9. First off Will, despite your public status,

There is no need for you to be so damn condescending and rude. Kemosabe is considered to be a racist slur by many Native Americans, and your use of it is deragatory and condescending. I expected better from the great and mighty Will Pitt, but alas, he apparently has feet of clay and a tongue of dung like many others:shrug:

Now then, back to the main point of this discussion. I never said that I wasn't concerned about fissionable material floating around the Soviet Union, nor anywhere else. I fact I didn't mention it at all because that was not the point I was trying to make. We were, if you would read the discussion, talking about plans being posted by the Bush administration, and the fact that many people here are getting all worked up about this. And frankly, I think this is being overblown, for, as I stated earlier, one can figure out how to build a bomb using public sources that have been available for decades now. Does it concern me that this can occur, yes. So do lots of things. However the thing is to keep it all in perspective. If a person is looking to pick up plutonium, they probably have already figured out how to build a bomb without the help of these Bush documents.

What I truly thing is driving this hysteria is the fact that it is Bushco who put these latest set of documents out there, and that this is a last minute attempt to bring down Bush and the party. Well and fine in my book, but please, rather than resorting to such fake hysteria, be intellectually honest with yourself and the rest of us, OK. Otherwise such faux hysteria, driven by politics makes everybody on the left look bad.

[WilliamPitt]

10. Well

We'll just have to disagree on the main points. I never realized that word was an insult, and you have my apologies for using it. Apologies also for the snark; I'm out of my mind these days.

Great and mighty? Only after I eat oysters. ;)

[MadHound]

11. Oh man, no oysters please

I love the things, but damn, living here in the midwest they are flown in, and by the time they get here they're inedible. Last time I had them I was sick for days.

And we can agree to disagree on this one, that's fine. I just think there are more important things to worry about at this point in time, like another potentially stolen election, public apathy towards that fact, and two more years of 'Pug mob rule. That scares me more than bomb plans running around.

I didn't realize about kemosabe until my cousin-in-law clued me in. Hell, there have even been court cases regarding it, both here in the US and in Canada. It is a big no-no amongst most Native Americans.

Peace, and keep up the good work:hi: