Everyone Know What a Spark-Gap is? [View All]

[The Whiskey Priest]

It’s the thing that makes the bomb go BOOM!!

It would seem that an Israeli/South African business man was engaged in trying to illegally export several of these to the Pakistani black-market.

As you may or may not know the Pakistani black-market is thought to have direct ties to all sort of bad people, mostly those operating in the Kashmir.

There is a long piece in Mother Jones about the case: http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2005/05/middleman.html

Among other things it would seem that Bush and his minions are not very interested in controlling the Spark-gaps….which by the way have a dual use of being used to bust up kidney stones.

A taste of the story:

“THE KARNI CASE RAISES questions about the use of third-country conduits for nuclear proliferation, about loopholes in the reporting of the sales of dual-use items, and about the ability of middlemen to mask dangerous transactions in the cloak of ordinary business. Those questions pervade the industry. On a gray day in late January, a hundred or so Silicon Valley technology executives filed into a ballroom at the Biltmore Hotel off Highway 101 in the bedroom community of Santa Clara, California. The scene was like any other gathering of specialists in a suburban hotel: airless, loaded with lexicon, scattered with porcelain cups of half-finished coffee. The subject, however, was far from mundane. The U.S. Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security was making its Northern California stop for a two-day seminar in Export Control regulations—informing the assembled salesmen and designers of some of America’s most sophisticated technology how to maneuver through the bureaucracy established to control the sale of dual-use technology to “the bad guys,” as one Commerce Department official explained to me. “
Don’t it make you feel all warm, safe and fuzzy?