Nuclear Fuel How-To 335
ATMosby writes "The BBC has an article that pretty much sums up everything you might need to know if you wanted to refine nuclear fuel and build some atomic weapons." From the article: "Uranium is the basic raw material of both civilian and military nuclear programmes. It is extracted from either open-cast pits or by underground mining. Although uranium occurs naturally all over the world, only a small fraction is found in concentrated ores. When certain atoms of uranium are split in a chain reaction, energy is released. This process is called nuclear fission."
Nothing new, check your encyclopedia (Score:3, Interesting)
The better informed the public is to how these things work, the better off we'll be in participating in our national policies. Saying that the information should be restricted is akin to arguing in favor of 'security through obscurity'. I argue that if you criticize both the BBC article and Microsoft for their security policies, then you're exhibiting traits of hypocrisy.
In the end, the part of the equation that's required is the presence of uranium. It's hard to get. It's even harder to mine/refine, especially in secret.
everything? (Score:4, Interesting)
This is true, in the same way
"Everything you need to know how to build a car is that pistons get pushed down by gas exploding which turns the crankshaft which turns the wheels"
is everything you need to know to build a car. Or
"Think of space as a sheet with masses as balls"
Is everything you need to know about general relativity
A general overview of anything is usually quite simple however in practise building a nuclear bomb is pretty difficult.
Oh come on... (Score:2, Interesting)
If you want plutonium, you need to have a working fission reactor, which ostensibly makes you subject to regular inspection (and is hard to hide). If you want Highly Enriched Uranium, the enrichment process requires things like production scale mass spectrometers, giant centrifuges, and nasty chemicals (uranium hexafluoride, anyone?)- basically, a large amount of equipment that serves little other obvious purpose.
Of course, what we've seen with North Korea in particular is that the rest of the world knowing you're try to build nukes isn't always a deterrent to building nukes anymore, and in fact makes a handy bargaining chip where you agree to stop making plutonium in exchange for something you want, and then once you get it, continue making plutonium anyway.
Newcular World Order (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:So? (Score:1, Interesting)
Does your theoretical standpoint include tossing as much Plutonium onto a pile until it goes boom? Or is the only theoretical standpoint that you have is that the concept of a chain reaction is simple.
If nuclear weapons are so theoretically simple, tell me why they need a beryllium source, vice using intrinsic neutrons from spontaneous fission (or other reactions). Why is a reflector needed if the bomb is designed to burn through from the center out? What fraction of the fuel is actually burned? Why are the specific energies of high energy neutrons released from fission more important than the average? How is the fuel orientated to minimize the effect of gammas heating the fuel?
No, the answer is that it appears simple because you do not know the details.
Re:So? (Score:3, Interesting)
The Reagan arms shipments [consortiumnews.com] to Iran might have reached a value of $82B. Even the smaller, officially admitted figures account for TOW missiles illegally shipped through Israel, which were strategically valuable to Iran in its Iraq war. That's what "Iran/Contra" was (half) about, but I suppose you've got some kind of "legitimate" explanation that excuses that illegal guns/drugs/policy scam.
The memos were confirmed by the secretary who was in the office at the time of the events, while the denial comes from someone connected only by relation, speaking in partisan "defense" for a dead person who acted independently, according to their conscience. Witness vs. self-interested hearsay, but your "bias" sensitivity is oneway, at best.
Newsweek's retraction acknowledged only that it was irresponsible to cite only a single, anonymous Pentagon source before publishing. Of course, Newsweek let the Pentagon review the story for days, without complaint, before publishing it. Only when the White House blamed the story for Afghan riots did Newsweek retract, though even the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff says the riots weren't caused by the story. While the military reports several acts of desecration ("inappropriateness"? talk about "bias"), including reports that they set of riots, and that a Koran was put into a toilet deliberately. Stories corroborated by independent people in the prisons, who had no way of synchronizing their stories. In prisons where other prisoners were being beaten, raped, electrocuted, and humiliated - "tortured" is the word, if you can forgive the bias towards "truth". I guess that the torture must be the product of our "left biased press". Which bias led them to promote Bush's lies about WMD, and Iraq's threat to the US, as much as possible. Screwball and Chalabi, Bush's uncorroborated anonymous sources, aren't biased, though - their WMD lies are true, right?
Many of these facts are reported by "left biased press", so I'm sure you'll ignore them. You dislike the conclusions drawn by the messenger, so the facts they document are irrelevant. Of course, you can't reply with an example of an "unbiased" source, because you prefer the rightwing propaganda you repeat. Which comes from the president and his execs, so it must all be true, right? Who needs the press, when the president can go around the filter, and tell us all the truth.