Nuclear Ring Reportedly Had Advanced Design

[cal04]

Source: NYTimes

American and international investigators say that they have found the electronic blueprints for an advanced nuclear weapon on computers that belonged the nuclear smuggling network run by Abdul Qadeer Khan, the rogue Pakistani nuclear scientist, but that they have not been able to determine whether it was sold to Iran or the smuggling ring’s other customers.

The plans appear to closely resemble a nuclear weapon built by Pakistan, and first tested exactly a decade ago. But when confronted with the design by officials of the International Atomic Energy Agency last year, Pakistani officials insisted that Dr. Khan, who has been lobbying in recent months to be released from the loose house arrest that he has been under since 2004, did not have access to Pakistan’s weapons designs.

In interviews in Vienna, Islamabad and Washington over the past year, officials have said that the weapons design was far more sophisticated than the blueprints discovered in Libya in 2003, when Col. Muammer el-Qaddafi gave up his country’s nuclear weapons program. At that time he turned over blueprints of a large Chinese nuclear weapon that dated to the mid-1960’s. Investigators found that both had come from Khan network.

But the design found on Khan network computers in Switzerland, Bangkok and several other cities around the world is half the size and twice the power of the Chinese weapon, with far more modern electronics, the investigators say. The design is in electronic form, they said, making it easy to copy — and they have no idea how many copies of it are now in circulation.



Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/15/world/asia/15nuke.html?hp

[Newsjock]

1. Story is by David Sanger, a Judith Miller clone

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joseph-a-palermo/memo-to-david-sanger-and-_b_68457.html

Yesterday's lead story in The New York Times by David Sanger and Mark Mazzetti entitled, "Analysts Find Israel Struck A Syrian Nuclear Project: U.S. Officials See Early Stages of a Reactor, Possibly of a North Korean Design," is yet another example of Judith Miller/Michael Gordon-style stenography that serves the Bush Administration's foreign policy goals.

Memo to Sanger and Mazzetti:

You're terrific reporters, and I'm sure you're reporting exactly what was told to you. But your sources are unnamed intelligence officials and diplomats from the United States and Israel. Their task is not to tell people the truth but what they want people to hear. You've got to understand that any report from an unidentified intelligence or diplomatic source is what they want you to believe. It may not be true.

[1Hippiechick]

3. "Their task is not to tell people the truth but what they want people to hear." RIGHT ON!

:yourock:

[kristopher]

4. So now all we need to do is contunue with the Republican policy on nuclear enery

In order to get enough high level plutonium on the market being shipped around the world so that a little of that plutonium is diverted and ends of cooking San Francisco, baltimore or boston.

[formercia]

5. Like the 15 Kilos of weapons grade Plutonium that dissapeared

on the way to France from a shipment destined to make MOX fuel rods. A few Kilos here, a few Kilos there and the boys have their own independent nukular terrorist group.

[amandabeech]

10. Was that weapons grade?

I thought that had been run through a reactor once, and then sent to France.

Once the plutonium has been through a reactor, it's degraded significantly and requires a lot of reprocessing to become bomb grade again.

You don't happen to have a cite handy, by any chance?

[formercia]

12. Yes

The info has been scrubbed from the web. The articles originally appeared in US News and World Report in the 2004-5 time frame. I had made a reference to it on another site and when I tried to read it, my computer tried to make a secure connection to a .mil site. Obviously, someone is interested in keeping tabs on people trying to look it up.
The US News site has been scrubbed of the article as well.

[amandabeech]

14. Thanks for the info.

Very interesting.

[liberalmike27]

6. Even If True

One Pakistan has the bomb already, and other countries inevitably will. Just from watching movies I have a pretty good idea of the basic design, so it isn't like it is some sort of secret. You purify Uranium, or some other radiocative material, and place charges exactly in locations all around the perfectly shaped piece, and make sure they all go off together. Hell, doesn't anyone watch the movies.

I'm sure there are many technical details that would have to be worked out, but it isn't like the basic idea is hard to grasp.

The important thing is, with a bomb that is so easily designed, shouldn't we stop being so aggressive, and making enemies? You see, that's why we put so much into this stop the nukes thing. We want to be massively aggressive, run around and rub the 97 pound weakling countrie's noses into the sand. But if they have a nuke, they can make quite a mess. Why do you think weak countries that could use the money much more wisely in other areas, clamor to get them? So we need to stop being an agressive neighbor, and work on being a better neighbor.

I might add, the time has come to go back to local production of goods, as the real threat of them bringing a bomb into the U.S. in a shipping container needs to be thwarted by searching them all. To do this, we need far, far less coming into the country. With fuel costs these days, I read that this is already happening, as it makes production in foreign countries a more expensive prospect than bringing them here.

[daleo]

13. The so-called gun design is simplicity itself

The Hiroshima bomb was just two sub-critical hemispheres of enriched uranium, with one being fired down a barrel at the other to lead to critical mass and "boom". Getting the required amount of enriched uranium is the tricky bit.

[judasdisney]

2. CIA asked Dutch not to arrest AQ Khan in 1976

QUOTE:

When AQ Khan first acquired the centrifuge blueprints in Holland in 1976, the CIA asked the Dutch government not to arrest him.

Those who threatened to expose Khan's network - Richard Barlow, Sibel Edmonds, Valerie Plame, and the latest addition, Atif Amin - have been harassed, threatened and gagged.

According to Joe Trento:
The CIA even started using some of the Khan network’s front companies for its own purposes.

Maybe that explains it

The CIA watched over Khan's 'Islamic Bomb' project in Pakistan, and they watched over the proliferation - to Iran, to North Korea, to Libya, and to maybe a dozen other countries and terrorist groups like al Qaida.

At various times in the last 30 years, (elements of) the US and British governments:
a) actively assisted in the proliferation
b) tipped off the perpetrators to various stings
c) stopped investigations into the network
d) destroyed people who threatened the network: Richard Barlow, Sibel Edmonds, Valerie Plame, and the latest addition, Atif Amin.

In fact, the CIA apparently knew more about the Pakistan program than even Benazir Bhutto when she was Prime Minister.

http://lukery.blogspot.com/2008/01/sibel-edmonds-case-benazir-and-islamic.html?widgetType=BlogArchive&widgetId=BlogArchive1&action=toggle&dir=open&toggle=MONTHLY-1185890400000&toggleopen=MONTHLY-1201784400000

Get this information secured for yourself quickly before Skinner removes this post as he does with all my others like this

[ohio2007]

7. Smugglers Had Design For Advanced Warhead

An international smuggling ring that sold bomb-related parts to Libya, Iran and North Korea also managed to acquire blueprints for an advanced nuclear weapon, according to a draft report by a former top U.N. arms inspector that suggests the plans could have been shared secretly with any number of countries or rogue groups.

The drawings, discovered in 2006 on computers owned by Swiss businessmen, included essential details for building a compact nuclear device that could be fitted on a type of ballistic missile used by Iran and more than a dozen developing countries, the report states.

The computer contents -- among more than 1,000 gigabytes of data seized -- were recently destroyed by Swiss authorities under the supervision of the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency, which is investigating the now-defunct smuggling ring previously led by Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan. But U.N. officials cannot rule out the possibility that the blueprints were shared with others before their discovery


snip
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/14/AR2008061402032.html?hpid=topnews

I'm sure Khan would never have shared such info.

/sarc

[L0oniX]

8. Big deal. Any physics major could show you how to build a nuke.

Years ago, back in the 90's there used to be plans all over the still widely unknown, inet. The problem for nuke builders has always been getting the materials.

[Xenotime]

17. Agreed. The plans are on the Internet.

The US is so arrogant to think that if they have some nuclear device, it MUST have come from them.

[Davis_X_Machina]

9. Any American state university...

...with a School of Engineering and enough fissile material could produce a working bomb in a semester, using only graduate and undergraduate students, and the equipment already on campus.

The design is not the problem, obtaining the fissile materials is.

And it's been that way since the late '60's.

In John McPhee's 1974 The Curve of Binding Energy, Theodore B. Taylor explained how he would do it.

[FarCenter]

11. You need a calutron to do the final separation

They are still needed to do the final separation to get pure enough U235 or P230 for weapons-grade fissile material.

However, if you only want to purify enough raw uranium to make a very small number of weapons, it may be possible to use calutrons with superconducting magnets as the only enrichment technology. The numbers might be interesting.

[keopeli]

15. Why is a story published in 2006 about an incident in 2005 on the front page of NYT and WP?

Here's a quote from deep within:

"It was not until 2005 that officials of the I.A.E.A., which is based in Vienna, finally cracked the hard drives on the Khan computers recovered around the world."

Apparently, the story was published from the Swiss in 2006. Our own McCamy Taylor has the skinny:

"The Swiss and the U.N. found it in 2006. Bet you did not know that we have been in mortal danger for two whole years, even when the CIA Iran NIE gave us the "all clear"."

link

So, why is this on the front page of the NYT and WP? Drumbeats for war with Iran?

Inquiring (and skeptical) minds want to know.

[sofa king]

16. Also interesting: why didn't the CIA know?

And the answer to that is already clear: because the Bush Administration burned down the CIA's WMD team when they outed Valerie Plame Wilson and the front company behind which she and (apparently) the rest of her team were operating.

Now they're catapulting the IAEA's work--through the same media stooges they've relied on since before September 11, 2001--because they have no bullshit of their own to dish. Nice.