Nuclear Citizenry in Motion

........I'm not an alarmist folks, a realist actually. Someone would have to be specifically looking for the following non-classified argument, So here goes....If I can surf and figure some of it out, how about a terrorist cell phone bomb expert?....Hugh?

......To some, the threat of nuclear terrorism is closing in upon us, Chemical terrorism is at hand, and biological terrorism is a future danger. None of our 2500 Mega Ton's of nuclear weapons can protect us from these threats, can they?......

......Not a penny of the $425 billion (~$1600 per capita) dollars a year we spend on so-called defense, can actually defend us against a terrorist bomb, true? (Only "Delivered weapons via aircraft, submarine or ICBM are we technologically capable of vanquishing )

.......Nuclear (war) technology is in itself a fairly scary proposition. I have a large extended family, and I do worry....I worry that as I scan the internet for public domain details that are decades old, what technology is available to the terrorist cultures today?

........No matter how technically advanced our Laser/Killer Satellites are, no matter how many trillions of dollars were poured into them ... can "They" protect us from even a single hand delivered terrorist bomb? Am I overreacting the specifics?.......

It's been decided, we have to erode our constitutional rights, to protect ourselves. Bad Karma, tough choices , to Follow.....

.......The Justice Department has asked a federal judge to compel Google, the Internet search giant, to turn over records on millions of its users' search queries as part of the government's effort to uphold an online pornography law.(?????????????-I ask!).

.....Google has been refusing the request since a subpoena was first issued last August, even as three of its competitors, America Online, Yahoo and MSN, Microsoft's online service - had complied with subpoenas in the case., and agreed to provide information, according to court documents made public this week.

.....Not one weapon in our vast arsenal can shield us from a nuclear weapon delivered in a small boat, shipboard /53 foot tractor trailer container or a Cessna single engine plane or in a suitcase, or a Yellow Ryder rental truck.......

.....The warhead configuration of a suitcase nuke could simply consist of a tube with two pieces of uranium, which, when rammed together, would cause a blast. Some sort of firing unit and a device that would need to be decoded to cause detonation, may be included in the "suitcase."

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......I worry about these Suitcase nuke's or suitcase bomb's, they would contain a very compact and portable nuclear weapon and could have the dimensions as small as 60 x 40 x 20 centimeters or about 24 x 16 x 8 inches. The smallest possible bomb-like object would utilize a single critical mass of plutonium or

.....If Pu-239 was utilized, it could weigh as little as 10.5 kg and would be about 10.1 cm across. It doesn't take much more than a single critical mass of it to cause significant explosions ranging from 10-20 ton's........

.......It is the emissions of U-235 that are relatively trivial. Plutonium has a half-life 30,000 times shorter and is correspondingly more radioactive. It also typically has additional penetrating radiations such as gamma's and neutron's, different from Pu-240 and Am-241 contaminants, that create worker safety hazards in weapon grade material, and worse ones in non-weapon grade material..........

.....To accentuate my personal noncontagious paranoia, on 7 September 1997, the CBS news-magazine Sixty Minutes broadcast an alarming story in which former Russian National Security Adviser Alexander Lebed claimed that the Russian military had lost track of more than 100 suitcase-sized nuclear bombs, any one of which could kill up to 100,000 people! Oh Boy-just Peachy-Keen........

.....The CIA had intelligence reports from senior Arab intelligence officials alleging that in October 1998 bin Laden had obtained one or two nuclear suitcase weapons from a Central Asian republic in return for $30 million in cash and two tons of heroin worth $70 million - a deal brokered by the Chechen mafia.

......So how about that IRAQ/IRAN and the other preschool nuclear countries... what are we looking for in our Satellite photographs ?..... Emissions ..... Fissionable material acquisition..... Technology- of course...and a very well developed EGO /Determination of the futurist terrorist to be a PLAYER in the world politics of what my brother would compare t-shirt logo's like "My LAYWER CAN BEAT UP YOUR LAYWER". well...can they?........

.........The erosion of whole sections of the Bill of Rights quickened when the president signed the USA PATRIOT Act on October 26, 2001. With Attorney General John Ashcroft insisting on the crucial need for speed, the House passed the 342-page document by a vote of 356 to 56, although few had the chance to read it. ............Several members later said that parts of the new law seemed unconstitutional, but in view of the coming elections, they did not want to be attacked as "unpatriotic" by their opponents. In the Senate, only one senator, Wisconsin's Russ Feingold, voted against the PATRIOT Act.

....In the House or Representatives, dissenter David Obey of Wisconsin said bitterly, "Why should we care? It's only the Constitution.".................

......The Act has radically extended government electronic surveillance-on and off the Internet-with often reduced judicial review. For example, FBI agents can enter a home or office with a court order-while the occupants are not there-and insert the "Magic Lantern" (also known as the keystroke logger) into a computer.

...........I have always believed in the deterrent benefit of our (US/ALLIED) weapons strategy, bankrupting the Communists et al... however I think that we should have budgeted for the subsequent sale of Russia's Weapons / Technology /Hardware and Personnel, what's your opinion?

......In 1944, Nobel Laureate Friedrich Hayek wrote: "Though we neither can wish nor possess the power to go back to the reality of the nineteenth century, we have the opportunity to realize its ideals -- and they were not mean. We have little right to feel in this respect superior to our grandfathers; and we should never forget that it is we, the twentieth century, and not they, who have made a mess of things. If they had not yet fully learned what was necessary to create the world they wanted, the experience we have since gained ought to have equipped us better for the task. If in the first attempt to create a world of free men we have failed, we must try again. The guiding principle that a policy of freedom for the individual is the only truly progressive policy remains as true today as it was in the nineteenth century."..................

......The following is why terrorists can't simply "Make" their bombs, (LET ALONE a practical Delivery technology) this written section equates to an elementary dialog of rudimentary High School science..... And 2+2=4 level mathematics.....

..........The documented critical mass of weapons-grade uranium is about 48 kg, in the specific context of a bare sphere of uranium at normal density. The critical mass of a sphere of weapons-grade uranium, at normal density but surrounded by a reasonably efficient tamper-reflector is 15-20 kg depending on the exact composition of the tamper.

......And this same critical mass of a sphere of weapons-grade uranium, surrounded by a moderately efficient tamper-reflector, and compressed to twice its normal density, is 4-5 kg.

.....This has important implications for weapons design. If all you're going to do is slap together two hemispheres of HEU, they're going to be some pretty hefty hemispheres, 24 kg, just to get a hint of a nuclear reaction, and for a reasonable yield you really want two or three critical masses ......

......A gun-assembly bomb, while it does have the advantage of simplicity, is scarcely better than the slap-two-hemispheres-together (32 detonator's) ( FAT BOY) model. You can integrate a tamper-reflector with the gun, but only within limits. And you can't get any sort of compression out of a gun. So you're going to need 30-60 kg of HEU to make a bomb.

Thus.................................

.....With an implosion bomb, you can use the very best tamper/reflector materials, and then wrap the thing with explosive lenses that will compress the whole lot to twice normal density

..... Now you only need 8-15 kg of HEU to make a bomb, with about the same performance as the gun.

.......A proper reactor for producing weapons-grade plutonium is normally graphite-moderated and water-cooled. It isn't very useful for power generation, ( Gee where have we heard that particular terrorist Lie?) ......or anything except Pu production.

...... It's actually a bigger smoking gun for proliferation than enrichment. To take a nation that people trust, such as the Dutch or the Germans, they have large amounts of enrichment plant technology, and could make HEU any time if they wanted, but they don't have Pu production reactors. They make lots of civil plutonium , which has more of the isotopes that you don't want, and make a bomb prone to premature detonation with reduced yield.................. but nobody seems worried about that either.

..........Military significant amount of plutonium can be produced in much smaller reactors. The Hanford production reactors were originally 250 MW ( Today's top 3000MV!)... A 25 MW reactor can produce 6 kg a year, assuming operation for 250 days per year, enough for one weapon with 1st generation design techniques.......

...As far as Satellite/Infrared photographs of Iraq and Iran's reactors goes , Commercial coal or oil power plants are usually over 1 GW (thermal), so a large power plant would easily hide the thermal signature of a reactor. Petrochemical operations - burning field gas, advanced extraction techniques , steam injection, refining /cracking etc. -can also produce allot of covert camouflaged heat.

....If weapons-grade uranium is something you get by way of covert, illegal, industrial-scale alchemy at a cost that makes gold look cheap, you are not likely to throw up your hands and say, .........."Oh, when we get a hundred pounds of the stuff we'll let a high school shop class fashion a gun to use it".

........Our theoretical terrorists are going to do the math and take some money out of their uranium-enrichment budget, use it to send some of the best and brightest zealot's to university ( MIT Maybe?).... to figure out how to make four implosion bombs using the same hundred pounds of precious weapons-grade uranium that would have made one simple gun-assembly bomb. And incidentally make your first bomb that much faster.................

......That gives me the warm fuzzy that they will try and go the economical ( Long term) path, with time for the UN to forcibly abort their Nuclear progress! ......

Other Concerns:
........I have reacted like other US Citizens/Foreign Allies, to the controversy surrounding foreign control of our Sea Ports, inadequately protected National Borders and the ease, even after 9-11, of entering US customs with an assumed identity!

.....Our Airport's and Train stations, even with "Sniffer" Machines, Dogs, armed guards and beacoup video cameras, how can they stop a determined Terrorist that decides he or even she, will be compensated with Virgins and Camels in Heaven, and be rewarded with a postmortem GOLD stipend to their survivor family members in the $thousands$ ! I mean what kind of "Bonus" is that?.......

.....Another portable weapon I'm scared of is a nuclear "backpack" bomb. It could have as much as a 3-to-5 kiloton yield, depending on the efficiency of the explosion. The Soviet nuclear backpack system was made in the 1960s for use against NATO targets in time of war and consists of three "coffee can-sized" aluminum canisters in a bag. All three must be connected in line, to make a single unit explode.

......The detonator would be about 6 inches long, and each trigger is used to uniformly ignite a pentagon or hexagon of a very special form of plastique explosive, about the shape of a football , closely formed around a sub-critical sphere of metal. All the detonators have to go off simultaneously within microseconds to give a uniform "squeeze". Hence multiple speedy fuses. It's kept powered during storage by a battery line connected to the canisters....

....Speaking of Triggers : a few years ago...ISRAEL was facing the possible embarrassing new scrutiny of its unconfirmed nuclear weapons program, after the arrest in Spain of an American arms dealer who has been on the run for 16 years.

......He had been charged with selling 850 Krytron nuclear triggers to the Israelis. ( An absolutely/Mandatory device for the do it yourselfer bomber/martyr/all around terrorist ).......

....Bigger news the other day, was about smuggling parts for nuclear bomb triggers to Iraq. TV news said they were "capacitors." On the McNeil-Lehrer news hour on PBS, an expert called the devices "Krytron's and said that although they have other uses, the nuclear-trigger application is so "classic" that they require an end-user certificate for export...

.....Krytrons are used in nuclear weapons to control the discharge of high voltage capacitors with microsecond-precision into the multiple bridge wires used to detonate the explosive array elements.

.....The trade name "Krytron" is owned by EG&G. and is manufactured today as a thyratron , and is the gas tube predecessor of a silicon controlled rectifier (SCR).

.....Since a 2D21 or equivalent industrial thryratron will do the job almost as well I'm not so sure why they were worried....

........I suspect that the Krytron issue is merely an easier way for certain government agencies to get "good press" about anti-nuclear proliferation efforts. I would be MUCH more concerned about the "Other Problems" in nuclear industry than any issue involving Krytrons since they won't do anyone one iota of good without fissile material!

.......US Nuclear Weapon accidents are practically nonexistent today. I saw a program on the History Channel about the various Broken Arrows ( Nuclear Incident's) that have occurred in the past. What we have to realize is that weapon's Chute deployment circuits , altitude, inertial ( spin) , (accelerometer) switches, ready-safe device's, and ground approximation sensors (A Total of 5-8 safety system's) play a major role in nuclear arm and disarm security. The weapon has got to feel that it is the right time to continue with the arming process which begins at release.......

.......As a secondary "Failsafe" PAL devices are a separate circuit that are built into the weapon so a foreign country ( Allied ) can use them (England). The US must enable the PAL before use.

.....As far as US testing , a guesstimate of the largest test conducted, was around 141 megatons. There probably have been somewhere in the vicinity of 815 underground tests, mostly under 20 kt, but a few in the megaton range, and a bunch in an intermediate range (50-500 kt), but most underground tests do not have precise yields quoted, only ranges of yield.

.....WASHINGTON, Oct 14, 2001 (United Press International via COMTEX) -- " Israeli security last month arrested a man linked to suspected terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden armed with a radiological backpack bomb, as he attempted to enter Israel from the Palestinian Territories via a border checkpoint at Ramallah, according to U.S. government officials.

Ok what is a radiological Backpack "Dirty" bomb?

.....A dirty bomb is not really a nuclear bomb. Instead, a dirty bomb uses a conventional HE explosive to disperse deadly radiation. Technically, dirty bombs are considered "radiological dispersion devices." Some designs call for devices that simply emit radiation without requiring an explosion to produce the deadly result. This variation is known as a "radiation emission device." Or "RED" , "EMP" weapon. (Neutron Bomb)

.....Another Story...I can not vouch for the first hand accuracy of this, however the internet story goes thus....Once upon a time A public storage facility in NYC changes hands...

.....The new owners are gung-ho and thorough and one of the first things they do is check the rental records of the company. They note an oddity: a bay that was paid up in full for twenty years in 1981 and never visited after 1970. Attempts to contact the renter go nowhere fast and after some legal paperwork gets filed they open the bay to find an object that looks to one of them like a bomb of some sort. A 911 call soon follows. The bomb squad that shows up very quickly realizes that while the device is a bomb, it is not a bomb they are equipped to handle, as it appears to be a US-made B-53 nine megaton nuclear device. The task force OEMT is sent to the site to deal with the problem quietly, although by this time the press has been alerted by one of the bomb squad members and a certain amount of alarmist headlines soon follow. The device was on a timer but appears to have totally failed to go off for reasons that are not clear. Go Figure ...scares me...

.....Of course the US had the unique individual technology of the nuclear 155mm cannon/tank round. They were around 41 inches long and IIRC , which is a bit longer than a standard HE projectile but not as long as the Copperhead CLGP.

.....And since you are talking about a 155mm system, that is the projectile only--those kind of guns used separate propellant charges. Weight of the nuclear round is given as 118 pounds.

Boosted Fission...." non techies can skip to the end, need not read...Whatever...

.....First...today, the amount of tritium (3H) used for a boosted-fission device is typically between 10 and 30g. Most of the small light-weight weapons are using this boosting technique. Total Tritium amount for the US, e.g. 10.000 devices would be approximately 200kg. Tritium has a half-life of about 12.36 years, an important # providing for long-term continuance.....

......At a minimum usage, the consideration that 3 grams (a mole) would produce 1 mole of neutrons , and fission 1 mole (239 g) of plutonium directly, with a yield of 4 kt or so. With modest multiplication in the core, it should reasonably drive a yield of 10 kt or more, sufficient for triggering a thermonuclear weapon. Neutron bombs required more in line with 10+ grams......

.....Tritium-Deuterium or Deuterium-Deuterium fusion reactions are used in Fission weapons as a neutron generator . Tritium-Deuterium generates higher energy neutrons by "boosting "the fusion weapons. Tritium is a "mild" radioactive material, of which the Beta radiation is stopped by 0.2 mm water. 3H is used for luminescence watch dials...I never Knew !

.....A few grams of it will essentially supercharge the fission reaction by fusion reactions between the tritium and deuterium, which start when the temperature's are about what, -250 or 300- tons of fission yield in a bomb.

..Second...It can be used as part of a system called "pulsed neutron generation" which as the name implies, uses electricity to fuse tritium and deuterium in a compact particle accelerator.

....That fusion, like boosting fusion, releases neutrons, which then speed up the reaction or change/advance the timing in a fission bomb. It also may be used in the fusion parts of a thermonuclear or H-bomb, in similar fashions to supercharge the reactions as they are starting up......

.....There was some public discussion years ago, related to the shutdown of the last Savannah River reactor, that this was the last remaining (US) production of tritium, which was needed for thermonuclear weapons stockpile maintenance. That tritium had a half life somewhere in excess of a decade, and that there was a period of several years to resolve or "backfill" that particular production void, there were concerns......

...... It's believed that most or all US (and probably, Russian, French, Chinese, English, and possibly many Israeli, Pakistani, and Indian) bombs are boosted fission or boosted fission first stages in thermonuclear bombs
IN CONCLUSION (For now anyway...)

.....The former chair of the United Nations disarmament committee said there are more than 16,000 strategic and tactical nuclear weapons worldwide, ready for deployment, and another 14,000 in storage.

......The U.S. has nearly 7,000 ready for action and 3,000 in storage...

.....Russia has about 8,500 on hand and 11,000 in storage, he said. According to Roche's book, China has 400 nuclear weapons, France 350, Britain 200, Israel 200, India 95 and Pakistan 50. NATO has stationed 480 U.S. nuclear weapons in Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, Germany and Turkey.

.....As of February 2005 Defense Intelligence Agency analysts were reported to believe that North Korea may already have produced as many as 12 to 15 nuclear weapons.

.....This nation was at it's strongest prior to 9-11, because we as a people had retained and defended the freedoms we were blessed with by our founding fathers. Yet ,today is another Day.

I am afraid society and the world has outgrown our ability to afford our former innocence as a nation.

.....The devastation of September 11th is inexcusable, the criminals should be caught and tried and punished. Yet does this mean we as a nation should expect our own everyday personal freedoms to be lessened because of a minority of fanatical individuals in the world?.......

.....It worries me as an American citizen when the government has decided to use resources to investigate our personal tastes in what we do with our minds.....

.....Recently our FBI has been allowed to investigate public library records to monitor the reading habits of citizens.

....The veil of a perceived threat can now include individual incarceration by the government without bail or a charge of a crime to any citizen.

.....A single misplaced word, spoken or written can cause investigation into innocent personal lives.

.....Security agencies ill prepared and unwilling to work together since their creations are now forming alliances.

This is America? Let's work for our Freedom's...I have faith we can help, somehow....

Signed,

An American Vietnam Veteran

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# posted by Nuclear Citizens in Motion : 3/16/2006 11:22:00 AM