Wonkette
Hey everyone, it’s September 9 today, meaning that in only two days it’ll be… what will it be?… uh oh, WE FORGOT. HA HA HA, boy howdy. But yes: in two days it will be the seven (7) year anniversary of the day Rudy Giuliani couldn’t protect his own city from being attacked by commercial airplanes. And so for the next few days the Main Stream Media will “celebrate” with a slew of op-eds that sound like they were written in October, 2001. In today’s New York Times, for example, the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg has written the most terrifying, apocalyptic piece so far this season: that we have a 50% chance of getting nuked by terrorists in the next 10 years, according to Experts.
Good lord, these opening two paragraphs are making us want to randomly invade Iraq all over again:
THE next president must do one thing, and one thing only, if he is to be judged a success: He must prevent Al Qaeda, or a Qaeda imitator, from gaining control of a nuclear device and detonating it in America. Everything else — Fannie Mae, health care reform, energy independence, the budget shortfall in Wasilla, Alaska — is commentary. The nuclear destruction of Lower Manhattan, or downtown Washington, would cause the deaths of thousands, or hundreds of thousands; a catastrophic depression; the reversal of globalization; a permanent climate of fear in the West; and the comprehensive repudiation of America’s culture of civil liberties.
Many proliferation experts I have spoken to judge the chance of such a detonation to be as high as 50 percent in the next 10 years. I am an optimist, so I put the chance at 10 percent to 20 percent. Only technical complications prevent Al Qaeda from executing a nuclear attack today. The hard part is acquiring fissile material; an easier part is the smuggling itself (as the saying goes, one way to bring nuclear weapon components into America would be to hide them inside shipments of cocaine).
An “optimist,” eh, GOLDBERG? Does he know nothing! After Nine Eleven, being a dandy “optimist” is mere code for “If I, Jeffrey Goldberg, were playing a game of soccer, or football as the Muslims call it, against the Terrorists, I would be so distracted with my thoughts of pretty rainbows and unicorns that I’d show up late for the kickoff and be forced to forfeit, which literally means that the Terrorists would win.”
More importantly: why is this, the nuking of a city, such a litmus test for a president’s success? Depends on the would-be nuked city. Hell, for the next ten seconds, just from the top of our heads, we’re gonna rattle off some American cities that everyone would love to see nuked: Detroit, Cleveland, Baltimore, Houston, Tampa Bay, Orlando, really anywhere in Florida, Richmond, Phoenix, Reno, fucking WASHINGTON D.C…. out of time. Albany.
So we should just hedge and tell the terrorists they’re free to nuke any of these cities; we’ll even give them that fissile shit and twine and duct tape and whatever the hell they need.
On Nov. 4, Remember 9/11 [NYT]
I think the odds of getting hit by a giant asteroid are still SLIGHTLY higher than that. Did I mention that I was struck by lightning today and also got a pot o’ gold after torturing its whereabouts out of a surly little dude in a green suit?
“Only technical complications prevent Al Qaeda from executing a nuclear attack today.”
How true. And only technical complications prevent me from getting with Scarlett Johansson and flying away with her to the moon.
there’s a joke in here about sarah palin charging the terrorists to smuggle their bomb or something, but I can’t quite see it.
ONLY technical difficulties eh? Psshaw! How hard it is REALLY to mine Uranium ore, refine it, spin it in centrifuges, handle it properly and shape it into a fissile core, and then create a careful-timed electrical detonator, all while stuffing it into a non-suspiciously-sized package?
Hell, they showed us how to do that in MAKE magazine last quarter! Goldberg needs to start building his bunker RIGHT NOW! OH NOEZ!
johnbpt: OH! Yours is better
But I’d replace Scarlett with Anne Hathaway. Meeow!
Twine?! Don’t share our NUCULAR secrets with the enemy! We all know that they regularly read this and other liberal terrorist blogs.
I thought Loser Americans were getting naked for a second there, instead of nuked. As a Loser American, let me just say, “What a let down.”
Remember when lois from family guy wins a debate simply by saying “9-1-1″ over and over?
It’s like that.
apocalypsethen: Anyone see a remake of South Park’s “Snuke” episode being apt right now?
This is why Sarah Palin should be Vice President. She will bake so many brownies for the terrorists that they will get fat and unmotivated. After that, she will ban the Koran, again, for Jesus.
I don’t care when or where this eventual attack happens, I just care who Tweets about it first.
You forgot Wasilla…or does that not count because there aren’t enough people?
president palmer paved the way for barry, or so the experts say. also, the last season of 24 blew. i’m giving jack one last chance…
lastly, i HATE twitter.
on teevee a guy said if you combine a horseshoe and a leprechaun, you have a 98% chance of success. i hope the bad guys weren’t watching.
Can I add Wassila Alaska to the list?
MargeSimpsonsBlackFriend: Nono, they’re safe. See, them terrorists don’t like the cold an’ sech, since that there frosty weather shatters their beards and shrivels their balls, emasculating them in the eyes of their Moosleem jeebus.
Mooslem Jeebus would be a good name for a band
As I was reading Goldberg’s piece this morning, I was seized by a sudden stab of hope - if the odds are really THAT high of a nuclear explosion in a major American city, then there is a decent chance that I will be vaporized by terrorists before November and I won’t have to actually experience the wretched presidential election or the hideous aftermath that is sure to follow.
capitol hillbilly: …This just in, police are asking anyone who sees a horse being ridden by a ginger midget, I repeat, A GINGER MIDGET to immediately shoot both on site and burn the corpses.
shortsshortsshorts:
It’s the terrorists who are the brownies.
Sarah knows how to deal with them because Alaska is close to Russia, which shares a continent with Asia, which has a lot of brownies therein.
El Paso, for the love of Allah would someone please nuke El Paso. As a bonus you would also be getting Ciudad Juarez.
People in Hiroshima and Nagasaki commented: “Reeeeally? hope it happens during prime time so we can watch it on CNN while sipping cosmos.”
Wow, that Goldberg thing is so annoying I’m not even going to read page 2. He harps on Obama for mentioning that the perpetrators of the 1993 WTC bombing were all captured and are now imprisoned, like that’s some sort of strategic failure:
“And yet, the World Trade Center is gone. Eight years after the first attempt, Ramzi Yousef’s uncle, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, organized a more successful attack. The successful prosecution of the original bombers lulled the country into a counterfeit calm.”
Hey Jeffrey — you’re fuckin’ wroooong. The country was not lulled into a counterfeit calm. As a matter of fact, Bill Clinton ratcheted up the anti-terrorism machine right after the 1993 bombing. You have to get to January to September of 2001 before you get to the counterfeit calm part — and that was when Dubya was so concerned about his precious missile defense boondoggle that he was ignoring little items like “Osama bin Laden determined to strike inside United States.”
So if you want to stop the terrorists, I’d suggest you vote Gore in 2000. I have the strange feeling he would’ve paid attention to shit like that. True, your precious McCain might cut a defiant figure while standing on top of a heap of rubble, but I’d prefer the president who might actually stop a terrorist act, not make us more likely to experience one.
“He must prevent Al Qaeda, or a Qaeda imitator, from gaining control of a nuclear device and detonating it in America.”
I don’t know but I think it would be kind of helpful if the CURRENT president was working on this as well. What’s W been doing lately (other than trying to finish “My Pet Goat”?) I know he’s just coasting to the end praying that nothing happens that will make him look like more of an inept fool than he already is but at least pretend like you’re doing something meaningful about this.
loudmouthredhead: A ginger midget should be shot on sight anyway, really.
If a guy says we have a 50% chance of being nuked, who am I to argue. It’s not like he can base that on anything tangible, just take it on faith that it’s 50%. Every day for the next 10 years you have a 50% shot of getting nuked. Unless it doesn’t happen, then it’s 50% for the 10 years after that. And on and on. Until we get nuked and then we go dig up the time capsule Goldberg left us a thousand years ago and it says “See, I told you.”
He was right all along.
http://thesebastards.blogspot.com/
loudmouthredhead:
For me it would have to be Penelope Cruz, or any Japan Airlines stewardess… doesn’t matter which. Just choose one at random.
I’m still counting on the earth being swallowed by a black hole in the next couple days because of that collider thing in Switzerland. Forget about nuclear weapons.
…all of these nuclear apocalypse ass-hats are really getting on my nerves. First building a “nuclear weapon” is different than building a “nuclear device”. A nuclear device is what N.Korea has; it’s device that can achieve fission but often times is so big, fragile and unreliable that there is no way it can be used as a reliable/realistic weapon. A “nuclear weapon” on the other hand is an extremely advanced piece of technology that is easily deliverable, durable and powerful. Not only does it take hundred of millions of dollars but also years of advanced technical know how to effectively weaponize a nuclear device. So unless Al Queda has an advanced nuclear test facility in the mountains of Tajikistan(which would be the biggest target for a cruise missile that you could imagine) the odds of them developing a nuclear weapon is less than zero. Then you have the dick-weeds that propagate the myth that Iran or some other “Rogue Nation” will simply give terrorist a nuclear weapon. Well the problem with this, is all nuclear weapons have their own distinguishing characteristics when they detonate. These are essentially a finger print as to which country produced it. That being said there is no way any country would give Al Queda a nuclear weapon because it would easily be traced to them and we wouldn’t hesitate to turn their country into a smoldering pile of radioactive ash! In my opinion the chances of the U.S. being nuked by Russia/China are far more likely than from a terrorist organization(thanks WALNUTS!).
“He left college to move to Israel, where he served in the Israeli Defense Forces as a prison guard during the First Intifada.”
Yeah…totally objective, this guy.
the reversal of globalization
So it wouldn’t be all bad then?
Godless Liberal *: Hell, I’m a ginger, and even I’M revolted by my the thought.
Garble: But but, won’t you think of the children (who make our plastic knickknacks)?
SayItWithWookies: Thanks, Wooks. Rational.
This fear shit is so played.
NotNotLickingToads: “…He’s also president of the ‘ZOMG, Joe Lieberman is dreamy and I wanna have his babies!!!’ fan club, Haifa chapter”
NotNotLickingToads:
Truly. I mean let’s consider that Kim Jong Il, with an entire nation as his secret playground and probably thousands of scientists at his disposal, just recently built his first bomb, and it proved to be a dud.
I’m not saying it could never happen… just that the fearmongering is likely unjustified by the actual threat.
I’m not sure if everyone understands what Mr. Goldberg is getting at. Please allow me to translate:
Ahem…BOOGITY! BOOGITY! BOOGITY!!!! Vote Republican!
One positive about New York being nuked is that maybe small town America will stop mocking us as “liberal elites” and go back to cynically exploiting images of our dead.
is fear really all that party has left to offer?
I just wonder, while we’re thinking about how good 9/11 was for the Republicans, do we know for sure who Palin sold that plane to? Just askin’…
AngryBlakGuy: Full of win.
Wow, a “permanent climate of fear in the West.” I can’t even imagine what that would be like.
Clearly our only hope of avoiding such a fate is for prophet-of-doom journalists to publish more paranoid articles filled with terrifying possibilities. Oh, that and to keep growing a cult of celebration for a terrorist attack.
AngryBlakGuy: Wow, ABG, you really know some stuff about this stuff. All this dire prediction stuff is just an excuse for warrantless wiretapping, secret trials with bogus evidence, torture, and other abrogations of our former civil liberties. Goldberg, whose mommie is a vicious cunt, is just shilling for Bush here. You gotta like the argument: if we don’t give up our civil liberties now, it’ll be even worse later! Four more years!!!1!
Miller, Wonkette is not an platform to advertise your lame-ass blog.
Bullshit. Period.
MAD, or Mutually Assured Destruction, worked against a country that had 1000s of warheads. Despite what one may think, they, meaning terrorists, don’t want to push us hard enough to make their destruction assured and since the whole M part of that equation doesn’t really exist it is even less likely.
IF…IF they could construct, ship and detonate a nuclear device in a major city without being detected or sold out first, we would turn into glass every place that so much as had an Al Queda calendar hanging up on a wall (and yes, they make them). This would not bring about any kind of resolution to the arab/islamic people and contrary to our own nutcases, they don’t have any Dominion issues in their religion.
Of course we don’t want the proliferation of nukes, but this is a scare tactic to justify budgets and elections. If we were to do a cost analysis of the cost per dead bad guy Americans would go apeshit…unless they thought the risk was great.
So yeah, we need to chase these fuckers down, but they ain’t about to nuke us anytime soon.
“Many proliferation experts I have spoken to judge the chance of such a detonation to be as high as 50 percent in the next 10 years.” Just WTF is a “proliferation expert?” Could it be someone whose career is dependent on everybody worrying about something like, uh….proliferation? And if so, would such an “expert” have any other opinion?
Many douche-bag-identification experts that I have spoken to judge Jeffrey Goldberg to be a platonic example of same.
whattaya got against Richmond? My daughter lives there! she’s mentally ill! She votes Democrat! There’s not a case-and-effect there!
As to the other cities, yeah, what the fuck.
Pawdedoo: Second the motion. I’ve got a long rant on this topic on my blog, flogmyblog.com.
The US military established a long time ago that a couple of Ph.D. physicists could engineer a bomb end to end:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/jun/24/usa.science
Drink up! It’s later than you think…
noun, verb, 911. repeat.
HAHAHA The Repdoucheicans caused us to get into all these sticky messes so we should cling to them in our time of need to get us out of it–someday.
This is a steaming pile of fear (and it smells like shit).
Ah, the Republican party’s old standby: accept your horrible and rapidly worsening standard of living and just be glad you’re not radioactive vapor.
I love the “smuggle it in with drugs” angle. Because those Columbians will be totally down with killing off their customers.
Walnuts knows all about crashing planes into people.
well, with someone like snowbilly in charge we can be assured immediate retribution, irak style against whomever is out of favor at the moment. I pick South Ossetia. They’ve been realy getting on my nerves by complaining when Georgia attacked them. At least Akazia had the balls not to be attacked.
nutshell king: me too. amazing.
shortsshortsshorts: ftw
Glad to see chicago is not on the List’O'Places-To-Nuke. I’m rather partial to my hair and skin.
Da Derga: Isn’t Boogity!!! Boogity!!! Boogity!!! Vote Republican the official motto of NASCAR?
Much as I hate, once again, to introduce facts into a Wonkette discussion:
1. The hardest part of constructing a nuclear bomb is getting the fissile material. Unless a terrorist group steals the fissile mate4rial, or it is “donated,” this is the biggest obstacle - and likely always will be, given the technologies involved. (And if you are going to steal weapons grade fissile material - why not just steal/buy a weapon?)
2. It is relatively easy to build a U-235 weapon, as opposed to a PU-239 device. The latter has to use implosion technology (plastic explosive lens) and relatively sophisticated electronics, due to the risk of pre-detonation as the fissile material reaches critical mass. But a U-235 device doesn’t have this problem, and could be cobbled together out of a piece of five inch pipe and a little black powder. (That was the basic design of the Hiroshima bomb, and all “gun type” assembly devices.)
3. The idea that there is a substantial difference between a “device” and deliverable “weapon” largely turns on the type of delivery system. There can be significant engineering issues in trying to put a nuclear core into an artillery shell (e.g., a 155 mm howitzer round); a bomb; or a missile warhead. But a terrorist could build a “bread board” type “weapon” into a standard commercial cargo shipping container, which is the size of a small room. (If you think that the U.S.’s screening of such cargo containers is effective . . . well . . . .)
4. The idea that nuclear weapons are “traceable,” after detonation, via trace elements and/or fission byproducts used to be true, more or less, when there were only a limited number of reactors/facilities producing fissionable material. (This was the gist of the plot point in “The Sum of All Fears.”) But as the nuclear fuel cycle technology has spread to other countries, it has gotten harder to prove, either conclusively or to a reasonable degree of scientific certainty, that “fissionable material X came from reactor Y in country Z.”
5. Probabilities such as those touted by Goldberg are utterly meaningless unless you know the basis for the calculation (if any). In terms of the possible use of nuclear weapons, the world arguably is less safe nowadays than it was during the height of the Cold War, when only the major players had a nuclear capability. On the other hand, both the USSR and USA had an enormous number of deliverable weapons/devices (over 30,000 each), a substantial number of which were on alert status, e.g., “cocked and locked.” In terms of probabilities, I prefer the current situation — although I would not want to live in the capital cities of Pakistan, India, Israel . . . or this country.
AfghanVet: …that price per body count thing actually sounds interesting. Anyway we can get a guestimate?
V572625694: …in all honesty Neo-Cons make it seem like you can put together a Nuke in your garage using spare parts from your ‘79 Ford Pinto and a schematic you buy off of E-Bay.
As long as they leave New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Boston untouched, I really couldn’t care less about the rest of the country. Fuck you, Small Town America.
grendel: Mooslem Jeebus would be a good name for a band
Even better:
Mooslem Jeebus and the Partisan Rancors
AngryBlakGuy:
a schematic you buy off of E-Bay.
You KNOW who put it on E-Bay, right?
Neilist: To inject even more facts, it seems that most people read only the first few paragraphs of Goldberg’s piece, which, admittedly, amount to little more than fear-mongering. Once you reach, the second page, however, you being to realize something: he’s *not* actually shilling for the Republicans. Look at this tasty quote:
“There is no one in Washington more sincerely gripped by the issue than John McCain, but he comes with his own set of problems on matters of counterterrorism, not least of which is his rhetorical excess, and his strange decision, given his (justifiable) preoccupation with the issue, to choose as his running mate the figurehead commander of the Alaska National Guard.”
The second page can be summarized as, “Both Obama and McCain are imperfect choices, but at least an Obama administration would understand the basics of the current world situation, which is far more than I can saw for McCain, who thinks Hamas and Iran are working together.”
d4g33z: …it would not be a weaponized version. All the technology required to make a nuclear weapon is on a nuclear proliferation black list. This is how we discovered that both Iran and N.Korea had nuclear programs. I’m pretty sure 2 nuclear physicist could eventually build a nuclear device but there is no way they would be able to obtain all of the materials without setting off alarm bells. Secondly there is NOWHERE on the planet they would be able to test their designs or technology without the U.S./China/Russia detecting it. In a theoretically perfect storm, where you have access to design schematics, materials, proper containment facilities, testing facilities and hundreds of millions of dollar yes 2 physicist more than likely could put together a NUCLEAR DEVICE. But if a nation as large as Iran with their resources cant secretly build one, what makes you think 2 mad scientist in a basement can?
This is how the world ends.
Thanks, Jeffrey! Your valiant efforts may help push us into yet another war. Your parents are proud of you now. You’re a good boy. Such a very good boy.
Neilist: …getting enough weapons grade fissile material represent only half of the difficulty of building a nuclear device/weapon. The technology required to reliably and safely detonate such device is just as difficult to produce from scratch. If it was easy to produce then Syria, Iran and Sadaam would have all had at least a couple nuclear weapons by now. Its been widely recognized over the past couple years, that Iran has enough fissile material to make 2 or 3 nukes. However they don’t yet have one because of technological hurdles and its been presented that they wont have one for at least 5 years. Technology makes the difference between getting nuclear detonation and a nuclear fizzle. Tracking trace elements from a detonation is still accurate because, despite there being more reactors in the world today you have to ask yourself how many of them are in countries easily accessible by terrorist? Not very many(I only count 2, N.Korea and Iran)
The ending of the piece is its highpoint: ‘because nothing else matters.’ If your kid gets sick, and you don’t have health insurance, it doesn’t matter. If more Americans develop diabetes because they’re pretty much eating nothing but processed corn syrup, it doesn’t matter. If global warming wreaks havoc, it doesn’t matter. If the banking system collapses, and your retirement account disappears, it doesn’t matter. If your job is shipped overseas, it doesn’t matter. If a hurricane destroys another American city because we let our infrastructure rot, it doesn’t matter. All that matters is countering a hypothetical threat in a way that we can never be certain is working or not.
Oh, and Jeffrey? Maybe an awful terrorist attack wouldn’t mean “the comprehensive repudiation of America’s culture of civil liberties” if we really fought for civil liberties in advance of such an event, which may or may not ever happen.
in 1950 (not that i remember it), walter winchell said we would be nuked within 5 years. just sayin’.
I bloody well hope they get us before the election. I have visions of our New National Everymom waggling her righteous finger in all our faces and washing our collective mouths out with Lava soap.
Maybe if someone bothered to take out Osama Bin Laden, the chances wouldn’t be so high.
Just sayin’.
4tehlulz: The excuse Bush gives for not pursuing bin Laden is laughable. While it might be true that he isn’t currently planning or funding any terrorists attacks, the symbolic effect his capture would have is immeasurable. He is followed with messianic zeal by all of the al Qaeda splinter groups, who believe they are completing a task from god. I have to imagine their recruiting materials really play up the god angle, and pointing to the fact that the US hasn’t yet captured bin Laden probably reinforces for these people that god is on their side. Snatching him up and frog-marching him across the world would help mute that message.
So Giuliani couldn’t defend New York against terrorists crashing airplanes, eh? I hadn’t heard about this but I’m not surprised. I’ll look it up on teh googlz later. You know another terrorist airplane crasher? John McCain. Looks like he had a lot in common with the New York guys, except that he survived. If the New York guys had survived, they would also be running for president. I don’t think that pansy Obama ever crashed an airplane did he?
In other logic news, if the probability of a nuclear attack within 10 years is 50%, then the probability of a nuclear attack within 20 years is 100% and within 40 years it’s 200%. I will be advising my children to breed early and often.
Neilist: NO, those are good facts, because, as you point out, the only way to assess a risk calculation is from its assumptions. That is, a calculated risk always rests on uncertainties–otherwise it isn’t a risk, it’s a certainty.
Which belies the rhetorical misdirection Goldfuckheadberg employs.
AngryBlakGuy: And, being elitist “defense intellectuals,” most neocons are baffled by instructions for an Ikea bookshelf.
AngryBlakGuy: It’s called MASINT my friends. If we really wanted to, we could track Putin by his farts.
RuperttheBear: Well, actually, neo-tards do risk calculation via the “Cheney Method” (TM) which is the “One Percent Doctrine”. This doctrine states that if there is even a 1% chance that it will happen then we should act. The propoganda that goes with it is, “We have to be right all the time, they only have to be right once.” It’s all bullshit from people who never learned to do risk analysis at Yale.
Risk = PROBABILITY x COST
This simple equation is lost on the neo-tards as they hate spending tax money unless it means they can spend it on contractors, with whom they own stock, who build systems and machines that are wildly expensive and address something that in all probability will not happen.
If, as Darth Cheney thinks, something has a 1% chance of happening, then one should calculate the cost if that risk actually happens.
So, if the hit to the economy would be, say $1 Trillion dollars…then one should reasonable spend 1% of $1T dollars…IF you really thought 1% or $1T was worth preventing. Problem is, resources are finite and therefore one must prioritize what is worth mitigating. This is where JUDGMENT comes in and this is where the neo-tards FAIL big time. Hence, $470 Billion deficit.
Hey, fuck you - Tampa is God’s Own Debauched Town-on-the-Bay. We have a football team, an Air Force Base, and several drunken street festivals. We have Cuban sandwiches and flying Palmetto bugs. We have more strip clubs than any city but Vegas. We have the Redneck Riviera. We have as many gays as we have bible bangers. And we’re having Super Bowl whatever the hell number it is, in 2009!!!
So eat a bowl of Shut the Fuck Up, you Yankee elitist douchehounds. Come down here and say it to my face!!!
“Many proliferation experts I have spoken to judge the chance of such a detonation to be as high as 50 percent in the next 10 years. I am an optimist, so I put the chance at 10 percent to 20 percent.”
Is this some kind of “new math”? Will this be a new standard in reportage: the “expert” view and the “optimist” view, each featuring completely fabricated and entirely contradictory statistics?
12% of experts and 100% of optimists demand that this practice cease immediately!
PS- I think this is an awesome new campaign promise both sides should start using immediately: I will protect the US from terrorist nuclear attack, if I can, assuming everything goes well.
Didn’t he see Traitor? The Magical (muslim) Negro(tm) will save us.
springfield_meltdown: That would be so awesome if the kooks were right, for once. I mean, it wouldn’t be awesome, or more like, we wouldn’t be able to appreciate its awesomness, because of, you know, the endless nothingness, but you know what I mean.
AngryBlakGuy:
1. I disagree that it is as difficult to create a workable U-235 fission device/weapon as it is to obtain the Weapons Grade Uranium required. I also disagree re a workable PU-239 devicef/weapon. The latter is harder to make, but the “secrets” involved - i.e., the explosive lens technology; the specific two types of plastic explosives required; the electronic firing circuits required - are no longer secret in the relative scientific/engineering communities. It’s simply not that complicated.
Also, the “marker” technology for an implosion device — e.g., “slap” detonators; krystron switches; the specific plastic explosives involved — have become much more available. Also, there are more “work arounds” for the technology that might “flag” a weapons program.
In contrast, it is much, much harder to produce the fissionable materials involved. A U-235 enrichment facility has a very large reconnisance “footprint” in terms of the size of the plant; power requirements; etc. In turn, PU-239 production requires a working reactor and a chemical extraction facility, both of which have large “footprints.”
No disrespect, but any claim to the contrary simply is incorrect.
2. Syria, Iran and/or “Saddam” did not/do not have sufficient fissile material to make any devices, whether based on uraninum or plutonium. Iran has a working U-235 centrifugue casade, but best estimates are it will not produce enough WGU for a device for a couple of more years (maybe a bit less). But once Iran has sufficent U-235, making a workable “bomb” is relatively easy. You just need to “assemble” enough fissile material fast enough to get a reasonable yield, say in the 10-15 kiloton range. The engineering for “gun type” assembly devices, at these (relatively low yields) just is not that complicated.
3. The phyics of a gun type assembly device, using fissile U-235, are so well established, and so widely known, that there would be no need for a “test.” Indeed, the U.S. didn’t bother to test the Hiroshima bomb for they dropped it, because the confidence was so high that it would work — even though it was untried technology at that point.
The real difficulty is/was reducing the size of the “physics package” into a deliverable warhead, while at the same time upping the yield. But if you only want/need a 10-15 kt yield out of shipping container breadboard device located on a freighter parked in the Maryland docks or lower Hudson, that’s not an issue. Such a device would kill/wound several hundred thousand people, which would be sufficient to make the point for most “terrorist” scenarios.
4. Post-detonation tracing is much, much more problematic nowadays. First of all, you don’t need a reactor for the U-235 fuel cycle. The “feedstock” may, or may not, have trace elements, but other production lines would be using the same raw materials.
You do need a reactor for the PU-239 process, if you are going to get a reasonable amount of material in a reasonable amount of time. But on the reactor, you still need fairly detailed information on the production runs over time in order to trace the trace elements accurately. This is one of the reasons that the IAEA monitoring is useful. But if the host government wants to, it can run a second, “secret” reactor not subject to IAEA inspection. This is what Israeli pulled — in producing its “terrorist” nuclear weapons.
I’m not making this stuff up, or pulling it from the popular press. Earlier in my career I had a Weapons Grade, Q Clearance, and represented a nuclear weapons laboratory That Shall Remain Nameless.
Speaking of which: If you ever want to have the hair go up on the back of your neck, try to get out to the Nevada Test Site someday. As far as the eye can see, out to the horizon, there are the subsidance craters from the underground shots. There are well over 500. It’s . . .disquieting.
The bottom line is that, if you have the fissile material, a device with a reasonable yield is not that hard to assemble — provided that you don’t have to cram it into a missile warhead, artillery shell, or other compact container. I wish it was otherwise, but it’s not.
I love Goldberg’s argument. “Only technical complications prevent Al Qaeda from executing a nuclear attack today.” Yeah… technically they can’t build a nuclear bomb. Technically, I can’t build a rocket ship so I guess I’m only 50% on my way to the Moon. “…one way to bring nuclear weapon components into America would be to hide them inside shipments of cocaine.” Great idea, because no authorities bother looking for shipments of cocaine, and if they find one they’ll just let it right through. There’s a reason shipments of cocaine get across the border… because they don’t look like shipments of cocaine! This ain’t the mid-80’s, Iran/Contra era with Ollie North greeting drug-runners on the tarmac with leis made from $100 bills.