michael are you living in denial that al-Qaeda wants to hit the United States hard with a nuke or similar dastardly device? why are you joking about such a serious matter that could involve thousands of deaths?
they need to hi-jack sip to do that and not get caught
and the ship not be noticed gone for the trip to the U.S.
as for the ryder truch
the 1st attack on the trade center was a truck bomb
and they learned from they`re mistake and upgraded to planes
but on matter of nukes
how to get it to the U.S.?
if in parts
you need somebody who can`t make it without getting killed.
making a nuke is not hard ,but making it and not get poisined is another matter
I know how to do it
but not enough to make it work right.
a dirty bomb is the best bet
but dang if I know how to get that much plutonium
and noway is it gonna be cheap
<<michael why do you think it is so impossible? why couldn't they sneek a dirty nuke in via a shipping container on a ship?>>
They can't get their hands on a dirty nuke, they wouldn't know what to do with it if they could, and they couldn't hide the radiation from the radiation detectors. I asked my wife's cousin about this, he is a nuclear physisist who has held some very high positions in the Canadian nuclear energy industry and he says it would be impossible to get these bombs past the radiation detectors at any port of entry.
You realize, I hope, that a dirty bomb won't kill anywhere near the number of people that could be killed by a high-explosive bomb. The ammonium nitrate fertilizer bomb of Timothy McVeigh would kill many more than a dirty nuclear bomb.
<<drive it to manhattan in a Tim Veigh Ryder truck and let loose? >>
They'd first have to get it into the country, which they couldn't. Even if they could, the radiation detectors would pick it up at any of the bridge or tunnel entrances.
They could skip a step and just make the Marijuanna radioactive.
it`s unlikely they`ll find people who don`t mind
most of the 9-11 high-jackers didn`t know it was a oneway trip.
================================================
If your plan is to hijack a plane and fly it into a building, how would you assume that it was anything but a one-way trip?
Was the plan to take the elevator down to ground floorr and walk away, do you suppose?
<<The Pilots had to have known , the rest of them might have been stooges without the need to know.>>
I think that's a given. Why multiply the chances of failure by the number of non-pilots needed?
They may well have. I was only kidding about the rush to the exits. Anyone who's dedicated himself to being an Islamic "terrorist" has probably already decided that his likeliest fate will be premature death.
| Given their inability to do something simple--say, shoot up a shopping mall or set off a truck bomb--it's reasonable to ask if they have a chance at something much more ambitious. Far from being plausible, argued Ohio State University professor John Mueller in a recent presentation at the University of Chicago, "the likelihood that a terrorist group will come up with an atomic bomb seems to be vanishingly small." (http://polisci.osu.edu/faculty/jmueller/APSACHGO.PDF) The events required to make that happen include a multitude of herculean tasks. First, a terrorist group has to get a bomb or fissile material, perhaps from Russia's inventory of decommissioned warheads. If that were easy, one would have already gone missing. [...] Then comes the task of building a bomb. It's not something you can gin up with spare parts and power tools in your garage. It requires millions of dollars, a safe haven and advanced equipment--plus people with specialized skills, lots of time and a willingness to die for the cause. And if Al Qaeda could make a prototype, another obstacle would emerge: There is no guarantee it would work, and there is no way to test it. |
| A terrorist atomic bomb is commonly held to be the single most serious threat to the national security of the United States. Assessed in appropriate context, that could actually be seen to be a rather cheering conclusion because the likelihood that a terrorist group will come up with an atomic bomb seems to be vanishingly small. Moreover, the degree to which al-Qaeda--the chief demon group and one of the few terrorist groups to see value in striking the United States--has sought, or is capable of, obtaining such a weapon seems to have been substantially exaggerated. |
from a Reason Online article titled "Who's Still Afraid of Osama?" by Steve Chapman:
Given their inability to do something simple--say, shoot up a shopping mall or set off a truck bomb--it's reasonable to ask if they have a chance at something much more ambitious. Far from being plausible, argued Ohio State University professor John Mueller in a recent presentation at the University of Chicago, "the likelihood that a terrorist group will come up with an atomic bomb seems to be vanishingly small." (http://polisci.osu.edu/faculty/jmueller/APSACHGO.PDF)
The events required to make that happen include a multitude of herculean tasks. First, a terrorist group has to get a bomb or fissile material, perhaps from Russia's inventory of decommissioned warheads. If that were easy, one would have already gone missing.
[...]
Then comes the task of building a bomb. It's not something you can gin up with spare parts and power tools in your garage. It requires millions of dollars, a safe haven and advanced equipment--plus people with specialized skills, lots of time and a willingness to die for the cause. And if Al Qaeda could make a prototype, another obstacle would emerge: There is no guarantee it would work, and there is no way to test it.
Whole thing at the other end of this link (http://www.reason.com/news/show/124874.html).
<<They might become alarmed at how the courage gene was being selected against.>>
Not if they understood math as well as evolution.
If your theory held any water at all, at this point in time the Anglo-Saxon race would be a bunch of gibbering morons.
Testing for example , they wouldn't need a garuntee that it would work .
Testing for example , they wouldn't need a garuntee that it would work .
Possibly, but I don't see what part of "It's not something you can gin up with spare parts and power tools in your garage. It requires millions of dollars, a safe haven and advanced equipment--plus people with specialized skills, lots of time and a willingness to die for the cause." is implausible. Are you suggesting a nuclear weapon can be made with spare parts and power tools in someone's garage?
Certainly ,it is not as coplicated as restoring a 67 mustang. The nessacery parts are common , except for the fission fuel.
Certainly ,it is not as coplicated as restoring a 67 mustang. The nessacery parts are common , except for the fission fuel.
Upon what do you base that statement?
| It is essential to note, however, that making a bomb is an extraordinarily difficult task. Thus, a set of counterterrorism and nuclear experts interviewed in 2004 by Dafna Linzer for the Washington Post pointed to the "enormous technical and logistical obstacles confronting would-be nuclear terrorists, and to the fact that neither al-Qaeda nor any other group has come close to demonstrating the means to overcome them." Allison nonetheless opines that a dedicated terrorist group, al-Qaeda in particular, could get around all the problems in time and eventually steal, produce, or procure a "crude" bomb or device, one that he however acknowledges would be "large, cumbersome, unsafe, unreliable, unpredictable, and inefficient" (2004, 97; see also Bunn and Wier 2006, 139; Pluta and Zimmerman 2006, 61). In his recent book, Atomic Bazaar: The Rise of the Nuclear Poor, William Langewiesche spends a great deal of time and effort assessing the process by means of which a terrorist group could come up with a bomb. Unlike Allison, he concludes that it "remains very, very unlikely. It's a possibility, but unlikely." [...] More than a decade ago Allison boldly insisted that it would be "easy" for terrorists to assemble a crude bomb if they could get enough fissile material (Allison et al. 1996, 12).13 Atomic scientists, perhaps laboring under the concern, in Langewiesche's words, that "a declaration of safety can at any time be proved spectacularly wrong" (2007, 49), have been comparatively restrained in cataloguing the difficulties terrorists would face in constructing a bomb. But physicists Wirz and Egger have published a paper that does so, and it concludes that the task "could hardly be accomplished by a subnational group" (2005, 501). They point out that precise blueprints are required, not just sketches and general ideas, and that even with a good blueprint they "would most certainly be forced to redesign" (2005, 499-500). The process could take months or even a year or more (Pluta and Zimmerman 2006, 62), and in distinct contrast with Allison, they stress that the work, far from being "easy," is difficult, dangerous, and extremely exacting, and that the technical requirements "in several fields verge on the unfeasible." They conclude that "it takes much more than knowledge of the workings of nuclear weapons and access to fissile material to successfully manufacture a usable weapon" (2005, 501-2). |
from the aforementioned paper, "The Atomic Terrorist: Assessing the Likelihood":
Learned Men can pull your leg.
A critical mass of Uranium is hard to get , but not if you are really good freinds of someone that has some already.
You get two sub critical masses , combine them at high speed , that is about all there is to it.
Younger has more recently made a similar argument:
Others contend the crudest type of bomb would be "simple and robust" and "very simple" to detonate (Bunn and Wier 2006, 140). Younger disagrees:
All this work would have to be carried out in utter secret, of course, even while local and international security police are likely to be on the intense prowl. "In addition to all the usual intelligence methods," note the Los Alamos scientists, "the most sensitive technical detection equipment availablewould be at their disposal," and effective airborne detectors used to prospect for uranium have been around for decades and "great improvement in such equipment have been realized since" (Mark et al. 1987, 60). As Milhollin presents the terrorists' problem, "the theft of the uranium would probably be discovered soon enough, and it might be only a short matter of time before the whole world showed up on their doorstep" (2002, 48).16 Moreover, points out Langewiesche, people in the area may observe with increasing curiosity and puzzlement the constant coming and going of technicians unlikely to be locals (2007, 65-69).17 In addition, the bombmakers would not be able to test the product to be sure they were on the right track (Linzer 2004; Mark et al. 1987, 64). |
However, if the gap between the barrel and the slug is too tight, then the slug may stick as it is accelerated down the barrel. If the gap is too big, then other more complex, issues may arise.
<<A critical mass of Uranium is hard to get , but not if you are really good freinds of someone that has some already.>>
That's totally absurd. This isn't borrowing sugar from a neigbour to bake a cake. As Charles de Gaulle said, "Nations don't have friends, they have interests." In whose national interest would it be to hand over nuclear fuel that a nation probably had to sacrifice the equivalent of 20,000 left testicles for, in order to give some raggedy-assed band of crazies a shot at nuking the U.S. once and unleashing a torrential shitstorm of a counterstrike that could anihilate whole countries, including the "friendly" donor? That's about the most asinine idea I've heard all night.
<<You get two sub critical masses , combine them at high speed , that is about all there is to it.>>
That's also bullshit. They're usually combined by a small, controlled explosion. Too much force and the whole fuel core is blown apart before the chain reaction starts. Too little force and you never reach critical mass. The best scientists and mathematicians in the world including many Nobel Prize winners working non-stop around the clock for the Manhattan Project took months or maybe years to figure out this little detail, and you think that al Qaeda's brilliant scientific minds are just going to duplicate the Manhattan Project's research? rotsa ruck. There are plenty of other little details for the "bright undergrads" to figure out (I gotta tell you the link in the article to John Aristotle Phillips, apparent source of the "bright undergrad" remark, did not work), details such as the metallurgical composition of the core capsule, the actual mechanism by which the controlled explosion drives the two halves of the fuel core together and other stuff I can't recall.
Unfortunately, due to the link, I can't evaluate the source of the "bright undergrads" remark, but even if it's correct, the problem of getting the nuclear fuel remains insoluble. Your idea of getting it from one's friends is beyond ludicrous.
John Aristotle PhillipsWithout benefit of Google
In 1977, he became known as the A-Bomb Kid while attending Princeton University as a junior undergraduate when he designed a nuclear weapon using publicly-available books and papers.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Aristotle_Phillips
Phillips was an underachieving student who played the tiger mascot at Princeton games. Hoping to stay at the school, he proposed a term paper for a seminar on nuclear proliferation outlining the design for an atomic bomb similar to the Nagasaki weapon. According to Phillips' supervisor Freeman Dyson, a renowned physicist, and professor Harold Feiveson, who held the seminar, Phillips' design was not functional[1], and the story was widely circulated in exaggerated form. Nevertheless, the Federal Bureau of Investigation confiscated Phillips's term paper and a mock-up he had constructed in his dormitory room. Phillips published his story together with a co-author, David Michaelis, as Mushroom: The True Story of the A-Bomb Kid (ISBN 0-671-82731-6 / ISBN 0-688-03351-2).
That's totally absurd. This isn't borrowing sugar from a neigbour to bake a cake. As Charles de Gaulle said, "Nations don't have friends, they have interests." In whose national interest would it be to hand over nuclear fuel that a nation probably had to sacrifice the equivalent of 20,000 left testicles for, in order to give some raggedy-assed band of crazies a shot at nuking the U.S. once and unleashing a torrential shitstorm of a counterstrike that could anihilate whole countries, including the "friendly" donor? That's about the most asinine idea I've heard all night.
If that were easy, one would have already gone missing.
The best scientists and mathematicians in the world including many Nobel Prize winners working non-stop around the clock for the Manhattan Project took months or maybe years to figure out this little detail, and you think that al Qaeda's brilliant scientific minds are just going to duplicate the Manhattan Project's research?
However, I didn't bother to modify my post because I recalled reading somewhere that John von Neumann, one of the project's star mathematicians, DID have access to the most powerful computer of the day when he was at Los Alamos.
I guess the first thing that comes to my mind is the intense sensation of waste - - astonomical amounts of wasted money and wasted time, due to those Neanderthals over at the Manhattan Project not realizing how easy it was, had they only gone to simple hammer-and-anvil design and bypassed all the hi-falutin mathematical and physical theories those Nobel nincompoops were so busily spinning, controlled explosions, critical mass, etc. no doubt to keep their overinflated paycheques coming in regularly. Critical mass my critical ass. plane, where you when they needed you?
<<It turns out that the presence of Bethe, Feynman, and von Neumann was not entirely coincidental. Herb Grosch writes that in May 1945, calculations at Los Alamos were falling behind. . . . "They came to IBM for help. . . " New space was needed, and found, for Watson Lab's first task: solution of temperature-pressure equations for completion of the A-bombs at Los Alamos [57] (more about this HERE and much more in Chapter 03 of Dr. Grosch's book) >>
But even this design requires sophisticated calculations - - the relative mass of the ball and spike, the dimensions of the spike, the velocity of the collision, etc. The end result of any of this is relatively easy to describe in words but the formulation and details are the result of hard work and plenty of high-level thinking and research.
Is casting a Bullet ,to fit a barrell, a rare skill?
It is true that one would have to protect the Uranium from Oxigen while it was melted , that makes the difficulty equal to working in Magmeisium but not so difficult as titainium.
Again, I think you are severely underestimating the difficulty. If it were as easy as you make out, seems to me we would not worry about other countries developing the ability to make nuclear weapons because the other countries would already have nuclear weapons. If you are to be believed, all they need is enough money to buy some uranium, some scrap metal and a couple of machinists to put it all together. I remain skeptical.
Again, I think you are severely underestimating the difficulty. If it were as easy as you make out, seems to me we would not worry about other countries developing the ability to make nuclear weapons because the other countries would already have nuclear weapons. If you are to be believed, all they need is enough money to buy some uranium, some scrap metal and a couple of machinists to put it all together. I remain skeptical.
The uranium is the hard part. To make a gun type nuclear bomb, you need a fair amount of reasonably pure uranium. Making reasonably pure plutonium is easier, so most countries concentrate on the implosion type nuclear bombs, which can use plutonium for fuel, but they are trickier to make.
Actually, several of the earlier gun type nuclear bombs were literally made with guns - they used artillery barrels, which were readily available. And the uranium was machined into discs with a hollow core (like slices of pineapple) so the "spike" would fit right into the center.
Well, I realized after posting that computers had become much more widely available and computing power vastly increased since the days of the Manhattan Project. However, I didn't bother to modify my post because I recalled reading somewhere that John von Neumann, one of the project's star mathematicians, DID have access to the most powerful computer of the day when he was at Los Alamos. It was my understanding that the Project therefore was working with the advantage of computers. I stand to be corrected, of course.
<<Uranium does not require an implosion just that two sub critical masses be brought to gether at a rate greater than the rate that they can repel themselves , if you made a hammer and anvil out of highly enriched Uranium smacking them together by hand would produce an explosion , but not an optimum explosion , the explosion would be random in its output and tend to be on the small side , increaseing the speed at which they approach each other makes the process more dependable and yeild more , if they are in full contact before the chain reaction occurs the exposion will be optimised .>>
I guess the first thing that comes to my mind is the intense sensation of waste - - astonomical amounts of wasted money and wasted time, due to those Neanderthals over at the Manhattan Project not realizing how easy it was, had they only gone to simple hammer-and-anvil design and bypassed all the hi-falutin mathematical and physical theories those Nobel nincompoops were so busily spinning, controlled explosions, critical mass, etc. no doubt to keep their overinflated paycheques coming in regularly. Critical mass my critical ass. plane, where you when they needed you?
<<It is rediculous to state that the sub critical masses must be very finely machined . . . >>
I never stated that. I don't know if they must or they mustn't, but I rather suspect that they were very finely machined, probably for very good reasons unknown to schleppers like me.
(http://www.charneyresearch.com/logo/abcnews_logo.jpg)
Gvts and intel agencies don't worry Universe Prince proclaims we "underestimate the difficulty".
Lets stick our heads in the sand.