U.S. Web Archive Reveal Nuclear Secrets

The Federal website set up to make public the archive of Iraqi documents captured during the war has posted documents that are essentially a how to for building nuclear weapons. It is unclear how long these specific documents were posted but last night the Feds shut the site down after complaints from weapons experts and arms control officials. Last spring the same website posted how to documents on chemical weapons such as sarin and tabun.



Well ain't this ducky. It is unclear whether these documents had been translated into English or were posted in the original Arabic...either way it just boggles the mind that this type of info was actually posted....or that it would even be considered. It is impossible not to ask...was this slip up done on purpose in the push to attack Iran or was it just one more instance from the gang that couldn't shoot straight administration?

Not that many years ago I would have never considered the idea of an administration deliberately leaking deadly secrets but the longer this one goes on the less unlikely the idea becomes.



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[edit on 3-11-2006 by UM_Gazz]

On the other hand, if all the documents were not released there would have been outcries of "Bush is hiding evidence that there were no WMD's in Iraq!".

But then, it would have only have been a matter of time until some NYT reporter released them to the world...

Absolutely, The media only cries out when they're not the ones doing the damage to national security.

It seems nuts that the gov't would post such documents from a rogue regime on the Internet without first analyzing them to see if they contained any information on weapons not generally available.

But, as already mentioned, they'd probably be accused of hiding information if they didn't, so it sound like a damned if you don't, damned if you do situation.

Well to be perfectly honest, it is no real mystery how a nuclear weapon works. The difficulty is in obtaining materials and in engineering the weapon. You need a way, depending on the design, to insure that you equally compress a fisionable mass or slam two other masses into each other in such a way that the resulting mass is a critical mass and undergoes a chain reaction.

Thermonuclear weapons are significantly more difficult to develop. At least one that isnt the size of a tanker.

anyway, I doubt this is a serious problem. Most arab countries probably have the know how, just not the resources to produce a nuclear weapon.

So Sadamm was really close to developing Nuclear Weapons. Glad we took him out when we did!

How come "old news" becomes "breaking news" right before an election?

Originally posted by RRconservative
How come "old news" becomes "breaking news" right before an election?

Ask the U.N./IAEA and the New York Times. They pulled the same sort of stuff in 2004 with Kofi saying he thought the Iraq War was illegal.

The article never said that Saddam was close to having nuclear weapons...if he actually had this administration would have been crowing the roof off about it.

What he had were plans, probably bought from Pakistan. You can have all the plans in the world but if you don't have the technology or materials they don't mean squat.

Even his own people have baldly stated that they had all sorts of plans but after the 1st Gulf war, lacked the means and willpower to carry them out.

Most posters on this thread agree to there is no secret in how a nuclear weapon works. The difficulty lies in obtaining a sufficient amount of the right materials.
I sure agree.

I remember in our textbook of physics, back in the sixties when I went to school, there was a diagram of "Fat Boy", the nick name for, I think, the Nagasaki bomb. It was quite simpel. Any boy who could have got his hands on some U-235 would have build it. We made all kind of experiments back then; rockets and chlorine gas, the poison gas used during WW1. Really simpel to make.

Uranium oxide was general aviable up to post war times. Used in cheramic glazes, it produces the most wonderful yellow colour.

Originally posted by khunmoon
Most posters on this thread agree to there is no secret in how a nuclear weapon works. The difficulty lies in obtaining a sufficient amount of the right materials.
I sure agree.

I remember in our textbook of physics, back in the sixties when I went to school, there was a diagram of "Fat Boy", the nick name for, I think, the Nagasaki bomb. It was quite simpel. Any boy who could have got his hands on some U-235 would have build it. We made all kind of experiments back then; rockets and chlorine gas, the poison gas used during WW1. Really simpel to make.

Uranium oxide was general aviable up to post war times. Used in cheramic glazes, it produces the most wonderful yellow colour.

Actually I think you're thinking of 'Little Boy', the Hiroshima bomb. That's really easy to build, it's basically just a subcritical mass and bullet. The bullet is fired into the mass of U-235 and it becomes supercritical.

Very few of this types of bombs have ever been made, the "Fat Man" design of explosive lenses compresses a supercritical mass out of a subcritical shell is used today, along with layers of deuterinum-emitting substances and uranium tampers causing a fission-fusion-fission-fusion-fission chain that is theoretically unlimited.

But it's easy to say that and far more difficult to actually build it, even if you do have the nuclear material. Apparently some of these documents described engineering difficulties in the bomb building and how to overcome them that is not generally known.

Actually I think you're thinking of 'Little Boy', the Hiroshima bomb.

You're right djohn, the diagram was the Hiroshima bomb... and there was a photo of the Nagasaki bomb. I mix the two.
After all it's 45 years ago.

Thanks for setting things straight.