Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal: A Weblog

I'll bet this Berube guy will soon find his "delete post" button.

http://justoneminute.typepad.com/main/2004/10/why_oh_why_cant.html#comments

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/03/international/middleeast/03tube.html?oref=login&hp

How the White House Embraced Disputed Iraqi Arms Intelligence
By DAVID BARSTOW, WILLIAM J. BROAD
and JEFF GERTH

In 2002, at a crucial juncture on the path to war, senior members of the Bush administration gave a series of speeches and interviews in which they asserted that Saddam Hussein was rebuilding his nuclear weapons program.

In a speech to veterans that August, Vice President Dick Cheney said Mr. Hussein could have an atomic bomb "fairly soon." The next month, Mr. Cheney told a group of Wyoming Republicans the United States had "irrefutable evidence" - thousands of tubes made of high-strength aluminum, tubes that the Bush administration said were destined for clandestine Iraqi uranium centrifuges, before some were seized at the behest of the United States.

The tubes quickly became a critical exhibit in the administration's brief against Iraq. As the only physical evidence the United States could brandish of Mr. Hussein's revived nuclear ambitions, they gave credibility to the apocalyptic imagery invoked by President Bush and his advisers. The tubes were "only really suited for nuclear weapons programs," Condoleezza Rice, the president's national security adviser, asserted on CNN on Sept. 8, 2002. "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."

Before Ms. Rice made those remarks, though, she was aware that the government's foremost nuclear experts had concluded that the tubes were most likely not for nuclear weapons at all, an examination by The New York Times has found. Months before, her staff had been told that these experts, at the Energy Department, believed the tubes were probably intended for small artillery rockets.

But Ms. Rice, and other senior administration officials, embraced a disputed theory about the tubes first championed in April 2001 by a new analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency. Senior scientists considered the theory implausible, yet in the months after 9/11, as an administration built a case for confronting Iraq, the theory gained currency as it rose to the top of the government.

"She was aware of the differences of opinion," the senior administration official said of Ms. Rice in an interview authorized by the White House. "She was also aware that at the highest level of the intelligence community, there was great confidence that these tubes were for centrifuges."

Ms. Rice's alarming description on CNN was in keeping with the administration's overall treatment of the tubes. Senior administration officials repeatedly failed to fully disclose the contrary views of America's leading nuclear scientists, The Times found. They sometimes overstated even the most dire intelligence assessments of the tubes, yet minimized or rejected the strong doubts of their own experts. They worried privately that the nuclear case was weak, but expressed sober certitude in public.

The result was a largely one-sided presentation to the public that did not convey the depth of evidence and argument against the administration's most tangible proof of a revived nuclear weapons program in Iraq.

Berube really hits it on the head--Bush looked like an amateur, someone completely out of his depth. This is NOT good. Bush has been the leader of the Free World (or at least America) for almost four years, and appears to know less about the job than when he started.

Certainly, as the debate made clear, he knows less about the job than John Kerry.

The old saw that the Office makes the Man sure does not apply to George W. It is a telling detail, which proves that George W. might hear, but does not keep up with the daily Intel briefings. lgl

When Bush named WMD as the biggest threat but appeared to agree with Kerry (who said "nuclear proliferation") I remember thinking at that instant that perhaps Bush wanted to avoid articulating "nuclear" in front of so many ...

“Then Jim Lehrer asked what Kerry thought would be the greatest threat a US President would face in 2005.”

Actually the question was: “If you are elected president, what will you take to that office thinking is the single most serious threat to the national security to the United States?”

KERRY: Nuclear proliferation. Nuclear proliferation. There's some 600-plus tons of unsecured material still in the former Soviet Union and Russia. At the rate that the president is currently securing it, it'll take 13 years to get it.

Not a very accurate or informed answer. First, Kerry seems unaware of the HEU bend-down program where the Russians (supposedly) bend down HEU (highly enriched uranium) from dismantled warheads to reactor grade fuel (LEU). The LEU is sold to USEC and shipped to the US (as UF6) for use in power reactors. He also seems unaware of the Fissile Material Storage Facility (under construction) at Mayak where HEU and Pu from dismantled weapons will be placed in secure storage. These programs would proceed faster if not for Russia’s financial difficulties. As it is, the US is paying for most of the facility. The slow downs at Mayak are caused by Russian financial difficulties and negotiations over our monitoring of these operations.

(Kerry contd) “And the black market sale price was about $250 million.”

He’s not telling you the buyers get stiffed on these purchases.

(More Kerry) “Now, there are terrorists trying to get their hands on that stuff today.”

There is no evidence that terrorists have gotten any fissile material. They would need to get HEU because they don’t have the expertise to make an implosion device and Pu won’t work in the gun design (which is much easier to build). Even then could they build bombs without testing them just once? After all Al-Qaeda is not the Manhattan Project team.

I covered Kerry’s remarks on the bunker buster remarks in a previous post.

Smooth debate (talking) does not a leader make... perhaps a talk show host or tv network pretty boy ?....hmmmmm

The old saw that the Office makes the Man sure does not apply to George W.

Well there's the rub. You gotta have a Man to work with first. Junior is just a little peevish boy.

When Bush named WMD as the biggest threat but appeared to agree with Kerry (who said "nuclear proliferation") I remember thinking at that instant that perhaps Bush wanted to avoid articulating "nuclear" in front of so many ...

I give Junior a little more credit here. I think that he didn't want to say nuclear proliferation because he knows that was the primary justification for going to war and also that was the most complete and absolute bust of all.

He’s not telling you the buyers get stiffed on these purchases....There is no evidence that terrorists have gotten any fissile material.

Well thanks for the info. I'm so relieved. No, really, I am. I'm breathing easier already.

Patrick:

You're on. I've got $100 that says he won't delete that post.

Interesting observation that Bush is soft now in debates. Or maybe he's just tuckered out from all the "hard work" (mentioned ~10X), b/c remember according to Farenheit911 it was all play before...golfing and digging in the ground for bugs and whatnot.
-
I'm too biased to judge, but many thought he did fine. Some undecided voters found him compelling, actually, according to a NPR broadcast I heard.

And to the issue...perhaps a return to the cold war would take the nukes issue off the front page and roll us back to a place that the codgers on all sides are comfortable with.

After Kerry's remarks on NK, Bush got in a short line that is being praised by some of his defenders as showing he was really well informed.

BUSH: The minute we have bilateral talks, the six-party talks will unwind. That's exactly what Kim Jong Il wants. And by the way, the breach on the agreement was not through plutonium. The breach on the agreement is highly enriched uranium. That's what we caught him doing. That's where he was breaking the agreement.

Well, I heard that NK was reprocessing fuel rods, which would be typically Pu these days - or could it be either one? U is typically associated with centrifuging and such. Who was right, and does it matter anyway?

If Berube decides to delete his post (Patrick Sullivan means before the election), then Mr. Sullivan's benefactors are not worthy of an election, but something much more decisive.

Tell us now, Mr Sullivan, you of hidden knowledge, where are the WMD and where is Osama Bin Laden?.

C'mon, scoop your Party, tough guy.

Do it right here. Now.

Or is testosterone all you've got left while young Americans and young Iraqis are butchered to keep your cheap-ass secret?

I repeat: Tell us what you know, my fellow American.

Maybe I'll change my vote.

Hey Zarkov, so how long will it take at current rates to blend down all the russian HEU? (Hint the deal was for a max of 30 metric tons HEU/year max, and we have, what, 600 sitting over in Russia)

In any case this program is an interesting version of outsourcing as it lead to USEC closing some advanced separation projects and to speed it up would distory the market even further

http://www.fas.org/ssp/docs/020500-heu/app_b.htm

A. Zarkov, your complacency on russian nuclear materials is quite astonishing. You are normally better informed than this, and kerry is better informed than you. This is a problem that has vexed people concerned with nuclear proliferation for years, bush has done nothing about it, and saying it's really just because of russian financial problems is a non-answer.

Zarkhov-
Surely not as UF6, U3O8 perhaps, is safer.

Rabett: FAS backs up what I said.

howard: It’s not just Russian financial problems. It’s also transparency problems and logistics. The Russians continue to run their centrifuge plants, and we don’t know for sure if we are really buying HEU from dismantled nuclear weapons or new production. Moreover we do not actually observe weapons being dismantled, and there is no continuous chain of custody from the source to the HEU blend-down point. We don’t know because the Russians have put severe restrictions on our monitors. For example at the Mayak Fissile Material Storage Facility the US can only make degraded measurements of what goes into the silos, because the Russians don’t want us to know the isotopic ratios accurately. This is how the game is played. None of these problems is unique to Bush, we had them under Clinton, and we continue to have them if Kerry is elected. So I would ask Kerry: How do we really know the Russian HEU is coming from weapons? If you were president would you renegotiate the agreement to increase transparancy?

Zarkov, how George Aiken of you. Please tell us how many years will it take this program to consume the 600 mT of HEU at 30 mT per year.

I would like to have heard Kerry parse out GWs WMD response a little further. Kerry correctly pointed out that nuclear proliferation is the greatest threat. Bush watered the response down to WMD. I hoped Kerry would point out that WMD is a mischaracterization since it includes chemical and Biological which simply are not in the same category of dangerous as nuclear are. I believe Bush would have had to spend quite a while batting his eyes to think that through.

Was Kerry right with all of his facts on North Korea?

Hmm. I would have thought that newly produced HEU would have a different distribution of decay products than older material.

I honestly believe that, if I were a Republican and a Bush supporter, I would have been deeply embarrassed by his performance in the "debate". He showed he is a lightweight without intellectual vigour, unable to think on his feet. Put simply, he was outclassed.

I actually made the mistake of clicking on Patrick's link, the link that he thinks will make Berube delete his post. Sorry, Patrick, but that was one of the lamest attempts at a rebuttal I've read in a long time. You got nothing, Patrick; please don't waste my time (and embarrass yourself) again.

I actually made the mistake of clicking on Patrick's link, the link that he thinks will make Berube delete his post. Sorry, Patrick, but that was one of the lamest attempts at a rebuttal I've read in a long time. You got nothing, Patrick; please don't waste my time (and embarrass yourself) again.

I'm glad that no serious person here thinks that I would delete that post. Here's my response to Patrick on my site:

Welcome, Patrick, and thanks for the suggestion. But no, I don’t think I need to consider the possibility of contemplating the chance that I might want to think about the idea of maybe perhaps deleting this post, because it is not true, as you claim on your blog, that “the left objects to the multilateral approach to the North Korean problem.” Instead, what actually happened on Thursday night was that John Kerry, the Democratic nominee for the Presidency, said the following:

--Now, I’d like to come back for a quick moment, if I can, to that issue about China and the talks. Because that’s one of the most critical issues here: North Korea.

Just because the president says it can’t be done, that you’d lose China, doesn’t mean it can’t be done. I mean, this is the president who said “There were weapons of mass destruction,” said “Mission accomplished,” said we could fight the war on the cheap—none of which were true.

We could have bilateral talks with Kim Jong Il. And we can get those weapons at the same time as we get China. Because China has an interest in the outcome, too. --

--Patrick's response was terrible on the merits, as PaulB notes. But then again, it's an appropriate emblem for Bush's position on nuclear proliferation, which can be summed up as "could you repeat the question?"

w00†!

Patrick, now I realize that you didn't take me up on my offer but i'll be generous and give you a choice of which organization i should send (my own) $100:

1 Kerry/Edwards campaign
2 DNC
3Move On

If anyone has any other suggestions of worthy organizations please feel free to post.

Saletan's review of the debate at Slate is the best thing I've read on it so far.

Bush made a very revealing argument in the debate, that explains a lot about him. He said over and over that a president has to project certainty. He didn't say he was certain he was right, he said he tried to project the impression that he was certain.

It's a bit like the Nixon tactic of projecting a slightly insane personality to scare the enemy, except Bush tries to project an image of certainty so his opponents become unsure of themselves.

So as long as he acts as if he is certain he is correct a lot of people will give him the benefit of the doubt and a lot of opponents will keep quiet in case they are wrong and make a fool of themselves.

The old term for this used to be a confidence man. Even if Bush is trying to project certainty for the right reasons it is very dangerous. As Kerry said, one can be certain and wrong. If Bush is just using a facade of certainty then it may be possible that all the apparent screwups of the last 4 years are in fact what they seem - screwups. Bush more or less admitted this, that some undetermined amount of his certainty is just a placebo.

And the only solution Bush proposes is to somehow mimic a sense of certainty to make things come right. How much real certainty is there though? How certain is Bush really that he has the answers?

There have been a lot of signs of this attitude. For example Bush said many times that he was certain Saddam had WMD's, and there was no evidence for this certainty.

Rabett:

“Please tell us how many years will it take this program to consume the 600 mT of HEU at 30 mT per year.”

The HEU blend-down program was set up in the 1990s to consume Russian HEU over a period of 20 years. It was Clinton’s people who negotiated the agreement. That’s why we are helping the Russians secure their fissile materials.

Barry:

“Hmm. I would have thought that newly produced HEU would have a different distribution of decay products than older material.”

Non-Uranium decay products can be removed chemically, that leaves only the isotopes of uranium. The Russians don’t want us to know the isotopic ratios and severely limit the measurments we can make. The entire process is very constrained and political.

OK, so the russians don't want to be an ex-nuclear power and they need money. And they have lots of stuff that needs to be reprocessed or something.

So they sell some to us, and they make some new stuff, and they put some old stuff in storage without letting us see exactly what it is.

They are acting like capitalists. It's like the old story where you pay a bounty on rats because you want to have fewer rats around, and so the capitalists breed rats to sell you. Can't really blame them.

So the more we pay the russians for HEU or plutonium or whatever, the more of it they'll sell us. And if terrorists or whoever also want to buy, won't they just increase supply to meet the increased demand?

This approach cannot work.

The obvious alternative is to occupy russia. But that doesn't seem all that plausible either.

I frankly don't see a solution. We'd better get ready for a world where proliferation is a fact.

Oh wait, here's a solution. We can try to persuade the russians -- all the russians -- that proliferation is a bad thing and bad for them as a nation and bad for them personally, and maybe enough of them will act for the common good that the problem will be reduced. That isn't anything I'd want to depend on but it's the best I see so far.

If even I don't see a good solution, we sure can't expect it of lightweights like Bush and Kerry.

Thomas:

We don’t know if the Russians are cheating on the HEU agreement. We simply don’t have enough transparency to reliably verify that they are not. We don’t have to persuade the Russians about proliferation, they already know it. The big Fissile Material Storage Facility at Mayak will provide a lot of secure storage, but it’s getting loaded slowly. The big worry is internal corruption where someone might be diverting the material and selling it.

It is claimed:

They would need to get HEU because they don’t have the expertise to make an implosion device and Pu won’t work in the gun design (which is much easier to build). Even then could they build bombs without testing them just once? After all Al-Qaeda is not the Manhattan Project team.

I can't tell you how reasurred I feel. Particularly since everyone who has ever tried to build a fisson bomb has succeeded on their first try.

The world has changed since the days of the Manhattan Project.

Zarkov, your logic is compelling. We don't have solid evidence that they're cheating, because they don't want us to have solid evidence one way or the other? And we pay them for LEU (or HEU we can convert to LEU)? For nonproliferation we'd want to pay them to have less HEU. But what we're actually paying them for is to give it to us. Why *wouldn't* they produce it for the market, us? And make as much else as they want for themselves? And (if they aren't convinced proliferation is that bad, compared to what they can individually make off of it) make enough more to satisfy whatever other markets show up?

If it was cocaine dealers or heroin dealers it would be no question, right? "We'll buy up your whole crop, we'll pay you more than the competition." Of *course* they'd expand production to what the market would bear, or as high as they could go, whichever is less.

Johnathon, somebody who could sell nuclear material to al qaeda might easily be able to sell them a working device. However, there are questions of trust. Say al qaeda buys a bomb at great expense and secretly transports it to the USA at great expense and sets it off and it doesn't work. What kind of guarantees can they get? Not like the Better Busines Bureau would listen to them. Ideally they should buy one to test, they at least need to get repeat business going.

Thomas:

The Russians don’t sell us HEU, only LEU at above market price (the last time I looked). The Russians don’t want us to know the isotopic ratios (or at least know them accurately) in the HEU because they believe it would reveal too much about the design of the warheads that the HEU was supposed to come from. Like the US, the Russians have (supposedly) reduced their weapons stockpile, and that reduction provides the HEU that Russia blends down to LEU. However they still run their centrifuge plants (it’s expensive to shut them down). They would cheat if they really wanted to keep the original weapons, and simply sell us current LEU production from the centrifuge plants. How much we buy from them per year has already been negotiated. Yes it would make sense for us to have negotiated a better deal in the 1990s, say buy the HEU directly. But we couldn’t get that kind of deal, so in the interests of anti-proliferation, so we settled for a less transparent process. Russia should not be making any more HEU only new LEU stock for their consumption and trade.

Goldberg: “...since everyone who has ever tried to build a fisson (sic) bomb has succeeded on their first try.”

How do you know that? If say France’s first few tests were duds, do you think they would have announced that fact? Ditto for Pakistan, India, Israel, South Africa and country X. The Manhattan Project tested their implosion design (the Trinity shot) and it worked. But remember they had super stars like John von Neuman to do the calculations for the lens. On the other hand, the gun device (made with HEU) was not tested because the Manhattan Project team believed the design was robust enough to field without a test. They took a chance. It might have failed. But they had a material shortage, so they tested the least reliable design and then fielded the weapon.

If a terrorist group got enough HEU they would most likely try to make a gun device. But without tests and big resources they couldn’t “weaponize” their design. They would most likely end up with a big bomb, hard to transport and dangerous to them.

It’s true that the world has changed since the Manhattan Project. The big changes are the centrifuge method to produce HEU and breeders to make Pu. The terrorists would also have advantages of modern electronic components and desktop computers. While today's technology makes the project easier, it’s still not trivial. On the other hand, governments have more resources than terrorists, and they can test. Then there is still the problem of delivery systems, but that’s another subject.

All,
Please read "Curve of Binding Energy". I think the copywrite is 1970 something. Good read. It may change your idea of how hard it is to make a Pu bomb. The hard part maybe getting the Pu.
Does anyone know how hard it is to make a laser separation/enrichment system?

dogbert:

Laser isotope separation is about the most technically difficult way to enrich uranium that exists. The process was invented in the early 1970s and developed at DOE’s Livermore lab. They spent about 20 years on project AVLIS. But it took them ten years too long to engineer the system. The world changed, and LIS became uneconomic. The whole AVLIS project was shut down lock stock and barrel in the 1990s. Today it’s a technical white elephant.

Anyone who thinks designing, fabricating and weaponizing a Pu bomb has obviously never done it. Tell us more.

Whoops. Make that anyone who thinks ... is easy,...

Well this discussion appears to have moved on a bit, so a few comments.

First, as Zarkov said the HEU blend-down was configured to consume Russian HEU over ~ 20 years. But it was not configured to consume all of the HEU, let alone plutonium that was in unsecured locations. It was a part of a broader program to attack the problem. This places Zs original statement somewhere between a non-sequitor and a red herring

*******************************
KERRY: Nuclear proliferation. Nuclear proliferation. There's some 600-plus tons of unsecured material still in the former Soviet Union and Russia. At the rate that the president is currently securing it, it'll take 13 years to get it.

Z: Not a very accurate or informed answer. First, Kerry seems unaware of the HEU bend-down program where the Russians (supposedly) bend down HEU (highly enriched uranium) from dismantled warheads to reactor grade fuel (LEU).
**************************************

Well the 600 tons comes from the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Agency. You can find a discussion of the amounts and links to other studies at http://tinyurl.com/5y6b5

It is useful to know that what Kerry was talking about was the amount of nuclear material (not just HEU, but also plutonium) at UNSECURED SITES.

There is a lot more HEU and plutonium sitting in secured sites and bombs and missles in Russia.

So we ask again, how does the existence of the mixdown program show that Kerry's statement was neither accurate or informed?

As a passing note I have pieces of the AVLIS project in my basement. I talked briefly with the USEC President at the auction after they shut it down, and guess why they killed the sucker, as well as closing down Portsmouth, leaving only Paducah producing. As to whether the recent centrifuge demo project at Portsmouth is an Ohio jobs program or serious...... I leave that to the economists.

Rabett:

Your link is to a political document (the democrats) not a scientific document. Scanning it quickly I found one link to a GAO report which states (quickly scanning I could have missed something):

“The Number of Sealed Sources in Use and Lost, Stolen, or Abandoned
Worldwide Is Unknown:”

So it’s not clear (at this point) that these so-called unsecured sites actually have weapons grade material as opposed to industrial, medical and consumer (like smoke detectors) material.

Again I took only a cursory look. Stay tuned.

Zarkov wrote, "The Russians don’t sell us HEU, only LEU at above market price (the last time I looked). The Russians don’t want us to know the isotopic ratios (or at least know them accurately) in the HEU because they believe it would reveal too much about the design of the warheads that the HEU was supposed to come from. Like the US, the Russians have (supposedly) reduced their weapons stockpile, and that reduction provides the HEU that Russia blends down to LEU. However they still run their centrifuge plants (it’s expensive to shut them down). They would cheat if they really wanted to keep the original weapons, and simply sell us current LEU production from the centrifuge plants."

Doesn't weapons-grade material degenerate over time? They have to reprocess it anyway.

So is the difference that it's more work to process LEU to HEU while adding DU to degraded HEU and selling it, than it is to reprocess degraded HEU into usable HEU and sell us the LEU?

It sounds about the same to me, apart from purely technical issues.

And surely by this time we know about isotope ratios etc. We can't have gone this long without getting access to a single russian warhead. We haven't even bought a single one on the black market? If we don't have any, why do we think anybody else does?

Still, it doesn't sound as bad as it did to me at my last post. Warheads have to be scattered and somewhat available. There's room for theft there. But HEU or Pu that hasn't been shaped will be at central locations and it might be much harder to steal it or to do excess production off the books. If the government has more HEU than it knows what to do with, why not convert it to LEU and sell it to the USA? That's actually easier than making fresh LEU to sell. It only makes sense for them to cheat if there's such a big market for illicit HEU that they run out, or if they want to keep so many nukes that they don't have any extra HEU.

Published US sources probably aren't the best for easy ways to make HEU. If we found such methods why would we publish them?

The south africans succeeded with hilsch tubes, which we say are less efficient than centrifuges but much easier to build and operate. Someone who actually wanted to do it might start with their published methods. They weren't very far along the learning curve, there might be ways to improve on them.

Also, if an expired warhead fizzles, isn't the result a dirty bomb? It only has to work well enough to open the casing and just barely vaporise itself. How much enrichment does that take?

So anyway, back to Zarkov's original point:

"KERRY: Nuclear proliferation. Nuclear proliferation. There's some 600-plus tons of unsecured material still in the former Soviet Union and Russia. At the rate that the president is currently securing it, it'll take 13 years to get it."

"Not a very accurate or informed answer. First, Kerry seems unaware of the HEU bend-down program where the Russians (supposedly) bend down HEU (highly enriched uranium) from dismantled warheads to reactor grade fuel (LEU)."

This is the program that will take 13 more years, right? And it only covers the original amount of HEU we intended to buy over 20 years, none of the rest of the unsecured material, the Pu etc. So the 600-plus tons could have referred to the original amount which has been partly bought -- that would be a little bit inaccurate, he didn't account for the bought part. But if so he'x definitely aware of the program, it's what he's referring to. But I notice that he was nice about it, he didn't ask what initiative Bush has made to reduce the amount of unsecured material in the XSSR.

"He also seems unaware of the Fissile Material Storage Facility (under construction) at Mayak .... The slow downs at Mayak are caused by Russian financial difficulties and negotiations over our monitoring of these operations."

So someday more of russia's unsecured materials will be secured there. We were paying for it, but now we're delaying because the Bush administration thinks it's more important that we know what's in it than to have it working soon. I'm not sure Bush is wrong but the immediate result is the unsecured material is still unsecured.

"(Kerry contd) “And the black market sale price was about $250 million.”

"He’s not telling you the buyers get stiffed on these purchases."

Is there enough of a market to establish a golng price? At a quarter billion a shot there aren't many terrorists who can afford one. For a quarter billion how many chemical plants could they sabotage? Nuclear power plants? If that was the price I wouldn't be as worried. But you say the fair price is lower.

"(More Kerry) “Now, there are terrorists trying to get their hands on that stuff today.”

"There is no evidence that terrorists have gotten any fissile material."

Yes. I'm not sure they're even trying. It's such an utterly stupid idea, except for terrorists who've given up and just want to take as many of us with them as they can. Terrorists are people who are so overmatched materially that they're reduced to showing that they can't be ignored. They want splashy attacks to show they exist and are somehow important. They don't want to be ignored, but they shouldn't want so much attention that the whole world is against them, either.

"They would need to get HEU because they don’t have the expertise to make an implosion device and Pu won’t work in the gun design (which is much easier to build). Even then could they build bombs without testing them just once? After all Al-Qaeda is not the Manhattan Project team."

We don't know how good al qaeda engineers are. We don't know what other terrorists are out there or how good their engineers are.

So, Kerry said nuclear proliferation is the worst threat, and he mentioned terrorists. What do you think is the worst threat? You appear to be saying that terrorists can't get nukes, which argues against Bush's claim that terrorists with WMDs are the worst threat.

Who are you disagreeing with?

I wish Kerry would mention that this new generation of nuclear bunker-busters is thought by military people to be of not much use in practice. Like missile defense, they seem to more part of the Republican catechism than anything having any usefulness in reality.

Why yes, dear Zarkov, you missed this sentence, starting at the bottom of the first page and continuing to the second
**************************
Current figures show there are 105 nuclear sites in Russia with 243 buildings that need assistance
improving their security.5 According to the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration, “these sites contain approximately 600 metric tons of nuclear materials, enough
for around 41,000 nuclear warheads.”6
***************************
Note the quotes. Note the footnotes. Trace the footnotes if you will. Note that the claim is that there is enough material for 41K warheads. This is not low grade radiological material. for that problem go down to page 6. Now, stop moving the shells about. Otherwise, in my humble opinion, J Thomas is pretty much right.

Rabett:

Those figures come from reference 5:

CRS Report RL32202, Nuclear Weapons in Russia: Safety, Security, and Control Issues, by Amy Woolf.

That report is not available on the Internet, so I can’t (quickly) make any kind of judgment as to how they estimated those numbers. In my experience these kinds scary numbers are frequently based on poor information, and when you try to drill down to the source you come up dry. But I do know people who work in this business, and I will ask them if they can provide more information. Some of them have gone to Russia to help them increase security at their weapon storage sites.

I disagree with Kerry that proliferation is the number one danger to the US. Moreover, his statement in the debate leads one to believe that little is being done about the problem, and that’s simply not true.

Zarkov, do you also disagree with Bush that terrorists with WMDs is the biggest threat?

Zarkov, do you also disagree with Bush that terrorists with WMDs is the biggest threat?

mortgage leads

Yes I disagree with both Bush and Kerry about terrorists armed with nuclear weapons as our biggest threat. However, other WMD, such as anthrax, is another matter. I don’t know enough about biological warfare to access the threat, although some of the stuff I read is certainly very scary. The physicist Garwin also takes this position. He says biological warfare actually has greater potential for damage against the US than terror-made nuclear weapons. The book “Biohazard,” says the Soviet Union planned to use weaponized anthrax in missile warheads. They believed that these warheads would be as deadly as nuclear warheads. In my opinion the nuclear weapons threat has been exaggerated for political and budgetary purposes. I don’t think they could even manage a gun design, but others disagree. This does not apply to governments. Iran and North Korea for example, should be able to design and test a nuclear bomb within five years.

Zarkov, I can say a little about biowarfare. It comes in 3 classes. Battlefield weapons are designed to spread easily from an artillery shell or whatever, but be hard to spread from person to person. It takes 3 days or so for the symptoms to develop, slow. CW defense will mostly stop it, if you're already doing CW defense. Just another weapon.

As a WMD it gets designed to spread very easily. It might take out whole nations like the Black Death did but much faster since our travel is faster and these would be designed to be more lethal and easier to spread. Every reason to think it would spread beyond the target population, it might easily spread to all population centers. You might immunise your own population if you don't care about any of the others. You might have rarely-used antibiotics (if it's bacteria) and stockpile them to treat your own population. If it's a good WMD no defense but complete isolation would be enough, and it's harder to guarantee complete isolation than you'd think.

So that sort of weapon is more a doomsday-device WMD than an attack-your-enemy WMD. Its main use would be for a nation in extremity. Say israel was close to losing a war, they could say "We're about to release a disease that's likely to kill everybody on earth. If there isn't going to be an israel why should we let anybody live?" Terrorists might have that same attitude. Bio WMDs are cheap to use once they've been developed.

But they're hell to test. You could test lethality in a sealed prison. But to test how communicable a disease is you really need to test it on wild populations. And this is something you can't test that way until you're ready to actually use it. Once it's out, it's out. So you can't be sure what you've got until after you use it. It's pretty cheap to design and build a genengineered organism that *ought* to be a WMD. But finding out whether it does what you think it does is another matter.

If we wanted to defend against it, we could divide our population up into relatively small groups with strictly limited contact among groups. It would be hard on the economy but we could do it. We could do electronic communication any time; the idea that somebody can cross the whole country in one day is absurd when they might be a disease vector. But we aren't seriously intrested in defense. We can mostly depend on nobody making that attack.

Then, there are bioweapons to attack crops and domestic animals. Crops are the big issue. The communication issue isn't as hard. You don't usually get people carrying infected rice plants from china to louisiana. If it does spread you can give up that crop for a few years until the infestation is gone and introduce it again from seed. You can introduce a variety of the plant which is resistant to the disease. There aren't any moral issues about plowing under a billion rice plants to stop an infection, not like killing possibly-infected citizens.

If you destroy your enemy's crops they don't have to starve. Provided you have enough food in reserve you can feed them after they surrender. They only starve if they refuse to surrender. It's a humane weapon if that tactic works. I've never heard of it being tried. About the time we were getting really good at the methods, we were also talking about "food-as-weapon" to counter "oil-as-weapon". But I've never heard that we used it. The times that our enemies have had crop failures and we offered them food in exchange for what we wanted, there's always reason to think it was natural crop failures.

So, biowarfare against our crops is only an issue if we don't have enough food stored. Biowarfare against the population of the world could be very bad or less so, and for each incident nobody really knows ahead of time how bad it will be. It's useless for somebody who wants to win, it can only be used by somebody who wants revenge against the world, presumably after his own people have been exterminated.

Note that Kerry said "nuclear proliferation" was the issue, not specifically terrorists. And iran and NK might both already have designs that worked for other nations, that could speed up the schedule a little. By doing the enrichment in more parallel operations they could get material faster. Iran needs to have nukes sooner than we expect they can to disrupt our schedule, so they ought to be doing something like that.

Thomas and Rabett:

This website http://www.isis-online.org/publications/fmct/book/index.html deals specifically with worldwide issues of fissile material control. For Russia the following chapter is of interest:

http://www.isis-online.org/publications/fmct/book/New%20chapter%204%2012-26.pdf

This statement is to some extent reassuring:

“Fortunately, there is no credible evidence
that any of Russia’s nuclear
weapons have been stolen. Media reports that Russia is “missing”
nuclear weapons have not been verified.”

As to fissile material inventories, look here:

http://www.isis-online.org/global_stocks/tableofcontents.html

especially Table 1 which gives military and excess stock of HEU. But note the comment:

“Russia's HEU inventory remains difficult to estimate. Little public information is available about Russian HEU production or stocks, and thus the uncertainty in the total estimated stock is large. Although Russia's production of HEU for weapons ended in 1987 or 1988, it is believed to have continued making HEU into 1989 and to have stopped by 1990. Because this estimate factors in total Russian HEU production, it is greater than earlier estimates by this author.”

Thus depending what numbers you pick and how you define “unsecured,” you can come up with a variety of estimates. As before, I contend Kerry’s statement is unsupported by credible evidence. But decide for yourself, this is a pretty good unclassified source.

Zarkov, I'm ready to believe that Kerry's estimate may come from the CIA. Official US estimates are probably about as good as we can do at the moment. Or maybe it's completely unsupported. But it seems plausible to me that XSSR nuclear material would be an issue.

If I was in charge of russia's bombs and I noticed some of them were missing, I doubt I'd admit it to the world press. What good would that do me?

And I'm naturally concerned about russia's plutonium. That stuff is deadly poison even when it isn't blowing up. Find a way to vaporise a chunk of it in an american city and you might do almost as much damage as a nuke. We'd have every family in the country buying radiation detectors. Not pretty.

Hmm. I wonder who makes those things. If we could figure a 50% chance of an incident in 3 years, buy the stock now.... But no. It would be a stupid thing for terrorists to do unless they've given up any chance of eventually winning and only want revenge. Not that likely. Throw in the chance of a large well-publicised nuclear accident.... Probably not.

J. Thomas:

Go here for a good write up the danger of Pu from terrorists.

http://www.llnl.gov/csts/publications/sutcliffe/.

Pu is toxic, but less toxic than a lot of other things that are much easier to obtain. The chief toxic route is by inhalation. You would need particles in the 1-5 micron range to get the most effect. So I don’t terrorists would create a vapor even if they could. The boiling point is nearly 6,000 F. The chief danger is from a fission bomb that could go critical. For this they need to make an implosion device, or some kind of super gun device.

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Nice!

Zarkov, ignoring the details of how terrorists would build and use a dirty bomb, my claim is that the word "plutonium" would go a lot farther to reduce property values for the next 20 years than most poisons.

Biological and chemical poisons are cheap and easy, but the biological ones biodegrade and the chemical ones get diluted and don't have the scare factor.

So you go live or work in the low-rent district where the background count is a little high, and if you get cancer (as more than 1/3 of people do at some point) you won't know whether it was because of that.

If terrorists had a fission bomb that fizzled, if it exploded a little bit it would be a dirty bomb. Maybe not as effective a dirty bomb as they could make if they tried hard. An expired russian warhead that would be ineffective for blast etc might still make a good terror weapon. Because the point of terror weapons is to terrorise people, more than to destroy them.

When I think about it, a dirty bomb that spread a lot of small-particle depleted uranium would be a perfect terror weapon. We could play up how bad it is and upset our veterans.

Or we could play up how stupid the terrorists are for using something that has no effect and every crackpot conspiracy theorist in the country will come out with every study that's ever been published about how bad it is.

However, dirty bombs and nukes are both stupid attacks for terrorists who haven't given up all hope of victory. They could hurt us badly for revenge, but to win they must either hurt us so bad we can't retaliate or else persuade us to leave them alone. Dirty bombs and nukes won't do either of those.