American Hiroshima

[Guest]

Humbug.

A Radiological device is a lot easier and will terrorize much more effectively than a nuke.

Dead people can't be terrorized.

Command & Control will still be intact, and if a nuke is used, the gloves will finally come off once and for all.

mh

.

[Gravitymaster 0]

Quote

Humbug.

A Radiological device is a lot easier and will terrorize much more effectively than a nuke.

Dead people can't be terrorized.

Command & Control will still be intact, and if a nuke is used, the gloves will finally come off once and for all.

mh

.

I don't think it will take something on the scale of a Nuclear attack. I believe an incident in NY or DC like the London bombings, will do it.

[nerdgirl 0]

Of potential interest:
NTI's Last Best Chance
(was given the DVD a few weeks ago but have not had chance to watch it.)
http://lastbestchance.org/index.html

"Last Best Chance is a docudrama that shows the threat posed by vulnerable nuclear weapons and materials around the world and underscores what the stakes are.

"In the movie, al Qaeda operatives organize three separate operations aimed at getting nuclear weapons. The material is then fabricated into three crude nuclear weapons by small groups of trained terrorists, who have recruited bomb-making experts to help them manufacture their weapons.

"Governments around the world discover clues to the plot, but are unable to uncover the scheme before the weapons are en route to their destinations. The film clearly demonstrates that the hardest job for terrorists is gaining control of a nuclear weapon or material. Because the governments had failed to take sufficient action to secure or destroy the nuclear weapons material, they are helpless to prevent an attack.

"The film stars Fred Thompson and features an epilogue moderated by Tom Brokaw."

A couple other items of potential interest -- non-sensationalistic, grounded in hard-core science but written for a non-technical audience:
"Communicating Nuclear Risk: Informing the Public about the Risks and Realities of Nuclear Terrorism," http://iis-db.stanford.edu/pubs/20063/NuclearRisk.pdf,
contributors include Sig Hecker (LANL) and Mike May (former LLNL director/Stanford),

and Graham Allison's prolific work: http://bcsia.ksg.harvard.edu/publication_list_by_person.cfm?item_id=222.

marg

Act as if everything you do matters, while laughing at yourself for thinking anything you do matters.
Tibetan Buddhist saying

[billvon 3,120]

> nukes don't have a shelf life. They're unstable, give off hydrogen . . .

You're thinking of a thermonuclear weapon. A simple gun-type critical mass nuclear weapon is exceedingly simple to build, especially if you have a group of nuts who don't mind dying in the process (saves on expensive containment measures.) It relies only on physical proximity of U-235 for criticality, which has a half-life of approximately 700 million years.

So U-235 is what you have to watch in terms of homemade weapons. With plutonium you need a high flux neutron source to even initiate the reaction, and of course with hydrogen bombs you have _two_ reactions to deal with.