This from yesterday's Financial Times:

<a href='http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1087373567507' target='_blank'>http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?p...d=1087373567507</a>

Inquiry will back intelligence that Iraq sought uranium
By Mark Huband in London
Published: July 7 2004 22:38 | Last Updated: July 8 2004 0:49

A UK government inquiry into the intelligence used to justify the war in Iraq is expected to conclude that Britain's spies were correct to say that Saddam Hussein's regime sought to buy uranium from Niger.

The inquiry by Lord Butler, which was delivered to the printers on Wednesday and is expected to be released on July 14, has examined the intelligence that underpinned the UK government's claims about the threat from Iraq.

The report will say the claim that Mr Hussein could deploy chemical weapons within 45 minutes, seized on by UK prime minister Tony Blair to bolster the case for war with Iraq, was inadequately supported by the available intelligence, people familiar with its contents say .

But among Lord Butler's other areas of investigation was the issue of whether Iraq sought to buy uranium from Niger. People with knowledge of the report said Lord Butler has concluded that this claim was reasonable and consistent with the intelligence.

President George W. Bush referred to the Niger claim in his state of the union address last year. But officials were forced into a climbdown when it was revealed that the only primary intelligence material the US possessed were documents later shown to be forgeries.

The Bush administration has since distanced itself from all suggestions that Iraq sought to buy uranium. The UK government has remained adamant that negotiations over sales did take place and that the fake documents were not part of the intelligence material it had gathered to underpin its claim.

The Financial Times revealed last week that a key part of the UK's intelligence on the uranium came from a European intelligence service that undertook a three-year surveillance of an alleged clandestine uranium-smuggling operation of which Iraq was a part.

Intelligence officials have now confirmed that the results of this operation formed an important part of the conclusions of British intelligence. The same information was passed to the US but US officials did not incorporate it in their assessment.

The 45-minute claim appeared four times in a government dossier on Iraq's WMD issued in September 2002, including in the foreword by Mr Blair.

It became the subject of intense scrutiny when government scientist David Kelly was alleged to have voiced concerns about the claim's accuracy to Andrew Gilligan, then a BBC reporter.

Mr Gilligan's report of his conversation with Mr Kelly unleashed a fierce dispute between the government and the BBC that culminated in Mr Kelly's suicide, an inquiry into the circumstances of his death, and the resignation of the BBC's two most senior officials.

Lord Butler is said to have produced a report that criticises the process of intelligence gathering and assessment on Iraq but refrains from criticising individual officials.



...............................................................

None of this means our intelligence wasn't horrible, because clearly the CIA's info was bogus. However, the larger point that Iraq was attempting to buy uranium from Niger appears to now be independently confirmed by two European intelligence agencies and a UK parliamentary panel has verified the authenticity of that intel.

Too late for the Bush administration to get back on the bandwagon after they climbed down and said that the state of the union claim was a mistake. I bet they are kicking themselves for that. They were right all along and they didn't even know it. Still a very humiliating incident for the CIA.

It is disturbing, particularly in conjunction with yesterday's report that the CIA had pre-war information from relatives of Iraqi scientists that talk of weapons programs was bogus, but that information was never shared with the president.

Here's the larger issue: our intelligence was a mess, but that didn't stop us from acting rashly. The neo-cons succeeded in getting their Office of Special Plans set up, and then stovepiped any information that supported their cause right up to Cheney. Whether or not the information is truly credible doesn't seem to matter to him, and it's why to this day he insists he knows more than the 9/11 Commission, the CIA or anyone else not in his ideological camp. It is also why the Ahmed Chalabis of the world have been able to dupe us as of late.

It's an incredibly dangerous way to run a country.

I have serious doubts that anyone with any policy making authority in the Dubya administration has any idea how difficult it is to make a nuclear (or, in their words, nookular) weapon. Getting the urnaium is easy. The physics are easy. Go to your local library and you can find books regarding the physics of a nuclear weapon. It's the engineering that's hard.

First, you've got to refine the U238 into U235. This ain't a bathtub operation like anthrax. It takes large plants to do this and those plants emit, gasp, radiation. You can't hide it. And, it takes a lot, and I mean a lot, of U238 to get just a tiny bit of U235.

Now, let's suppose that somehow you build a big plant for the purpose of refining U238 and you somehow manage to hide it. Next, you've got to build a bomb.

The easiest type to build is a "gun" type bomb. Basically, you use explosives to shoot a slug sub-critical mass uranium into another slug of sub-critical mass uranium. The drawback is that this method is extremely inefficient in the fission process and you've got to refine a lot more U238 than for an "implosion" type bomb. Also, you need so much uranium that you can't deliver it in a small package. The bomb itself will be huge.

An implosion type bomb requires a lot less uranium but a lot more engineering expertise.

First, you have to shape the uranium into a hollow sphere. The idea is to pack explosives around the sphere and compress it. The compression causes the runaway reaction. The shaping of that sphere has tolerances to within thousandths of an inch so get it wrong by that much, and you don't get an explosion. Mentioning explosives, the explosives you pack around the sphere must also be shaped to tolerances to within thousandths of an inch. Finally, you obviously detonate explosives with an electrical charge but, let's assume the charge comes in at one point on the sphere. The wires are longer to the explosives at the opposite side of the sphere and, despite the fact that electricity is passing through your wires at the speed of light, the difference in time between the shorter wires and the longer wires is enough to derail your intended explosion. You've got to make the wires the exact same length or you've got to put sophisticated timers on the explosives so they all detonate at the same time.

Wonder what the public reaction would have been if Dubya had told us all of that?

MAKO Wrote:Go to your local library and you can find books regarding the physics of a nuclear weapon. It's the engineering that's hard.

First, you've got to refine the U238 into U235. This ain't a bathtub operation like anthrax. It takes large plants to do this and those plants emit, gasp, radiation. You can't hide it.

My understanding, and I could be wrong about this b/c I've never tried to buy U, is that these deals are for enriched U 235.

Getting unrefined U may also be a hassle, but probably not a huge problem for a state run operation.

I always thought these secret weapons deals were for the good stuff.

MAKO Wrote:I have serious doubts that anyone with any policy making authority in the Dubya administration has any idea how difficult it is to make a nuclear (or, in their words, nookular) weapon. Getting the urnaium is easy. The physics are easy. Go to your local library and you can find books regarding the physics of a nuclear weapon. It's the engineering that's hard.

You make a jab about how he says "nuclear" and then misspell uranium in the next sentence. Interesting. I would be willing to bet that the people on the Bush Administration have at least 3 times as much education as any of your Hollywood "elites".

MAKO, you make good points. It is difficult to build a bomb. But there are people in this world that are capable of doing it. The US did it in the 40s. After the fall of the Soviet Union there was a scare that Soviet scientists might take jobs building bombs for the highest bidder. There's also the prospect of a dirty bomb, which wouldn't be as initially devestating. But it could still leave cities in unlivable conditions.

My point is that, unless you somehow got a warhead, pre-assembled, from some other country, it would take a massive effort to build one. Again, the physics are simple and not classified. Go to your local library or do a google search and you will find detailed directions for assembling an implosion type weapon. But, even if you get the scientists, you've still got to get the uranium and then you've still got to get the machine tools that are precise enough to build the bomb. All the experts in the world are useless if you don't have the needed tools.

As for the United States building a bomb in the 1940's, that's true. It's also true that we had some of the world's leading physicists involved in the project. Furthermore, it is estimated that the total amount spent by the United States government in developing the atomic bomb was somewhere around $20 billion. Translated into today's dollars, that's more like $250 billion. Question. Do you really think that any country could recruit some of the best nuclear physicists in the world, spend an absolute pile of money, build huge plants to refine the uranium, and acquire the machine tools necessary to build a bomb without getting noticed?

As for a "dirty bomb", you can get good radioactive material from a whole lot of medical equipment. Compact that material and then explode it and, presto, you've got a "dirty bomb."

This is a fascinating read by Fareed Zakaria of Newsweek:

<a href='http://msnbc.msn.com/id/5197531/site/newsweek/' target='_blank'>http://msnbc.msn.com/id/5197531/site/newsweek/</a>

He argues the United States could control every bit of uranium 235 and plutonium in the world for about $1 billion per year.

SDI costs $10 billion per year.

There are some informative posts in this thread.

Schadenfreude Wrote:This is a fascinating read by Fareed Zakaria of Newsweek:

<a href='http://msnbc.msn.com/id/5197531/site/newsweek/' target='_blank'>http://msnbc.msn.com/id/5197531/site/newsweek/</a>

He argues the United States could control every bit of uranium 235 and plutonium in the world for about $1 billion per year.

SDI costs $10 billion per year.

There are some informative posts in this thread.

Can't someone put a hydrogen bomb in a ballistic missile? How about chemical or biological weapons? However, to be honest with you, I don't understand the need for SDI at this point in time, but it's always good to be prepared for the worst. We didn't, well, "I" didn't, anticipate something on the scale of 9/11.

MAKO Wrote:I have serious doubts that anyone with any policy making authority in the Dubya administration has any idea how difficult it is to make a nuclear (or, in their words, nookular) weapon. Getting the urnaium is easy. The physics are easy. Go to your local library and you can find books regarding the physics of a nuclear weapon. It's the engineering that's hard.

First, you've got to refine the U238 into U235. This ain't a bathtub operation like anthrax. It takes large plants to do this and those plants emit, gasp, radiation. You can't hide it. And, it takes a lot, and I mean a lot, of U238 to get just a tiny bit of U235.

Now, let's suppose that somehow you build a big plant for the purpose of refining U238 and you somehow manage to hide it. Next, you've got to build a bomb.

The easiest type to build is a "gun" type bomb. Basically, you use explosives to shoot a slug sub-critical mass uranium into another slug of sub-critical mass uranium. The drawback is that this method is extremely inefficient in the fission process and you've got to refine a lot more U238 than for an "implosion" type bomb. Also, you need so much uranium that you can't deliver it in a small package. The bomb itself will be huge.

An implosion type bomb requires a lot less uranium but a lot more engineering expertise.

First, you have to shape the uranium into a hollow sphere. The idea is to pack explosives around the sphere and compress it. The compression causes the runaway reaction. The shaping of that sphere has tolerances to within thousandths of an inch so get it wrong by that much, and you don't get an explosion. Mentioning explosives, the explosives you pack around the sphere must also be shaped to tolerances to within thousandths of an inch. Finally, you obviously detonate explosives with an electrical charge but, let's assume the charge comes in at one point on the sphere. The wires are longer to the explosives at the opposite side of the sphere and, despite the fact that electricity is passing through your wires at the speed of light, the difference in time between the shorter wires and the longer wires is enough to derail your intended explosion. You've got to make the wires the exact same length or you've got to put sophisticated timers on the explosives so they all detonate at the same time.

Wonder what the public reaction would have been if Dubya had told us all of that?

To be fair, the point of this intelligence, as it was used, was not to say that Saddam had a nuclear weapon.

The intelligence was presented to prove that Saddam had not given up his nuclear ambitions, and was actively attempting to obtain fissile material for the purpose of developing weapons. When a state with a track record like Iraq's makes attempts to acquire this material, its not sufficient to simply look the other way and say that "its tough to build a bomb, so we shouldn't worry about it". This is particularly true when examining our inability to monitor how far Iran and North Korea were in there programs until it was too late. Iran is reportedly incredibally close right now, and North Korea, one of the poorest nations on earth in terms of financial and human capital most probably has the pieces in place to build one if they haven't already. Speaking of which, Iraq was already purchasing ballistic missiles from Pyongyang off the shelf up to and on the eve of war. Those relationships represent a unique proliferation threat given what we know about North Korea's need for economic resources and their recent history of exporting nuke tech to Tehran and Libya via the A.Q. Khan network in Islamabad.

There are good reasons to argue why a war was not required in Iraq in March 2003, but saying that "its hard to build a deliverable warhead" is not one of them. The point is that its possible for poor nations with few resources to do it, and Iraq was certainly trying.

All the more reason why we should be following Zakaria's reccomendation to secure the world's fissile material and loose nukes, and this is a problem (the underfunding of the Nunn-Lugar initiative) that has gone on for over a decade. We simply need to start getting serious about proliferation. I happen to think that Iraq was part of that threat, particularly in so far as we showed the consequences of failure to comply with a disarmament regime. I understand how others might not agree. However, we need to continue pressing these issues, no matter who is the next president. Bush has done some good things (like the implementation of the Proliferation Security Initiative) that must be continued and expanded over the next administration, and I trust that Kerry and Edwards understand that.

MAKO Wrote:As for the United States building a bomb in the 1940's, that's true. It's also true that we had some of the world's leading physicists involved in the project. Furthermore, it is estimated that the total amount spent by the United States government in developing the atomic bomb was somewhere around $20 billion. Translated into today's dollars, that's more like $250 billion. Question. Do you really think that any country could recruit some of the best nuclear physicists in the world, spend an absolute pile of money, build huge plants to refine the uranium, and acquire the machine tools necessary to build a bomb without getting noticed?

As for a "dirty bomb", you can get good radioactive material from a whole lot of medical equipment. Compact that material and then explode it and, presto, you've got a "dirty bomb."

But, what you fail to realize is that there would be no research required to build such a facility, as there was in the 1940's. That reduces costs tremdously.

Furthermore, there is much better COTS equipment available than back then. Remember, alot of that stuff was custom.

As for the physicists, I do think they're available. Because you no longer need the world's top nuclear physicists, they aren't doing research, they are just being trained in an established field. And US universities love to train international students in those type of fields. :rolleyes: Nevertheless, there are some very smart Russians around too.

Pakistan got them...others could too.

The costs aren't prohibitive. Rather it's escaping the world's scrutiny that is. Like you wrote earlier, radiation can be detected. That's why the US gets so upset when places like N. Korea start "re-activating" old nuclear power plants. Suddenly it's tough to be sure what's going in those facilities.

Secondly, while the US has U mines, I tend to believe other sites in the world do too. But, I'm no geologist so I don't know where they are. Are they in the M East? Africa? Can you mine raw U ore and get away w/ it?

There are challenges to starting a nuclear program, especially from scratch. But, I don't think they are the ones you cite.

As for the dirty bomb, there was discusion a few weeks ago that U was lousy material for such a bomb. The 238 isotope is not very radioactive, it's very dense material, difficult to transport, and doesn't spread well.

But other elements do exist as you mentioned, in medical devices, and perhaps even old smoke detectors. (I believe some designs used to use Am...they still may.)

Schadenfreude Wrote:This is a fascinating read by Fareed Zakaria of Newsweek:

<a href='http://msnbc.msn.com/id/5197531/site/newsweek/' target='_blank'>http://msnbc.msn.com/id/5197531/site/newsweek/</a>

He argues the United States could control every bit of uranium 235 and plutonium in the world for about $1 billion per year.

That was a good article. I'd like to see the US adopt more of these "goal oriented" policies.

While I think his numbers of 99% control are inflated...the cost-benefit analysis suggest that it's still a great avenue to pursue.

Curioser and curioser, as per Jeff Jacoby in today's Boston Globe:<a href='http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2004/07/11/new_look_at_bushs_16_words/' target='_blank'>Niger, uranium, and Iraq</a>

sherman&amp;grant Wrote:Curioser and curioser, as per Jeff Jacoby in today's Boston Globe:<a href='http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2004/07/11/new_look_at_bushs_16_words/' target='_blank'>Niger, uranium, and Iraq</a>

I think the media, rightfully so, want to be cautious in verifying any new information introduced at this point. (Well, maybe except for the New York Post writer who came up with that Dick Gebhart as Kerry running mate story).

But I hardly think such a development, if it comes about at this point, puts the administration in much of a better light. They would have had to spoken up a year ago that the source info for the 16 words wasn't the forged documents, and they didn't. (And you know damn well that these guys have no compunction about coming through with sensitive documents, if it backs their case).

So the revisionist history case doesn't clear the slate here. In fact, it falls under the heading of one more thing we didn't know that we didn't know.

I'm afraid we're all chasing shadows and ghosts on this subject until November, unless the U.S. District Attorney investigating the Plame affair comes out with indictments. Those would be damaging. But the existence of the whole Plame affair undermines any administration claim that they knew about this new intelligence the British may have -- if the administration had this info at the time, they could have blown up the whole Joseph Wilson report with facts and never had to go on the Valerie Plame witchhunt. So clearly they can not claim that they knew.

Very good read in the MSNBC article and he makes some excellent points. One of the better thought out arguments I've seen in a while. Unfortunately, I doubt it will see time in the presidential debates because both candidates will be too busy yelling at each other to engage in any substantive discussion of the issues.

MAKO Wrote:I have serious doubts that anyone with any policy making authority in the Dubya administration has any idea how difficult it is to make a nuclear (or, in their words, nookular) weapon. Getting the urnaium is easy. The physics are easy. Go to your local library and you can find books regarding the physics of a nuclear weapon. It's the engineering that's hard.

First, you've got to refine the U238 into U235. This ain't a bathtub operation like anthrax. It takes large plants to do this and those plants emit, gasp, radiation. You can't hide it. And, it takes a lot, and I mean a lot, of U238 to get just a tiny bit of U235.

Now, let's suppose that somehow you build a big plant for the purpose of refining U238 and you somehow manage to hide it. Next, you've got to build a bomb.

The easiest type to build is a "gun" type bomb. Basically, you use explosives to shoot a slug sub-critical mass uranium into another slug of sub-critical mass uranium. The drawback is that this method is extremely inefficient in the fission process and you've got to refine a lot more U238 than for an "implosion" type bomb. Also, you need so much uranium that you can't deliver it in a small package. The bomb itself will be huge.

An implosion type bomb requires a lot less uranium but a lot more engineering expertise.

First, you have to shape the uranium into a hollow sphere. The idea is to pack explosives around the sphere and compress it. The compression causes the runaway reaction. The shaping of that sphere has tolerances to within thousandths of an inch so get it wrong by that much, and you don't get an explosion. Mentioning explosives, the explosives you pack around the sphere must also be shaped to tolerances to within thousandths of an inch. Finally, you obviously detonate explosives with an electrical charge but, let's assume the charge comes in at one point on the sphere. The wires are longer to the explosives at the opposite side of the sphere and, despite the fact that electricity is passing through your wires at the speed of light, the difference in time between the shorter wires and the longer wires is enough to derail your intended explosion. You've got to make the wires the exact same length or you've got to put sophisticated timers on the explosives so they all detonate at the same time.

Wonder what the public reaction would have been if Dubya had told us all of that?

Are we supposed to be impressed you can search google for "How to make a bomb" and cut and paste it here? Or are trying to convince us you posted all that from your own memory? :rolleyes:

Thought this article would provide useful information:

<a href='http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20040720/ap_on_sc/uranium_mine_1' target='_blank'>U Mine in Congo</a>