Countdown To Zero Page #4

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If a terrorist thinks

that the portal monitor

might detect weapon,

they set it off in the port.

highly enriched uranium is

easy to smuggle

the radiation is very weak.

The detectors that we are

putting in place now

would have no chance of detecting

HEU:

in a cargo container.

The signature of highly enriched uranium

is so slight

that they would have to set

the monitors very high

to detect it,and so

they are getting

thousands of false alarms

every day.

Toilets, will set it off

china

Ceramics,

stones like granites,

lot of biological materials

like tobacco, some algae,

televisions ,the

old style televisions,

kitty litter,lot of chemical products,

and well other stuff also

You wants to smuggle a

bomb into the United States?

Ship it in a truck with a kitty litter

No one would ever find it

They are great for really

radioactive stuff,

like cesium or something

that might be used

in a "dirty bomb."

But for the stuff that you

would use to make a nuclear bomb

that would incenerate the

heart of a major city

they are not gonna detect that.

Robert Oppenheimer

in 1946, he appeared in a

closed door session

of the Senate,

and one of the senators

asked him

if nuclear terrorism

was a potential threat.

He said "Of course"

"Terrorists could bring a

bomb into New York City

"And destroy the city."

Somebody asked him :

"How would you stop it?"

He said:

"With a screwdriver,

"To open up every container

that comes into this city. "

Once you have smuggled the highly enriched uranium

into the U.S.you would need a

place to build the bomb.

The bomb could be built

right in the target city.

The hard part was

what we did in 1945.

The hard part is doing

it the first time.

This is no longer a conceptual challenge

There is no trick.

There is no magic

that needs to be figured out

It's really just an engineering challenge

It's definitely not rocket science.

The rocket science

is more difficult.

you can make a

very simple weapon,

a so called gun type weapon

which was the one used in Hiroshima

It was so simple we didnt even test it

before we dropped it

It is essentially just

a gun barrel.

with a target and you can projectile,

and you propel the projectile into the target.

you will need an artillary gun

to fire a

one piece of HEU in the other,

which would be bolted

onto the muscle of the gun

The military sells these

things as surplus,

but they sell them to save it

You would have to make the

gun capable of shooting again

and you would want to test fire the gun

to make sure that

that it fired the

projectile at the right speed.

This is the only thing that

you would need to do off-site.

you would need a

group of people ...

lets say,between 15 to 20 to 25,

who would be knowledgable in

particular aspects

of weapons designs

of explosives.

Two or three people

to do the machining,

two or three people to

work on the gun

two or three people

to work on electronics,

People who are experts

in ballistics

People who know something

about nuclear physics.

you just need the machinist and metallar

just to make the pieces into the right

shapes and make sure they fit together

Ordinary explosives and

detonators

maybe some

electronic equipment.

You can go online

and easily find the

blade for $ 10,000.

you could find the furnace

for about $ 50,000.

And you can even find the

surplus recoilless rifle

probably also

for $ 10,000.

More than 90% of the effort

in the Manhattan Project

was making the

nuclear material

to make

the nuclear bomb.

If you can get hold of

that nuclear material,

then it doesnt take a

Manhattan Project to make a bomb.

If the circumstances

are right,

acquiring a

complete bomb

may be easier

than building one

In Algeria, in 1961,

officers within the French

millitary rebelled

and tried to seize a nuclear weapon.

As the rebels closed in

the weapon was detonated in a

degraded explosion

to prevent it from falling into the

hands of the rebelling officers.

The Japanese death terror cult, Aum Shinrikyo,

attemted to buy a nuclear

bomb from the Soviet Union.

They had a lot of resources,

We are talking well over

billion dollars of assets.

and secondly they had

tremendous access. At one point,

the group had more members in Russia in the

former Soviet Union than they had in Japan

In 1994, a senior leader made eight trips to Russia

His personal notebook

included a shopping list

for buying a nuclear warhead

for $ 15 million.

A perfectly secure nuclear weapon

is also a perfectly

unusable one

So here one has this paradox

between security and usability

Where is the worlds most dangerous place right now?

mu money it is Pakistan.

you have got an unstable government,

plus enough material for

up to a 100 nuclear weapons,

plus Osama bin Laden in the country.

What we have seen over the last two or three years

has been a spiral that has

been going downwards

Destabilization,the

spread of the Taliban,

the spread of radicalism,

the collapse of the economy.

So could there be a cornals coup in Pakistan

by Islamic radicals

within the military

and then could nuclear

weapons be at risk?

What happens if that country destablises?

What happens if the

army splits?

Who gets the weapons?

Who gets the

material for the weapons?

Who gets the scientists

who know how to build the weapons?

There is no such thing as perfect command and control

over the nuclear weapons,

even in the sophasticated

of the arsenals.

from the levels of the presidents gone down

there are human weaknesses,

technical problems

deficiencies and

vulnerabilities.

I was the launch officer for

Minuteman missiles.

and I spent three years

in Montana in a hole

in an undergorund launch

control centre

I was one of the guys responsible for

for getting these missiles off ground

in one minute. we didnt call them

"Minuteman missiles" for nothing.

When I was serving in the Air Force

as the launch officer,

there was a device in the launch control centre

into which 12 digits

had to be dialed in

in order to unlock the missiles for firing

This had been installed under Robert McNamara

over the objections of the Strategic Air Command

Since they couldnt prevent the panel from being installed

the StrategicAir Command

in Omaha

had set these codes to zero

and we all knew it.

That was the secret unlock code

for firing

our missiles:

In fact, in our launch

check list

we had to ensure

that the unlock code

was set to al zeros

before we completed

the launch sequence.

This changed in 1977

when they started using

actual codes.

But until then, I and one other

crew member

could have actually

formatted a launch order

a completely valid launch order

and transmitted it to the

entire American stratergic arsenal.

Looks like we are in a shooting war

Oh hell.Oh the russians have got it?

i think:
Thats what i have been told / i

just came in on the

red phone.

My orders are toseal this base tight

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