Nuclear Warhead Blueprints On Smugglers' Computers

imrehg links to a story at the Guardian which begins "Blueprints for a sophisticated and compact nuclear warhead have been found in the computers of the world's most notorious nuclear-smuggling racket, according to a leading US researcher. The digital designs, found in heavily encrypted computer files in Switzerland, are believed to be in the possession of the US authorities and of the International Atomic Energy Agency, in Vienna, but investigators fear they could have been extensively copied and sold to 'rogue' states via the nuclear black market." Reader this great guy links to the New York Times article on the discovery, and asks "Given that Khan's revelations were made in early 2004, does that mean it took the IAEA 1-2 years to brute-force the encryption?"

Well,

the server's been nuked.

Oh, come on, this is secret?

They've been on Usenet for ages. That's why Verizon is cutting off access to the binaries.

Re:Oh, come on, this is secret?

They've been on Usenet for ages. That's why Verizon is cutting off access to the binaries.

Oh great. It's one thing for terrorists to have nukes, but even scarier for rabid web trolls to own nukes. Emacs vs. vi may be about to ramp it up...
       

Let me be the first to say:

KHAAAAAAAAAAAANNNN!

Re:Let me be the first to say:

You do mean DefKHAAAAAAAN ONE... right?

Oh Crap!

The digital designs, found in heavily encrypted computer files in Switzerland, are believed to be in the possession of the US authorities

Great! They're the last people we need to have even more nuclear weapons.

Why

"Given that Khan's revelations were made in early 2004, does that mean it took the IAEA 1-2 years to brute-force the encryption?"

No, it just means that it is now time to stir up people's fear of "international terrorism" so whichever government let this bit of news out can squeeze through yet another draconian security measure.

Re:Garage Nukes

We need better protection against theoretically impossible threats - like backpack nukes.

Re:Garage Nukes

Sjuh... there's only one option: contain it at the source(s). Very strict contol of enrichment. That's about all one can do, and unfortunately doesn't control already distributed materials nor as yet untouched ore sources - which may become in trek if the world does get strict on ores. But methinks the only real solution is nuclear fusion. Make sure there's enough power for everyone's needs, and then some; that way we can try to kick the planet into a Golden Age and maybe the shortsighted suicidal monkeys will give it a rest and get back to masturbation instead of terrorism. God knows I'd sponsor 'em with a blowup doll or something.

Re:Garage Nukes

See, that's insightful. If we take away our enemies' incentive to fight us, we will be safer. I'm glad you actually got modded up for saying it, rather than modded to -1 and buried under "boohooo you're letting the terrorists win" replies. That's not what it's about. It's not about giving in to our enemies, it's about preventing people from becoming our enemies in the first place.

Re:Garage Nukes

So what will you do when someone demands that you follow their religion? When they demand that you force your women to cover themselves? Demand that homosexuals be put to death?

Fight for their right to say it?
Or take the UK option, and place the entire population under surveillance.

Re:Garage Nukes

The knowledge on how to build a nuke is by no means much of a secret. Yes, the design for more recent fusion-based and otherwise advanced nuclear weapons is surrounded by a lot of hush-hush but a simple fission-based nuke could probably be designed and built by students from any university engineering department, the theory behind it is available in most libraries, as is the basic design of some of the earlier nuclear weapons.

What is hard to get a hold of is the fissible material needed to manufacture a working bomb.

/Mikael

Re:Garage Nukes

The issue is not with building a gadget that produces an uncontrolled nuclear chain reaction. Putting that in a compact, reliable, and deliverable package is what takes effort.

Re:Garage Nukes

Well, I don't want to sound like a fearmonger but compact isn't much of a problem as long as your definition of compact is "smaller than a freight container". Reliability might be a bit harder for your average garage nuke to have though...

/Mikael

Freight container is exactly right!

Any bomb that fits easily into a standard freight container is already a horrible nightmare:

These containers travel worldwide, are rarely inspected if the paperwork seems to be OK, and they can easily stay in a harbor area of a major city for many months.

The only trigger you need is a cell phone, so you can preplace them wherever you like and blow up any coastal city in the world, whenever you want to.

Stopping this scenario is probably (or should be) the real nightmare for most of the three-letter agencies in the world.

Terje

Re:Garage Nukes

The knowledge of how to build one small and light enough to fit on top of a missile is still closely held. That's the key point of this story, that a design was out there which a country with a missile program could use.

Re:Garage Nukes

That is an often-repeated statement, however there is very little in terms of facts that support it.

Building nukes, especially advanced ones in quantities over a single test weapon still requires (in addition to the plans) a large and relatively modern industrial base -- for the components, for the various explosives, for the wealth of rare materials necessary etc. etc.

Having such an industry USSR style -- for the purpose of nukes only -- is quite expensive, and out of reach of almost any country. Hence you don't see many succeeding, especially when there is resolute opposition from the superpowers to such efforts.

So, no, the nuclear cat isn't quite out of the bag yet, the weapons are out of reach of mostly every state, and those countries who make them profit very little from having them per se.

And, thankfully, nuke-building capability tom-clancy style is so far quite out of reach of any kind of terrorist group.

International forums and inspections as those that exist under the NPT regime are still the most important, effective and relevant way to keep your "nuclear cat" in the bag.

Re:Garage Nukes

"the weapons are out of reach of mostly every state, and those countries who make them profit very little from having them per se"

Funny how India suddenly respected Pakistan when Pakistan demonstrated they could also make nukes.

Garage nuke ? You probably mean GNUke !

GNUke is an sophisticated and compact nuclear warhead - and more. At its core is are two pieces of piece of sub-critical material that can be combined into a supercritical mass for civil and military use alike.

GNUke is a GNU project which is similar to the Little Boy Bomb which was developed at Manhattan Project Laboratories by J. Robert Oppenheimer and colleagues. It can be considered as a different implementation of Litte Boy. There are some important differences, but much destruction wreaked through Little Boy can be achieved unaltered with GNUke.

One of GNUke's strengths is the ease with which well-produced fission-quality material can be included. Great care has been taken over the defaults for the minor design choices in the nuclear fission process, but the user retains full control.

GNUke blueprints are available as Free Documentation under the terms of the Free Software Foundation's GNU Free Documentation License in source code form. It can easily be set up and functions on a wide variety of launch vehicles and similar systems (including B-29 Superfortresses and ICBMs).

Re:Garage Nukes

Let's face it, the Nuclear Cat is slowly crawling out of the bag and will no longer be containable soon.

Imagine cleaning up after a nuclear cat...oy...

Seriously, it will happen, and sooner than we think. Either a state-sponsored or aided group stealing a nuke or paying off enough disgruntled Russian scientists and engineers to make a decent one, or some independent cell with a sufficient amount of knowhow and enough reasonably enriched uranium to create a big honkin', crude and ugly, but deadly Hiroshima-style boomer. I'm not as worried about the physical effects -- such a device would, indeed, kill thousands and devastate part of whatever city it's set off in, but is likely for financial and physical reasons to be a one-off event. What scares me is this: if you thought our freedoms have already been eroded, compromised, or plain out negated to an uncomfortable degree after 9/11, just wait until some group sets off a nuke somewhere on U.S. soil. When that happens, prepare to live under the Fourth Reich. Even a so-called "dirty bomb" that would merely spread some radiation around will be sufficiently alarming (the very word "radiation" scares the hell out of the masses) will mean more draconian laws, more intrusive surveillance, and more suspensions of Constitutional rights. But that is the victory terrorists hope for -- it's not so much the actual carnage that they seek, but the subsequent panic and overreaction of the populace and their government. "Terror" consists of far more than a body count.

Re:Why is it

Probably because the story clearly says that the design in question belongs to Pakistan. All things considered, a Pakistani nuclear scientist would be in a better position to steal his country's secret rather than a US design. As a foreigner in the US he, and his agents, would not be allowed to see anything of that sort, not even close. But in Pakistan he'd be an insider, even if he officially is not involved, and then all kinds of things can be done.

Re:Why is it

And.... clearly Iraq had links to Al Queda?

A strawman.

I know it's comforting to read the news and be able to believe what they say

There is always a fine line between questioning news and the denial. In this particular instance you are claiming that "David Albright, a physicist, former UN weapons inspector and authority on the nuclear smuggling ring" is lying to the whole world, though other IAEA scientists saw the materials and could expose him. I'd listen to David, though, he just might know about the subject a little more than an average slashdotter. If you insist on using fuzzy logic, fine - David's statement has weight of 0.9999 and your opinion has weight of 0.0001.

We can find plans of nuclear weapons, but we can't find Osama?

Yes, and I am not surprised. Khan's network was captured intact - did you read how much data they got? More than a terabyte of documents. Even if none of that is encrypted it takes an army of specialists and linguists to go through them, which is probably what happened. On the other hand, Osama was never captured. I'd be amazed if, for example, the US Army captures a large building and Osama keeps running and hiding *inside* of that building. But Osama - if he is still alive, of course - hides somewhere on Earth, and even if he is merely in Pakistan it's plain impossible to find him, considering that a good deal of Pakistani land is not under control of the central government.

Re:MAD is Dead

Iran, now, is it? Jesus, you buy the american propaganda hook, line and sinker.

Designing the bomb is easy

http://www.buzzle.com/editorials/6-24-2003-42105.asp [buzzle.com]

Forty years ago a couple of physics students designed a working A bomb.

Eventually, towards the end of 1966, two and a half years after they began, they were finished. "We produced a short document that described precisely, in engineering terms, what we proposed to build and what materials were involved," says Selden. "The whole works, in great detail, so that this thing could have been made by Joe's Machine Shop downtown."

Agonisingly, though, at the moment they believed they had triumphed, Dobson and Selden were kept in the dark about whether they had succeeded. Instead, for two weeks, the army put them on the lecture circuit, touring them around the upper echelons of Washington, presenting them for cross-questioning at defence and scientific agencies. Their questioners, people with the highest levels of security clearance, were instructed not to ask questions that would reveal secret information. They fell into two camps, Selden says: "One had been holding on to the hope that designing a bomb would be very difficult. The other argued that it was essentially trivial - that a high-school science student could do it in their garage." If the two physics postdocs had pulled it off, their result, it seemed, would fall somewhere between the two - "a straightforward technical problem, but one that involves some rather sophisticated physics".

Finally, after a valedictory presentation at Livermore attended by a grumpy General Edward Teller, they were pulled aside by a senior researcher, Jim Frank. "Jim said, 'I bet you guys want to know how it turned out,'" Dobson recalls. "We said yes. And he told us that if it had been constructed, it would have made a pretty impressive bang." How impressive, they wanted to know. "On the same order of magnitude as Hiroshima," Frank replied.

Re:NSA, anyone

Even with the materials, building any sort of nuclear weapon, even a rudimentary low yield one, is quite a feat of engineering. Fissile material for the core is but one component, albeit a very difficult one to acquire (from what I understand). Other bits; machinable billets of tungsten, complex fail-safe triggering mechanisms, primary ignition chemistry, and high explosives are all very very very difficult nuts to crack. From what I've read North Korea essentially exhausted it's entire supply of tungsten to produce the two semi-functional weapons which they tested recently; the chemistry of the high explosives used in the US's most early designed implosion fission bombs has never been declassified and is still considered a major feat of chemical engineering by those who've known enough about it to comment on it. The triggering mechanism used in our (US) ICBM arsenal is a micro-mechanical marvel with tolerances which could rival that of even the world's best watchmakers. Even with a detailed part by part schematic I think assembly of any sort of functional nuclear device would be well beyond the capabilities of most actors on the world stage. To claim otherwise would be tantamount to claiming that a blueprint for an F14 tomcat in the hands of a street gang would be a prelude to The bloods and the crips having an airforce... Having plans may be a necessary precursor to constructing a device, but it certainly does not imbue those in possession with the ability to actually make manifest the device described within the plans.