Nuclear Warhead Blueprints On Smugglers' Computers 637
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?"
Re:Why is it (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Garage Nukes (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Freight container is exactly right! (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, already at that size it would be difficult to protect yourself from, but as I pointed out in my previous post, reliability would also be important and if you're building your nuke in some warehouse in an unstable country chances are you'll a bit of a problem building a nuke that will go off reliably instead of being just a "fizzle" (although that could be pretty bad as well), and if you want a predictable yield then it's definitely something that takes a lot of resources.
/Mikael
Re:Garage Nukes (Score:4, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Atomic_Demolition_Munition [wikipedia.org] are very much real.
Re:Garage Nukes (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Freight container is exactly right! (Score:4, Informative)
(There's some argument about whether U-235 would have been detected by equipment that missed the U-238).
Re:Garage Nukes (Score:4, Informative)
However, it also is very improbable, because manufacturing such munitions require a lot of high tech R&D.
It is also possible to take down a big city with a slightly larger munition, like this one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W80 [wikipedia.org]
Reliability vs yield & efficiency (Score:4, Informative)
The problem is that gun bombs are an obscene waste of an extremely rare material; Little Boy had about five times as much uranium as Fat Man did plutonium (~100 vs ~20Kg) but a significantly inferior yield (~15 vs ~20KT). It's estimated that maybe 1/10 of Little Boy's uranium had fissioned when it disassembled.
* YMMV depending on isotopic impurities, but terrorists aren't going to be the ones refining the metal.
Re:MAD is Dead (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Garage Nukes (Score:5, Informative)
It's a kt.. you can pick up the ingredients to make a 1kt bomb from home depot. You won't need a team of nuclear scientists to do it, either.
If you want to level a city, you need at least 10s of kilotons and you need to detonate it at an altitude of about 2,000ft. And even then, you'd only be punching a hole in Manhattan, you'd need a 100kt bomb to level it.
A guy with a backpack bomb on, would likely only be able to carry about a 0.1kt bomb and detonating it at ground level would cause less damage than the Oklahoma City bombing.. and for that kind of bang there's cheaper ways to spend your bucks.
The whole "OMG Backpack Nuke!" hysteria is just a reflection of how poorly the average person understands anything with the word "nuclear" in it and immediately fears it.
You should know better.
Re:Garage Nukes (Score:4, Informative)
It's probably possible to make one that can fit in a small car easily, but not possible to make a suitcase/backpack nuke. And certainly not one the size of a soccer ball. Unless it was a soccer ball made entirely from uranium-235 that just happened to surreptitiously materialize all in the same spot.
Re:Garage Nukes (Score:5, Informative)
That said, there's a lot of things I fear way more than a backpack nuke as modern-city-life-ending threats, such as ebola[1]. Even those "more likely" threats are remote, and the nuke attack is more movie plot than reality. However, it is not correct to say a man-portable nuke is not possible, when they have already existed for some time. Do you also not believe in weaponized smallpox?
[1] Ebola in different forms has been airborne (Virginia outbreak between monkeys) or highly fatal to humans (most other outbreaks). It's only a matter of time before a strain manages both.
Re:Freight container is exactly right! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Freight container is exactly right! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:fearmongering (Score:5, Informative)
Nuclear weapons are a completely different matter the theory is (relatively) simple, but the practice is complicated, lengthy and requires a lot of technical expertise
Re:Garage Nukes (Score:4, Informative)
So maybe instead of disease, famine and war we could stabilise world population by actually rising the quality of life of those much less fortunate (e.g. by eliminating famine, diseases and war...). Of course, killing them en masse is also a solution and it is also much more profitable, especially if we can cleverly organise that they kill each other while paying us from both sides for the weaponry to do it efficiently. Alas, since they are usually quite poor, they can't really afford the best stuff, so often they have to (literally) hack throgh each other, but at least we can make shocking documentaries with nice washing powder (guaranteed to make your socks 7.3% more pleasant!) advertisement revenues.
Re:Garage Nukes (Score:4, Informative)
I was in Artillery in the Marines and was trained as a Nuke Tech. Our largest yield (circa 80-86, 155mm) was 2kt. It was designed for area denial. Not a lot of damage, but a lot of irradiation. The main reason they don't go higher is because you can't get the round far enough downrange to not get hit yourself with the blast or the radiation. They keep them small so that when you fire that thing 10-15 miles downrange there is little chance of the blast or the fallout/radiation coming back to hit you and your allies.
Yes, that one picture shows a small warhead, with a yield of 72tons and weight of 58kg. Hardly a city destroying capable device. The larger devices capable of destroying a small city were on the order of 4ft+ and 800+ lbs. Even the 2kt one I worked with was too large to realistically be man-portable.
Can you get a nuke into a backpack? Probably, but don't fool yourself that you will be able to destroy any cities with it and it is still going to be extremely heavy. You will be able to do something similar to 9/11 with such a device and cause a lot of terror, which might be the whole point. Of course, a dirty bomb might have the same effect and you need far less tech to actually get it to detonate.