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?"
NSA, anyone (Score:2, Interesting)
Honestly, I think complete designs are probably available out there from U.S., Soviet, and Chinese sources. The main problem with building nuclear devices is getting weapons grade materials.
But you gotta know that the guys in black are sitting around saying, "THAT is why we wanted to control encryption."
Why is it (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Garage Nukes (Score:5, Interesting)
May I be the first to say.. (Score:4, Interesting)
I have no solution, but to think that this is a major issue is not to understand politics.
Re:Garage Nukes (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Garage Nukes (Score:5, Interesting)
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:Sheesh (Score:4, Interesting)
I am not an engineer, but as I understand it one of the more difficult engineering challenges of designing an implosion type device is getting the arrangement of the explosive lenses just right to compress the plutonium pit into a critical mass symmetrically. Just wrapping the pit in a plain sphere of explosives won't do the job - there will be parts of the explosive that will fire later than others and the compression will be non-symmetric. If the implosion is non-symmetric, the fission primary will fling itself apart before substantial energy from the chain reaction can be generated.
Another design challenge is the electronics needed to fire all the explosive lenses with timing tolerances of less than a few millionths of a second, and switching devices that can switch hundreds of amps of current at those speeds. Needless to say, manufacturers do their best to control who gets their hands on them, though they are "dual use" and probably could be sourced indirectly.
Of course a gun type weapon would be substantially easier to get to work with wider tolerances than an implosion type, but they are so inefficient that they require a relatively huge amount of fissile material to make; perhaps an impractically large amount for a terrorist group to get their hands on without being easily noticed.
Designing the bomb is easy (Score:5, Interesting)
Forty years ago a couple of physics students designed a working A bomb.
Re:Why is it (Score:4, Interesting)
Investigators said the evidence that the Khan network was trafficking in a tested, compact and efficient bomb design was particularly alarming, because if a country or group obtained the bomb design, the technological information would significantly shorten the time needed to build a weapon. Among the missiles that could carry the smaller weapon, according to some weapons experts, is the Iranian Shahab III, which is based on a North Korean design.
I disagree with your first sentence. The article[the NY Times article excerpted above], according to my reading comprehension, does not clearly state that the design "belongs to Pakistan" in the sense that the design is of Pakistani origin. The Khan network was trafficking bomb designs. It specifically mentions the other design of being Chinese in origin.
I would guess that a compact design would have to be tested in order for it to be trusted.
My guess is that US and Soviet designs are on the black market. Once there, they found themselves on the Khan network. How many persons have this knowledge, or have access to this information? Extrapolate from there.
1: US -> Soviet
2: Soviet -> ???
3: ??? -> Khan network
Or:
1: US -> Israel
2: Israel -> ???
3: ??? -> Khan network
Wait, I left out Profit!
Re:NSA, anyone (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:FPers for code cracking? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Garage Nukes (Score:4, Interesting)
1) Actually, I'm Russian.
2) I'm not (very) afraid of mini-nukes falling into terrorist hands. There's a lot of other things to be afraid of.
Re:Garage Nukes (Score:5, Interesting)
23 Kg small enough for you ? Maybe by 'taking out' you mean to level the whole thing but I think just exploding one of these from the top of a high building would be enough to destroy Manhattan in an economical sense.
Re:Garage Nukes (Score:4, Interesting)
A 150kt bomb weights about 130kg - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W80 [wikipedia.org] Are you ready to bet that it can't be scaled down further? And in any case, 130kg is still within range for 'baggage nuke'.
And I'm not afraid of 'anything nuclear'. In fact, I now work at the Chernobyl power plant.
Brute Force. (Score:2, Interesting)
The example being: IAEA/NSA wants to crack a file, doesn't have the time to do it on its own and distributes the task via BOINC, so you can crack it for them? This would mean that the BOINC people are in it too but that should not be SO hard to imagine. Would this be possible?
Re:Garage Nukes (Score:1, Interesting)
While nukes are easy to make with the right materials, powerful nukes require a lot more imagination, fissile material and physical space.
Blueprints are easy to get (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Garage Nukes (Score:2, Interesting)
For a more disturbing account [wikipedia.org] of what we may have to protect ourselves against, read about the apparently 'missing' ones.
Nothing new here... move along... (Score:4, Interesting)
http://www.amazon.com/Mushroom-True-Story-Bomb-Kid/dp/0671827316/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1213618717&sr=1-2 [amazon.com]
Re:Freight container is exactly right! (Score:3, Interesting)
With 140 bytes (160 7-bit chars), you can make the detonation key arbitrarily un-guessable.
For extra credit, add a dead-man switch: An encrypted message which must be received every day (hour/week/whatever) to delay detonation.
At this point you really wouldn't want to experience a longterm cell phone outage.
Terje
Re:Garage Nukes (Score:3, Interesting)
Watch Japan. T Minus ~5-10 years and counting. The only way to grow the working population when the birth rate is low and declining, is to extend the useful, healthy, mentally-able life of productive elders. Efforts are underway, so we'll see if technology can overtake the problem.
Re:MAD is Dead (Score:3, Interesting)
You Been Played by The CIA (Score:4, Interesting)
The task of this piece [washingtonpost.com] on the front page of today's Washington Post is to establish the believe that Iran has a nuclear weapon design.
The Swiss 'businessmen', Friedrich Tinner and his two sons, are alleged to have sold several nuke related stuff to Lybia and other countries.
There is more to the Tinner story, but for now let me concentrate on the date. The WaPo says the laptop has been discovered in 2006. But Tinner was under CIA control [armscontrolwonk.com] at least since the 2003 bust of nuclear related stuff on board of the 'BBC China'.
The German magazine Der Spiegel had a big story [spiegel.de] about this in March 2006:
Tinner was flipped [armscontrolwonk.com] by the CIA at least since the 'BBC China' event but likely even earlier. Another man taking part in the alleged smuggling was also [armscontrolwonk.com] turned by the CIA or has worked for the CIA all along.
Indeed it somehow seems like everybody involved in the issue was somehow related to the CIA.
The usual story is that the Pakistani scientist A.Q. Kahn was the one who ran a smuggling network. That may not be true at all. Khan denies [blogspot.com] having been involved in such. A new book asserts [washingtonpost.com] that it was then Prime Minister of Pakistan Bhutto who personally gave Pakistani nuclear secrets to North Korea in exchange for North Korean No Dong missiles for the Pakistani army.
A Dutch court somehow 'lost' [sify.com] legal files about the Khan case and the CIA likely had a hand in this too. The CIA also successfully pressed [tagesspiegel.de] (link in German) the Swiss government to destroy information it had about the Tinner case. Tinner will thereby never be convicted.
Now please explain to me how people arrested in 2003 and flipped by the CIA at least since then managed to keep nuclear plans on a laptop that were somehow found only in 2006?
This whole story stinks from A to Z
Re:You Been Played by The CIA (Score:3, Interesting)