[iwar] [fc:Experts.Concerned.Over.Bomb-Making.Instructions]

From: Fred Cohen (fc@all.net)
Date: 2002-07-03 21:10:43


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Date: Wed, 3 Jul 2002 21:10:43 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [iwar] [fc:Experts.Concerned.Over.Bomb-Making.Instructions]
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Experts Concerned Over Bomb-Making Instructions 
By CHARLES J. HANLEY
.c The Associated Press

When Norwegian physicist Morten Bremer Maerli published an essay two years 
ago concluding that terrorists could do the ''trivial'' job of building a 
nuclear bomb, he suddenly saw his footnotes disappearing.

In place of references to technical sources, editors of the U.S.-based 
journal Nonproliferation Review repeatedly substituted a note saying 
citations were being removed to keep ''unwanted actors'' from gaining 
information.

Such is the nervousness over the growing universe of information, on the 
Internet and elsewhere, about making ultimate weapons.

Experts have long said sufficient information is publicly available for a 
dedicated team to build a crude nuclear weapon of the ''gun'' type the United 
States dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945.

In that bomb, two loads of highly enriched uranium-235, totaling about 92 
pounds, were slammed together by an explosive charge, forming a ''critical 
mass,'' a self-sustaining fission reaction and a nuclear explosion.

In his essay, Maerli cited early U.S. weapon scientist Luis W. Alvarez's 
statement that ''even a high school kid,'' if he had enough enriched uranium, 
could achieve a high-yield explosion simply by dropping one half onto 
another.

Alvarez didn't say, however, how much is ''enough.''

The complex relationship between amount of bomb material and sophistication 
of bomb design is what makes it difficult to fix minimums for fashioning a 
nuclear weapon. Other variables are involved, too, especially the level of 
fissionable U-235 isotope within the uranium. Although a weapon can be made 
with far less plutonium, that material is more dangerous to handle and more 
difficult to engineer.

The International Atomic Energy Agency has its own standard: 55 pounds of 
highly enriched uranium is considered ''significant,'' that is, sufficient 
for a bomb.

That standard has the practical effect of exempting smaller amounts from the 
most stringent IAEA safeguards in the civilian nuclear sector. Some 
specialists say much smaller amounts should be strictly safeguarded, but that 
would require a vote of member states to change the benchmark. These 
specialists say a bomb could be built with as little as 18 pounds or even 7 
pounds of highly enriched uranium, depending on the sophistication of the 
design.

At a Washington hearing in March, senators were told that U.S. national 
laboratories, whose technology can produce weapons using minuscule amounts of 
bomb material, had gone back to review primitive methods, to see what 
terrorists might do.

Their findings, like Maerli's footnotes, will not be made public.

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