Guide to building a nuclear bomb published online

[spike]

The American government has closed down a website it created this year after inadvertently uploading information that could be used for building a nuclear bomb.
The site was set up in March as a showcase for reams of Iraqi documents captured during the war. The idea came from congressional Republicans who wanted to use the internet to highlight the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.

But the plan appears to have backfired when the site posted documents that amounted to a basic guide to building a nuclear bomb. The Bush administration closed down the website last night after questions were raised by the New York Times.

"It was a goofy idea, releasing all that sensitive stuff in the current climate with Iran supposedly trying to build a nuclear bomb," one diplomat told Guardian Unlimited, declining to be named because of the sensitivity of the issue.

He could have added that releasing details on nuclear bomb-building while the US is locked in a "war on terror" amounted to crass stupidity.

The New York Times quoted a spokesman for the director of national intelligence as saying that access to the site had been suspended "pending a review to ensure its content is appropriate for public viewing".

According to the paper, the documents contained charts, diagrams, equations and lengthy explanations about bomb-building, beyond what is available elsewhere on the internet and in other public forums.

The papers reportedly gave detailed information on how to build nuclear firing circuits and triggering explosives, as well as the radioactive cores of atom bombs.

The impetus for the online archive came from conservative Republicans, including the chairman of the House intelligence committee, representative Peter Hoekstra of Michigan.

Mr Hoekstra and other hardliners argued that dissemination of the Iraqi documents would reinforce the administration's contention that Saddam had posed a nuclear threat before the US-led invasion.

US arms experts after the war failed to find any evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and the American public has grown increasingly disenchanted with George Bush.

In April, after the first documents were made public, Mr Hoekstra issued a news release acknowledging "minimal risks," but saying the site "will enable us to better understand information such as Saddam's links to terrorism, weapons of mass destruction and violence against the Iraqi people."

He added: "It will allow us to leverage the internet to enable a mass examination as opposed to limiting it to a few exclusive elites."

But arms experts expressed alarm when the documents on Iraq's nuclear programme appeared on the website last month.

A senior American intelligence official told the New York Times that the documents showed "where the Iraqis failed and how to get around the failures".

The documents, he added, could perhaps help Iran or other nations making a serious effort to develop nuclear arms, but probably not terrorists or poorly equipped states.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,1939055,00.html

 

[BB]

and yet ...can you get a good easy to understand guide to set your record timer on a dvd-recorder deck?

 

[unclehobart]

The plans for making an atom bomb are well known. The trick is actually getting the uranium and refining it to do any good. Otherwise you just end up with lame concert pyro.

 

[chcr]

Hell, I've known how to build one since the early seventies. Someone who actually wants to build one wouldn't have any trouble finding out.

 

[Gonz]

The original story, in the NY Times, happened to admit something they clearly didn't mean to admit.

Among the dozens of documents in English were Iraqi reports written in the 1990s and in 2002 for United Nations inspectors in charge of making sure Iraq had abandoned its unconventional arms programs after the Persian Gulf war. Experts say that at the time, Mr. Hussein’s scientists were on the verge of building an atom bomb, as little as a year away.

European diplomats said this week that some of those nuclear documents on the Web site were identical to the ones presented to the United Nations Security Council in late 2002, as America got ready to invade Iraq. But unlike those on the Web site, the papers given to the Security Council had been extensively edited, to remove sensitive information on unconventional arms.

The deletions, the diplomats said, had been done in consultation with the United States and other nuclear-weapons nations. Mohamed ElBaradei, the director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which ran the nuclear part of the inspections, told the Security Council in late 2002 that the deletions were “consistent with the principle that proliferation-sensitive information should not be released.”

How could they possibly write things in 1990s & 2002? They weren't working on nuclear anything then, remember? The UN had stopped their weapons technologies. We were invading for oil. No WMDs were found (another untrue statemet).

First its Kerry, now the Times. We need Dan to go for a trifecta.

 

[Luis G]

Hell, I've known how to build one since the early seventies. Someone who actually wants to build one wouldn't have any trouble finding out.

I agree, they would be better off putting false information on certain details than shutting down the whole site.

 

[Cerise]

So, in a pre-election last-minute lame attempt by the Slimes to demonstrate how the Bush administration carelessly endangered the public by publishing documents captured in Iraq that reveal Hussein's nuclear research and bomb building efforts on a gov. website----they have actually shown that Iraq was alot closer than the Slimes, their pals at the LMSM, and their dem allies ever wanted to admit!

After years of denying that Iraq was a threat, accusing the Administration of only going into Iraq to serve their own interests, that Saddam had been previously contained, the NY Slimes comes out with a story in which they admit they were, infact, wrong?? That they substantiate Pres. Bush when he said in the fall of '02:

Many people have asked how close Saddam Hussein is to developing a nuclear weapon. Well, we don't know exactly, and that's the problem. Before the Gulf War, the best intelligence indicated that Iraq was eight to ten years away from developing a nuclear weapon. After the war, international inspectors learned that the regime has been much closer -- the regime in Iraq would likely have possessed a nuclear weapon no later than 1993. The inspectors discovered that Iraq had an advanced nuclear weapons development program, had a design for a workable nuclear weapon, and was pursuing several different methods of enriching uranium for a bomb. http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/10/20021007-8.html

Wow, it has been rough for the dems lately. It's like the libs are in some crazy self-destruct meltdown-mode. Yeeaarrgghh. Can't wait to see the hissy fit next week.

 

[chcr]

Interesting to see what you took out of the story, Cerise.