Relying on Computer, U.S. Seeks to Prove Iran's Nuclear Aims

By WILLIAM J. BROAD and DAVID E. SANGER
Published: November 13, 2005
In mid-July, senior American intelligence officials called the leaders of the international atomic inspection agency to the top of a skyscraper overlooking the Danube in Vienna and unveiled the contents of what they said was a stolen Iranian laptop computer.


Iran Rejects Europe's Nuclear Offer (November 13, 2005) The Americans flashed on a screen and spread over a conference table selections from more than a thousand pages of Iranian computer simulations and accounts of experiments, saying they showed a long effort to design a nuclear warhead, according to a half-dozen European and American participants in the meeting.

The documents, the Americans acknowledged from the start, do not prove that Iran has an atomic bomb. They presented them as the strongest evidence yet that, despite Iran's insistence that its nuclear program is peaceful, the country is trying to develop a compact warhead to fit atop its Shahab missile, which can reach Israel and other countries in the Middle East.

The briefing for officials of the United Nations' International Atomic Energy Agency, including its director Mohamed ElBaradei, was a secret part of an American campaign to increase international pressure on Iran. But while the intelligence has sold well among countries like Britain, France and Germany, which reviewed the documents as long as a year ago, it has been a tougher sell with countries outside the inner circle.

more:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/13/international/middleeast/13nukes.html?hp&ex=1131944400&en=c64c532aa1b7f7aa&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Very long, but worth the read

will agree. We've been there before.

is to construct nuclear weapons from what I understand.

Don't get me wrong, I think this would be a BS reason to invade Iran. In the end every country will have the bomb regardless of what the U$ or anyone else has to say about it, but nuclear power is so expensive that IMO there is no other reason to have a nuke plant than to develop nuclear weapons.

Maybe the answer is to stop pissing everyone off so much. Maybe then "they" won't think about using a "wmd" against us.

... and while nuclear power is not what former AEC director Lewis Strauss believed ("nuclear power will be too cheap to meter"), peaceful nuclear power is not always the precursor to nuclear weapons.

Canada has nuclear power, but, by most estimates, has never engaged in a nuclear weapons program, nor has Sweden nor Japan nor Germany, for example. One doesn't follow the other, necessarily. Moreover, most light-water reactors aren't amenable to producing both power and weapons-grade plutonium (possible, but much more difficult).

One doesn't need a reactor to produce nuclear weapons. One only needs the means of enriching uranium.

Cheers.

Nuclear plants are the cheapest way to obtain weapons grade uraniam. I'm always open to more views and knowledge though.

:toast:

... quite simply. As I said, one does not need a reactor--at all--to produce nuclear weapons (at least those based on enriched uranium).

If you really want to improve your knowledge on the subject without referring to scientific texts, look for these two books in your local library, both by Richard Rhodes:

The Making of the Atomic Bomb

Dark Sun

Lots of layman's level science and history in both books.

In short, nuclear reactors use mildly enriched uranium to produce power. A by-product of that fission is plutonium. However, the longer the fuel rods remain in a light-water reactor, the more that plutonium produced is corrupted by further fission to an isotope of plutonium which prevents fission in nuclear weapons. The longer one makes power with the reactor, the worse the situation becomes, and the more that reprocessing is required to get rid of the bad isotope.

Moreover, as I've said, a nuclear weapon can be made without the aid of a reactor, simply by enriching uranium to bomb-grade concentrations of U-235. That's what the bomb used on Hiroshima contained--highly-enriched uranium.

Cheers.

Thanks.

As I said earlier (and I think you've helped me support it) Everyone will eventually have "The Bomb" one way or another. Maybe it's time we started trying to figure out how to make others not desire to use it against the U$.

... issue, not a technical one, isn't it?

But, not everyone is going to have nuclear weapons--many countries don't want them anywhere (the very highest number of signatory nations to the NNPT do not have nor want to develop same). However, our current government chooses to irritate countries on the edge of developing such weapons. In the past, non-proliferation efforts have had some few successes--both South Africa and Brazil, for example, gave up their nuclear weapons programs years ago.

North Korea is an excellent example of how the NNPT has broken down because of the Bushies. They're the most electricity-deprived industrial country on the face of the earth. They agreed, in 1994, to give up their weapons program in exchange for light-water reactors to provide electricity. Part of the deal was that they would get oil shipments to run their oil-fired generators in the meantime. The Bushies, once in office, cut off those imports and chose to make some very belligerent noises in their direction. The North Koreans saw that as a threat and announced they would be reprocessing spent fuel rods to obtain bomb-grade material.

In the Middle East, our continued intrusion into Arab countries combined with our general defense of Israel has made the situation very problematic. Israel is the fourth- or fifth-largest nuclear power in the world today, and they are not a signatory to the NPT and have never allowed inspections of their nuclear weapons facilities--indeed, they have never publicly even acknowledged possessing nuclear weapons--despite the fact that they've had them since 1959, and aided South Africa in its development program. So, it's a bit strange for us to continue to bitch about Iran's nuclear power program. We aren't exactly doing our best, diplomatically, to defuse the situation in the Middle East regarding nuclear weapons.

Not everyone will have them. Sensible countries don't want them. :)

Cheers.