The Times of London caused a media sensation this week when it reported: http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,2001390014-2001395995,00.html The Times discovered the partly burnt documents in a hastily abandoned safe house in the Karta Parwan quarter of the city. Written in Arabic, German, Urdu and English, the notes give detailed designs for missiles, bombs and nuclear weapons. There are descriptions of how the detonation of TNT compresses plutonium into a critical mass, sparking a chain reaction, and ultimately a thermonuclear reaction. Rotten.com claims to have analyzed photos of these papers; it reports that at least one is a widely-circulated one-page Internet essay spoofing how to build a nuclear bomb: http://www.dailyrotten.com/archive/159929.html Well, this is where it gets a little funny. You see, those words appear on a semi-famous document that has made the rounds on the Internet since the late 1980's. It's a reprint of a scientific parody called "How to Build an Atom Bomb" from a humor newsletter called The Annals of Improbable Research (AIR). At the time this document was originally written (1979!), the newsletter was called the "Journal of Irreproducible Results". (In scientific circles, a finding must be reproducible to be considered valid. Hence... well, it's geek humor. You understand.) You can find a copy of the Journal of Irreproducible Results article here: http://winn.com/bs/atombomb.html The project will cost between $5,000 and $30,000, depending on how fancy you want the final product to be. Since last week's column, "Let's Make a Time Machine", was received so well in the new step-by-step format, this month's column will follow the same format. Other news organizations have reported the existence of other biochemwomd evidence in Afghanistan (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A35529-2001Nov15.html), so it seems unlikely that the Times relied solely on one printout. Still, if the photos that rotten.com reprints are accurate, it's mighty strange. Lending support to that theory is this BBC article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/south_asia/newsid_1657000/1657901.stm US Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge said the information could have been found on the internet and it did not mean Bin Laden was able to build a nuclear device. Then again, Ridge's colleagues remain plenty worried: http://www.wired.com/news/conflict/0,2100,47158,00.html But does the al Qaeda terrorist network headed by Osama bin Laden have nuclear weapons? Nobody who knows for sure is talking publicly. Yet for much of the last decade, government reports and intelligence experts have been warning that bin Laden has been trying to build the bomb. Contrary to what government officials like Ridge have been warning, the hardest part seems to be securing the materials. Once you have those, building a nuclear bomb appears to be within the grasp of your average college physics student: http://www.fas.org/nuke/hew/Nwfaq/Nfaq4.html Interestingly enough, the United States government conducted a controlled experiment called the Nth Country Experiment to see how much effort was actually required to develop a viable fission weapon design starting from nothing. In this experiment, which ended on 10 April 1967, three newly graduated physics students were given the task of developing a detailed weapon design using only public domain information. The project reached a successful conclusion, that is, they did develop a viable design (detailed in the classified report UCRL-50248) after expending only three man-years of effort over two and a half calendar years. In the years since, much more information has entered the public domain so that the level of effort required has obviously dropped further. -Declan ------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list You may redistribute this message freely if you include this notice. Declan McCullagh's photographs are at http://www.mccullagh.org/ To subscribe to Politech: http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------
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