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
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