The basic physics and chemistry of a bomb is fairly well understood in the theoretical sense. 10 years ago we had computational models sufficiently sophisticated to forgo real testing in lieu of simulations. Which prompted the French to fire off some last real tests as a protest, really against the US and to somehow force us to give them that technology. In either case the hard part is engineering not research. The process of crafting one of these devices and making it reliable enough to use is the real challenge. But every step of the way you learn something about how to do that. You can't simply uninvent something, you can't wave a wand over a holy book and declare that everyone will forget what's in it, can you? That's why abolition is naive. Arms control is not. As we see, any nation with the money and the desire to build one of these things can make the attempt be it research, theft, or just purchasing it. Some examples lesser known are South Africa, Argentina and Brazil which all developed programs and then stopped. In the future you may see Taiwan and South Korea, Nigeria, Indonesia embark on their own programs. And contrary to popular wisdom, neither Japan nor Germany are actually barred from nuclear weapons research. They are prohibited from progressing past the point where they would be approx. 30 days from completion of a functional weapon. So the challenge is to limit proliferation across countries and to limit proliferation within countries.

Why? It's like the 'humor' of Andy Kaufman. The real joke is the insane reaction of the audience.

How does the Gweat and Tewible Paul suggest we de monitorize the trillion dollar debt we owe Beijing? That's 12 zeros,.

So we're lead to believe the equally somewhat implausible assertion that they've spent, what they themselves say is about $4 billion dollars a year NOT doing this. And the atomic power plants the Russians are building for them still don't have electrical generation facilities because.......(money they could have spent building refineries because Iran imports 80% of their gasoline and price increases indirectly HURT them as much as they hurt us).

And their own pronouncements more recent than 2003 not only repeated assert that they are and will develop an atomic bomb but that they're developing missiles specifically to deliver them

And just two weeks ago the IAEA announced that the Iranian atomic program is so opaque that they (the IAEA) lost track of the Iranian program, doesn't know what they're up to and can no longer comment on it good or bad.

Uh ok hang your hat on that theory. Why is it you call the NIE a bunch of hooey when it says something you disagree with and when it aligns with you is suddenly brilliant?

Saudi Arabia already owns more than a quarter of Citi. Now Abu Dhabi bought in another what, 8%? I don't whether it's good or their just deserts. I for one would love watching them go down with the ship.

All treaties once they are signed have to be ratified by Congress. The US is signatory to LOTS and LOTS of treaties we have never ratified. And by the way, many other countries are exactly like that too.

Was the Loudon Wainwright soundtrack.

And the Nextel line is once again getting revamped early next year. Not of course the Sprint line but the walkie talkie phones. I think that Sprint/Nextel will in the near future announce they are Nextel. Most of their phones today are already push to talk (you have to pay an extra service fee for that), clearly the Sprint phone lineup has always been and will be anemic old and out of style. In fact most of the phones offered for sale on Sprint's own website are already discontinued models. If you want a new current phone, go to a retail outlet. And when you do you'll find the new phones to be nothing special; e.g. offering phones with out cameras or bluetooth or music. They also rolled out the last gasp of the Palm company with the Centro and the Treo 755 both of which run Palm OS5 Garnet which still cannot multitask (hey it's been 10 years since Palm OS was created, don't rush them). Then there's the Upstage already heavily discounted, and the Moto-Q9. But other than that their lineup is state of the art 2004/5.

So clearly Sprint/Nextel looks to junk their dial phone network and go into Nextel in a big way. For you folks who are customers today and are ready to go to K-Mart buy a rifle and go Charles Whitman on the Sprint store, they're scrapping the Sprint billing system and the website and switching over to the Nextel components.

Doubly weird is the fact, the known fact that Sprint's data network is the fastest among the US carriers. And you can see from the plethora of EDVO cards they offer in lieu of phones that can do that job that they don't seem to care if they keep pace with the other carriers vis a vis 3G PHONE capabilities.

Oh well, I guess they all suck. If US companies maybe were only 5 years behind the rest of the world instead of 10 we might not care. But like Bart Simpson in the Hank Scorpio episode when Bart is sent to the 'special' school, he shouts out "We're already BEHIND the other kids and you expect us to catch up by going HALF as fast as them?"