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Read other letters about this article
Hey you guys arguing about fissle matierial
Go read Suskind's book. I give it a year or two. Geenie is OUT of the bottle.
WE invented and used this monster. On this 9/11 I had the thought that maybe we should examine on this night- Not the maudlin, fading, Rah-Rah memorials; as the relatives complained today "yearly funerals".
Maybe we should look at how we got here. No, not just Bush, how we got here for the last 62 years.
That's the message people want to hear.
-- cdr42
I've read it. I assume by give it a year or two, you mean a nuclear device being detonated? Just asking for clarification.
It's much much harder to make nuclear bomb that many give credit. First generations devices have poor yield would be poor and it would be undeliverable.
The exception is uranium devices, which are much easier to make, but the process of uranium enrichment is exceedingly hard. These types of gun type weapons can made, but they are very very heavy and hard to deliver. The only practical delivery method would be a ship, which would mean a ground burst, greatly reducing its effectiveness.
Plus, all such nuclear explosions leave a signature trace that allows you to know where the uranium was mined, which could easily lead back to the country of development, which would then be destroyed.
Any country or group deciding to use a nuclear weapon would have to be suicidal. Not that such a possible does not exist, but most nations are rational. I highly doubt Iran, for all the talk otherwise, really want's to be destroyed in a nuclear exchange with Israel.
For more likely and still dangerous are dirty weapons. The is unsecured nuclear material in certain countries, and at least two of Russia's beacons have lost. They contain contain a Pu isotope that is very dangerous. It can't explode, but inhaled it's very deadly.
