Jim Stewart wrote:
Gunner Asch wrote:

Are any of you onto this breaking story?

The Times of London is generally accepted as a credible
source:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/new...le3137695.ece?


For a video, see this less credible source:
http://antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=12166

For more info, see:
http://www.counterpunch.org/lindorff01072008.html

it suggests that living in one
of the 4 or 5 largest U.S. cities is a bit less safe than
one might suppose.

Metalworking content: Nuke building


Without knowing what "Deadly Nuclear Secrets"
are, it's impossible to know. There's no magic
to building a crude nuclear device. I read
somewhere that every country that has tried
to develop a nuclear weapon succeeded on the
first attempt. The only real leverage is through
control of weapons-grade material and political/
military pressure.

Well, the North Koreans seem to have had pretty poor success.
Rough guesstimates are that the Plutonium only boosted the yield
of the device by 5 - 10%, in other words the chamical high
explosive was 90 - 95% of the total explosion. That's
remarkably poor. Something apparently went REALLY wrong with
their bomb. Probably the symmetric compression of the plutonium
was bad, or the neutron trigger had poor timing.

This is assuming it was a basic device using relatively
unsophisticated explosives, like our first "Fat Man" devices.
In other words, a HELL of a lot of explosive for a tiny ball of
Pu. If they had something really sophisticated like our modern
missile warheads which use much less explosive to get the same
compression/implosion, then maybe it was a very sophisticated
low-yield, light-weight device. Since it took us 30 years with
practically unlimited resources and thousands of tests to get it
right, Occam's razor says "no way".


Jon