“…something worked correctly,” because a former Soviet Navy submarine captain elected to make unauthorized contact with the U.S. Embassy in Kazakhstan rather than sell it to any number of potential buyers. That the world was fortunate that one man followed his conscience rather than his wallet is a flimsy principle upon which to build a workable policy to limit nuclear proliferation.
Stranger
It’s always best to make posts as neutral as possible in GQ. If people can find something to take offense at, they will. If you had said something like “partisan sources” instead of “the clowns at Fox news” it would have been better.
Maybe I was a bit harsh on Leo. I’ll downgrade it to a note.
I’ve reversed this warning and downgraded it to a note. But Leo, please consider what you post before posting it. You have an unfortunate habit of posting without due consideration. Don’t do this again.
The US and its allies spend a great deal of time and effort keeping track of all of this. Satellites are better than anyone will admit and now there are drones to help surveil potential trouble spots. There are not a great many places from which potential bomb material can come and most of those are extremely tightly controlled–eg, the uranium mine in Niger. (It was never remotely credible that Iraq could have bought yellowcake from this mine, for many reasons I’ll not detail now.)
The rogue sources include North Korea, but their limited trade with the outside world makes it easy to keep track of–the US or one of its allies intercepted an NK ship with missile parts not too long ago. The worst/scariest place from which fissile material might come is the former Soviet Union, as detailed above. It was a terrifying time and some of the bad stuff was controlled only by accident, though Russia and the other successor states were mostly happy to have US help securing the stuff-- no one wanted it floating around except black marketeers.
I suggest that the fact there has NOT been a rogue nuclear weapon or dirty bomb means there’s unlikely to be one, at least not from ex-Soviet sources. Anyone who’d gained access to the necessary would either have used it already (terrorists) or added it to a strategic arsenal (India, Pakistan, any other state actor). Russia now seems to have rather tight control over itself and its neighbors and is unlikely to want this stuff kicking around, they are vulnerable to terrorism as well.
This now strays into GD, but I sort of doubt Iran is going to make a deal so they can break it. There’s a great deal at stake; planning to cheat on the deal immediately seems pointless especially with inspections in place. Why not just buy the shit and not go through the charade of a deal?
ETA, I lost the plot a little in reading the thread. TonySinclair asked specifically about enriched uranium, not precursors like yellowcake. That’s the result of an industrial process and few countries have the ability, and of those that do only NK would–but I still don’t think they could sneak a boat past the surveillance. My reasoning on ex-Soveit material still applies–if it was available, Iran would have it already.
Cosmic rays are always hitting the Earth, from all directions. Most of them are stopped by the same sort of materials that would block radiation from a chunk of uranium. So if you’re right next to a chunk of shielding, with a cosmic ray detector, you’ll find that you’re not getting any cosmic rays from behind the shielding. It’s just like how opaque objects shadow visible light.
Thanks. that makes sense.
Although, all that would indicate that there is a lot of shielding, not that there is something radioactive.
I wonder how much inspectors are going for nowadays.
True. But there’s not a lot of other reasons for any ship or cargo to have a concentrated blob of lead or other high-mass shielding.
Bottom line, a cosmic ray shadow is a standard technique for detecting abnormally dense cargos. Which cargo in turn can be further investigated with other tools to see what’s inside the shadow.
I don’t know that there’s a factual answer to the question, but one should also consider the following points:
We don’t seem to have any conclusive evidence that Iran has had an active nuclear weapons program for quite some time - perhaps as long as ten years. Yes, they’ve done a lot of enrichment, but enrichment isn’t the same as a nuclear weapons program. So the assumption in the OP, which was noted as an assumption, that Iran knows how to build a nuclear weapon, may not be true.
If Iran were to make the decision to acquire a nuclear weapon, it would have to decide whether it wanted one or a few nuclear weapons, or many. If it wanted many, one would tend to think that they would want a vertically integrated capability to build weapons, as opposed to relying on contracting out for critical materials or components. Give a man a fish, etc.
The risk involved in the simple business decision to buy HEU has got to be judged as fantastically high. The cost of HEU for one bomb probably would be in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Okay, so that’s a lot of money, Iran could probably scrape that much up. What what happens if Iran gets screwed in the deal? The ability to keep secret the hypothetical deal with North Korea must be questioned from the outset – surely Iran nor North Korea both know that U.S. intelligence capabilities are substantial… but how substantial? If the shipment is intercepted, does Iran simply lose the cash? Does DPRK ship the material hoping for cash on delivery? It isn’t like anyone is going to insure this very, very valuable shipment against loss.
The risk of discovery – or rather the consequences of discovery – are very high. If Iran acquired sufficient HEU for a bomb, they would still need a substantial amount of time to build the bomb, integrate it on some kind of delivery platform, test all of that to have reasonable confidence that it will work. Meanwhile, if any of that is discovered, in all probability the U.S. and Israel would probably start a preventative war to stop that process, since Iran would have no nuclear deterrent at that time.
Contrast that with the ambiguity of an indigenous program, in which there is probably a better chance of concealing the state of a nuclear weapons program than if it relied on two countries and a shipper concealing the activities.
Is it just coincidence that all these countries more or less followed the same indigenous path to a weapon? It’s hard to say because it isn’t like these decisions to pursue nuclear weapons are well understood by historians, political scientists, or other analysts. They are obviously very secret decisions, mostly made in very non-transparent governments, so the precise factors leading to all these decisions probably isn’t well understood by anyone.