This (strange) thought occurred to me after hearing about how the RIAA is planning to flood the peer-to-peer sharing services with fake song files, to discourage piracy.
I know it’s a totally different situation, but what if the US government (the CIA for example) were to deliberately flood the black market with tons of some radioactive, uranium-like substance that is nonetheless useless for making nuclear weapons? Wouldn’t it cause even more distrust amongst purchasers of fissile material, and even cause a few of these black market guys to whack each other? Is it even feasible to find a radioactive metal that resembles uranium enough to fool anything but sophisticated testing?
<tin foil hat on>Or maybe the US government is already doing this, and we just don’t know it?</tfho>
This would have to be so undercover, that they may be doing it yet we know nothing. Think of the unbelievably rotten pr if this got out. Not that the CIA has had to deal with bad PR in the past, but this would be worse than the spreading misinformation proposal that got trashed just a few months ago. We are supposed to be the good guys, but I have no problem ripping off those scum. I do believe there are better ways to handle the situation. Should it be done? IMHO, no. Can it be done? Beats me.
Of course, it isn’t just any uranium that is needed, but one with a particularly unstable isotope. My chemist (phd) buddy explained it to me, but I remember little (the number 235 mean anything?).
Right, the uranium as extracted from the ore is a huge percentage of 238 (no use for making bombs) as opposed to 235 (fissile). Why is this ethically wrong? Is it entrapment? (wandering into GD territory…) Are there any practical reasons the US shouldn’t do this? Anything to stop nuclear proliferation.
Any radioactive material can be used to make a nuclear weapon, if you stretch the definition of “nuclear weapon” a bit. Here’s what you do: Take your material, and mix it in with the conventional explosive of your choice. Detonate the conventional explosive. You’ve just produced a bunch of radioactive debris, spread over a rather large area. That area is now contaminated.
It’s not much use for doing actual damage, and it’s not too hard to clean up such a contaminated area. But if folks hear that an area has been contaminated with radioactive material, they’ll panic… Making such a “dirty bomb” an ideal terror weapon.
We don’t want to make it any easier for such a device to be constructed.
Yeah, that’s worse than “tinfoil hat” stuff. First of all, anyone who’s serious about making a nuclear weapon will have some means to verify and guage the product they receive. Secondly, flooding the market with fake stuff will make it much more difficult to detect the real stuff. If the there’s lots of rumors of uranium flying all over, they won’t immediately know which ones to take seriously. Finally, imagine the panic something on that scale would produce compared to all of the hoopla from yesterday’s uranium-madness non-event.