Ex-KGB officer versus the upwardly mobile failure. Not exactly an even match.Here is the thing: Chimpy says that he wants to put a missile defense system in eastern Europe to protect Europe from the threat of attack by Iran. First off, has anybody posited a reason why Iran would want to attack Europe? The Russians, not known for not having a low level of suspicion, probably have grounds to be suspicious.
There is one other thing that bothers me: With all the talk about Iran's nuclear cascade and so on, that technique is used to produce uranium. What little reading I have done on this stuff would seem to indicate that if you are going to produce an atomic warhead for a missile, an application where small size is critical, you use plutonium, not uranium. All of the concern about the smuggling of radiological materials out of Russia in the 1990s seemed to be centered on plutonium.
So what is really going on here?
4 comments:
Well, if you enrich uranium enough you can get a warhead small enough for a missile. But Iran is nowhere near having enough centrifuges in its cascade to do so. I'm not even sure it's physically possible within a reasonable amount of centrifuges.
The deal with plutonium is that it is extremely easy to extract Pu-239 out of irradiated U-238 uranium rods, since Pu-239 is chemically different from U-238 (unlike U-235, the stuff used for bombs, which cannot be chemically separated out of U-238 and thus must be mechanically separated). Thus Pu-239 is by default highly enriched and thus easy to make a warhead out of. Really, nobody who has any choice in the matter enriches uranium to make bombs nowdays. it took something like 10% of the U.S. GDP in 1944 to extract the uranium used for the single uranium bomb dropped onto Japan.
As for Putin's soul, I'm not sure that a KGB man has a soul. (Note that I do not say EX KGB, since he is nothing of the sort -- Putin's ascent to the Presidency basically is the triumph of the KGB, with the full approval of the majority of the Russian people who were sick and tired of the abuses of untrammeled capitalism and gangsterism). When Bush claimed he'd stared into Putin's soul, I merely laughed. So now Bush has figured out what we all knew back then? Gosh, it takes him only four years to figure out the obvious? What a dolt!
-Badtux the Nuclear Penguin
Which begs the question of both why Iran is mucking about with this and why the neocons are so fixated about it.
Iran is enriching uranium as nuclear fuel for their light-water nuclear reactors. Duh. They don't want their supply of fuel for their civilian reactors being cut off in the future once they do develop plutonium-based nuclear warheads for their missiles. If you want to find Iran's nuclear warhead program, just look at the heavy water "research" reactor that they bought from, uhm... Pakistan? WTF? Pakistan sold Iran a nuclear bomb making factory (heavy water reactors are the preferred way of irradiating U238 into Pu-239 since you don't have to bring down the reactor to get the irradiated rods out and since the rods start with more U238 in the first place), and all that the Bush administration can whine about is the light water reactors being sold to Iran by Russia, which are far less useful for making nuclear bombs because you have to "short-cycle" them in a fairly obvious way that wastes nuclear fuel rather than being able to stick rods in and irradiate them at will? WTF?
But oh I forget, Pakistan is our *ally* in the "War on Terror", so they are allowed to sell bomb making gear to other nations, while Russia is, uhm, well, not, so they're not even allowed to sell civilian gear not very useful for making nuclear bombs. Alrighty!
Well, all that makes sense, provided you happen to live in the bizzaro reality of BushCorp.
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