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Politics : Homeland Security -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: James F. Hopkins who wrote (409)	11/11/2001 9:51:21 AM
From: RocketMan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 827

He now claims to have access to nuclear and chemical weapons. Bin Laden made the claims on Friday night during an interview with the English language Pakistani newspaper Dawn. He said: "If America used chemical or nuclear weapons against us, then we may retort with chemical and nuclear weapons. We have the weapons as deterrent." Defence analysts dismissed these claims. They said that although bin Laden could have access to nuclear material through links with Pakistan or former Soviet republics, he was unlikely to have the technology to cause an explosion. A Foreign Office spokesman said: "We know that he was looking for that capability. We believe he does not have it." portal.telegraph.co.uk Here we go again. Those that doubt whether a terrorist can make a nuclear weapon get hung up on two things: the difficulty of extracting that much material from nature, which is extremely difficult, and the difficulty of manufacturing and testing a high-yield device. At least these guys admit that the material can be bought, they just want to argue on the technology side. The uranium, as we have seen is easy to get, all it takes is money, and they had lots of it. Critical masses are 52kg for U-235, 16kg for U-233, and 10kg for PU-239. On the technology side, what they disregard is that terrorists don't need a high-yield device for their purposes, a dirty bomb will work just as well. If I were one of them (and this is what we have to do, try to think as they would), I would buy the supercritical mass necessary, build a gun type device with high explosives (impact two subcritical masses together at high speed), and not even bother to test it. If I'm lucky the device will actually work, and produce a 10-20 kt explosion. I don't even have to be real lucky, there are enough designs floating around, and a gun type weapon is simple enough to build that my biggest concern would be hiding my activity, and protecting the bomb builders with a radiation suit. Don't even have to protect them all, just the ones who know what they're doing. If it doesn't work, I will still spread enough radioactivity around to cause a lot of casualties and the long-term evacuation of the downtown area a large city. And this is assuming that they actually have to build such a weapon, instead of buying one already built. It does us absolutely no good to pretend as if this can't happen, that they lack the technology, etc. We have to assume they already have these weapons, and what can we now do in response? We have a golden opportunity right now to establish a nuclear doctrine towards these terrorists. They came out and said they have them, and would use them in response in case we used ours. We should publicize that we also will respond in kind, and since they are claiming that this is a jihad, if they attack our cities we will respond by attacking their holy places, value for value. Since they claim this is a worldwide jihad and all moslems have a duty to kill americans and jews, we should put them on alert that every one of their holy places is a target, anywhere in the world. Let the protests begin, we should not worry about being liked, we should worry about enemy capabilities to destroy us. They know we have the capabilities, what they doubt is our courage, our steadfastness, and our willingness to do whatever it takes to defend our homeland. I can guarantee that after a few months of realizing that terrorists have made them a nuclear target, the vast majority of moslems who are people of good will are going to rid their countries of this filth.