Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Pastimes : Clown-Free Zone... sorry, no clowns allowed -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: zonder who wrote (294052)	8/31/2004 8:44:33 AM
From: orkrious	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 436258

this is quite a thought provoking piece A Guru's Guru Weighs In On Gold gold-eagle.com

To: zonder who wrote (294052)	8/31/2004 12:24:04 PM
From: Elroy Jetson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 436258

You should not be embarrassed by the fact that you are unacquainted with the basic mechanisms of a nuclear weapon. It is perhaps reassuring that the average Joe Six-Pack, like yourself, is completely ignorant of even the basic structure of a nuclear weapon. Perhaps you imagine that all you need is some fissionable material and you can create a huge explosion by placing it in a pile. Nothing could be further from the truth. All you would get is heat, radiation, and a melted pool of fissionable material. Even if you were informed enough to surround the fissionable material with correctly designed shape charges of conventional explosives, your chances of creating a nuclear explosion is far less than one in a thousand. As a budding petty dictator, you would discover in time that your missing component is something called a Klystron Timer, used to precisely control the creation of the pressure wave from each conventional explosive charge so that they meet in a perfect implosion. The timer is the key to a reliable nuclear weapon. Without the timer all you get is a dirty bomb. If every tyrant and terrorist wishing to obtain a nuclear device is as uninformed yet perversely confident as yourself, the world is a much safer place. Extremely accurate timers, made widely available in consumer devices, eliminates one of the siginificant current impediments to building a nuclear device - by those educated enough to build one.