Comment by giardini
4 days ago
laughing_man says "Yes, making a bomb is easy once you have the materials. Getting the materials is very difficult."
Well, apparently they've had (lots of) the raw material for years. And they have training: all those Iranian science majors at universities during/after the Shah was deposed are candidates. They've had 40 years to study, play and worship. As a friend says, Pakistan got the bomb and if they can do it, anyone can!
Marie Curie purified plutonium all by herself before the turn of the century (albeit in minuscule amounts at high personal cost), so I have little confidence in your assessment.
laughing_man says "...use of that kind of weapon would probably get Iran invaded"
That's the situation they're in. Furthermore many of them are "holy warriors" for whom death is a reward. 72 virgins waitihg for each martyr - I can almost smell the testosterone from here.[Note to countermeasures people: possibly use smell to "sniff them out" of their caves and hidey-holes?? Farhad's flatulence brings him down, bwahahaahaaaaah!8-))]
laughing_man says [dirty bomb] "not a very practical weapon".
Unfortunately I believe this is just wrongheaded. When I was a kid I read Flash Gordon cartoons. There was an episode with "cobalt bombs" to wipe out a civilization permanently. One of the few times that I was freaked out as a kid. Nuclear war didn't scare me at all, but cobalt bombs and extermination - sheeeeeeit!8-(
Seems the Russians read the same comic strip and took it to heart:
https://www.wired.com/2007/09/soviet-doomsday/
and
https://www.unrevealedfiles.com/russias-dead-hand-the-doomsd...
who's to say Iranians are any different (albeit hornier - though granted it really is a lot colder in Russia than in Paradise!).
laughing_man says: "When somebody finally does break that taboo the world will be a much, much more dangerous place for everyone and planners in places like Washington, Moscow, and Beijing know it. Once a nuclear weapon is used, especially by a country with a large arsenal, every country that could have nukes but doesn't is going to have nukes.?"
No shit, Sherlock! You're waking up. "Nuclear deterrence" is dead IMO (The July/August 2026 issue of "Foreign Affairs" magazine discusses this). [I hope there's no rush, I haven't yet bought a plane ticket. Goddammit! Probably end up rowing again!8-((].
> Well, apparently they've had (lots of) the raw material for years.
"raw material" != "material".
While I assume they could've purified enough of the former into the latter by this point if they wanted to, it is a much much harder thing to do than to say.
> Marie Curie purified plutonium all by herself before the turn of the century (albeit in minuscule amounts at high personal cost), so I have little confidence in your assessment.
No, what she discovered was *polonium*, not *plutonium*.
She named polonium that in support of the nationhood of Poland (which was at the time was partitioned between three countries), despite discovering it she never actually isolated it because polonium has a half life of 138 days which makes it a really really small fraction of the total material.
Polonium was first isolated in 1902 by Willy Marckwald who managed a whole 3 milligrams and even then it took another three years for people to realise what he'd isolated was the same thing Marie Curie had found. It took 15 tons of pitchblende to get those 3mg.
*Plutonium* on the other hand was first discovered in 1934. Plutonium (and uranium) is the stuff that makes fission bombs. It takes tens of kilograms of uranium or plutonium per bomb.
Purification of chemical elements (both polonium and plutonium) is much, much easier than separating the isotopes of uranium; and you need to purify ("enrich") uranium to a specific isotope to manufacture more than trivial quantities of plutonium. (And, indeed, polonium).
> Unfortunately I believe this is just wrongheaded. When I was a kid I read Flash Gordon cartoons. There was an episode with "cobalt bombs" to wipe out a civilization permanently. One of the few times that I was freaked out as a kid. Nuclear war didn't scare me at all, but cobalt bombs and extermination - sheeeeeeit!8-(
You're taking a comic book plot device as evidence?
Also, cobalt bombs != dirty bombs:
A cobalt bomb is a bomb powered by a nuclear explosion, that has enhanced fallout.
A dirty bomb is a normal, non-nuclear, explosive, that has some radioisotopes attached to it.
The former easily wipes out a city; the latter messes up a building.
Thanks for the history corrections and clarifications. Now I'll never forget that Mme. curie isolated polonium (another nearly-useless factoid). History is important but not as important as science. Still you're looking more and more like Frank Drebin: "Nothing to see here, folks, move along!"
https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?q=google....
ben_w: "You're taking a comic book plot device as evidence?"
I was telling a story about my early life! Get a grip! It was a lead-in to a)the Soviet doomsday device which may have been real and may still be around and b)to my early fright at the nasty side-effects of nuclear weapons.
ben_wL "The former easily wipes out a city; the latter messes up a building."
Indeed an understatement! The Chernobyl reactor is an accidental "dirty bomb". It FUed quite a large area: people don't do much picnicking in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_exclusion_zone.
Spare me talking about how large the Chernobyl reactor and how heavy its fuel rods are, etc. Fissionable material and fission by-products are generally toxic: spreading it around is devastating and difficult to correct. And the Iranians have lots of that kind of crap.
> History is important but not as important as science.
Bullshit. Without historical data, you can't recreate experiments!
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> Thanks for the history corrections and clarifications. Now I'll never forget that Mme. curie isolated polonium (another nearly-useless factoid). History is important but not as important as science. Still you're looking more and more like Frank Drebin: "Nothing to see here, folks, move along!"
Sarcasm noted, but you were mixing up something that wasn't isolated by Curie because it was too hard to do so, with something that was only found in the year she died.
> Indeed an understatement! The Chernobyl reactor is an accidental "dirty bomb". It FUed quite a large area: people don't do much picnicking in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone:
If you gathered all the nasty decay products from Chernobyl and put them into convenient balls to strap to an explosive for the purpose of messing up someone else's country, you'd immediately have a problem of *the balls would cause the explosives you put them next to, to catch on fire, because of the heat output of their own radioactive decay*. Even in the spread-out form of the real life incident, robots stopped working when they got too close to large concentrations, the radiation fried circuits.
You are scared of something that is not only not plausible, it's something such that if they could do it at a scale big enough to hurt you, they'd have better things to do, e.g. hitting the US warships counter-blockading Hormuz.
> Spare me talking about how large the Chernobyl reactor and how heavy its fuel rods are, etc.
Spare you the most important point?
> Fissionable material and fission by-products are generally toxic: spreading it around is devastating and difficult to correct. And the Iranians have lots of that kind of crap.
You say "lots" like it's a point, but it isn't: "lots" is far too vague.
Chernobyl had nearly 3000 times as much uranium in it as a fission bomb, to a different enrichment level, but how much enrichment matters during a criticality incident which transmutes elements into the nasty radioisotopes that you don't want to be around is complicated for fallout calculations. Nobody, including SpaceX, has a missile that is big enough to carry that all in one go.
- https://www.osti.gov/biblio/226794
In comparison, the one which levelled Hiroshima contained 64 kilograms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Boy
This scale difference is also (one of the reasons) why even having a nuclear reactor as a "civilian program" is suspect. Makes it relatively easy to hide a weapons program.
Much, much more effective to use the reactor to transmute yourself some plutonium, than a dirty bomb. Apart from anything else, half the plutonium won't vanish in 30 years (caesium-137) / 28.9 years (strontium-90) / 8 days (iodine-131) like the main Chernobyl fallout is doing.
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