Re Bill Perry Is Terrified. Why Aren't You?

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Jonathan Thornburg <jthorn () astro indiana edu>
> Date: January 7, 2017 at 11:44:03 AM EST
> To: dave () farber net
> Subject: Re: [IP] Re Bill Perry Is Terrified. Why Aren't You?
>
> Someone (who, if I've unwrapped the nested quoting correctly, may have
> been Thomas Leavitt) asked:
> > What has changed so fundamentally that we're now re-enmeshed in this
> > lunacy? I'm baffled.
>
> One thing that's changed in the past year or so is that the decades-old
> cooperative effort between the USA & Russia to switch research reactors
> around the world to NOT use high-enriched uranium fuel, is now in slow
> mottion at best, with USA/Russia cooperation essentially frozen.  (See,
> e.g.,
> http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/01/ridding-research-reactors-highly-enriched-uranium-take-decades-longer-projected
> for more information.)
>
> There are still 74 known civilian research reactors around the world
> which use high-enriched uranium fuel, and many of these are poorly guarded
> against theft.  If a terrorist group were to steal some high-enriched
> uranium fuel, they could have a decent chance of building a working
> kiloton-sized (= can destroy square kilometers of a city) gun-type nuclear
> bomb (probably built around an old artillery gun).  (In contrast, if they
> were to steal plutonium, making that explode with more than truck-bomb
> force would be hard: that would require implosion, which takes a lot of
> engineering expertise).
>
> Killing 100K to 1M people with terrorist nuclear boms *probably* won't
> start a "major" nuclear war, but the chances aren't exactly zero, either.



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