10nfl1-Nukes-Cover
MOST NUCLEAR SCIENTISTS ARE NOT CAPABLE OF SINGLE-HANDEDLY
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| MOST NUCLEAR SCIENTISTS ARE NOT CAPABLE OF SINGLE-HANDEDLY CONSTRUCTING NUCLEAR WEAPONS. John Mueller 2007 (Woody Hayes Chair of National Security Studies, Mershon Center Professor of Political Science, "REACTIONS AND OVERREACTIONS TO TERRORISM Prepared for delivery at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Chicago, Illinois, August September 3, 2007, http://psweb.sbs.ohio-state.edu/faculty/jmueller/APSA2007.PDF. It is possible to believe that the two scientists "provided detailed responses to bin Laden's technical questions about the manufacture of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons" as another Washington Post report puts it (Kahn 2001). But the questions do not seem to be very sophisticated, and as the scientists themselves have reportedly put it, it seems that the discussion was wide ranging and academic (even rather basic) and that they provided no material or specific plans (Kahn and Moore 2001). Pakistani officials stressed to Khan and Moore that Mahmood "had experience in uranium enrichment and plutonium production but was not involved in bomb-building," and therefore that he "had neither the knowledge nor the experience to assist in the construction of any type of nuclear weapon" nor were the scientists "believed to be experts in chemical or biological weaponry" (see also Albright and Higgins 2003, 49, 51; Baker 2002). Therefore, they likely were incapable of providing truly helpful information because their expertise was in not in bomb design, which might be useful to fabricate a terrorist device, but rather in the processing of fissile material, which is almost certainly beyond the capacities of a nonstate group. As a Pakistani nuclear scientist working at Princeton put it, Mahmood "may not actually have much more knowledge than you would get from an undergraduate degree in nuclear physics. My suspicion is if you gave him a bucket full of plutonium he wouldn't know what to do with it, because he never worked with nuclear weapons, as far as we know" (Baker 2002). Nonetheless, reports Allison, US. intelligence agencies have convinced themselves that the two errant Pakistani scientists provided al Qaeda with a "blueprint" for constructing nuclear weapons (2004, 24). Download 1.23 Mb. Share with your friends:
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