Iranian nukes

A friend sent along this piece from Slate.com on the IAEA's allegations about the Iranian nuclear project:

Besides the NYT, none of the other papers give much play to the IAEA report and emphasize the agency said it has no evidence that Iran's military has gotten involved in the country's nuclear program. For its part, the NYT specifies that 18 documents were included in the report that claim "Iranians have ventured into explosives, uranium processing and a missile warhead design," which could suggest that nuclear weapons are being developed. The nuclear watchdog agency also says Iran has failed to disclose advancements in its nuclear program and suggests the country could be producing enriched uranium. David Albright, a former weapons inspector who is the go-to guy for these kinds of stories, tells the NYT that the "Iranians are being confronted with some pretty strong evidence of a nuclear weapons program" and the report "is very damning." But Albright also tells the LAT there are some key components missing from the report that one would expect to find in a weapons program. Iran insists the documents are fakes but has failed to release evidence and provide access to international inspectors that could verify Tehran's claims.

Iran's lack of cooperation with the IAEA could indicate that they are hiding a nuclear weapons program, or could be a matter of national pride (like how the US rejects UN elections inspectors), or could be designed to foster uncertainty about their intentions and capabilities. Here are the likely possibilities that I see:

• Iran has a weapons program and is hiding it very well
• Iran doesn't have a weapons program currently but plan to have one in the future and so maintains some of the components today
• Iran's political decision-making mechanisms are so convoluted that some people are setting up weapons program components while others aren't, and nobody knows what is going on, including the Iranians themselves
• Iran doesn't have the expertise to develop a nuclear weapon small enough to be weaponized on their crappy missiles, but wants to create uncertainty about their capabilities in order to paralyze US and European decision making and/or extract concessions
  

However I don't know too much about nuclear weapons programs. Comments?

Loose nukes...

A B-52 flew some cruise missiles from North Dakota to Louisiana to be dismantled last Thursday, August 30th. All well and good, but somebody forgot to remove their nuclear warheads. Whoops! Stories from the AP, Guardian and the original one at an NBC affiliate.

Nobody was in danger and there was no possibility of the weapons ever detonating, but it's a more than a minor goof. The Air Force squadron commander was immediately removed from command and lost his nuclear certification. He will probably never be promoted again, which means his career is over and he'll leave the military.

The first thing I thought of when I read this was this line from Paul Yingling's essay from last May, A Failure in Generalship, in which he states:

As matters stand now, a private who loses a rifle suffers far greater consequences than a general who loses a war.

An Air Force squadron commander was correctly fired for misplacing five nuclear weapons for three and a half hours. No-one to my knowledge has been fired for mismanaging the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan. Different sorts of accountability exist at different levels.

Major General Taguba was essentially forced out for doing his job well, investigating the Abu Ghraib incidents. Shinsheki as we all know was forced out for doing his job in giving his honest opinion about the forces required for invading Iraq. On the other hand, there was no accountability to the generals who thought the insurgency would be defeated by just killing more people. Meanwhile, the people who were and are successful in Iraq, like Col. McMaster, are repeatedly passed over for promotion.

It is of course important to handle nuclear weapons carefully and to keep track of them at all times. But it is more important to win wars...

What if World War 3 had happened?

I grew up in a suburb of Boston, northwest of the city. It was near Hanscom Air Force base, as well as Lincoln Labs and the headquarters of Raytheon. Thus, if the US and USSR had started flinging ICBMs at each other, my house definitely would have been glowing. But I always used to wonder exactly how everyone I knew would have died. Would our house have survived the initial blast long enough to burn in the massive firestorms that follow the nuclear blast? Would we have lasted long enough to die from radiation poisoning? Luckily a rather morbid individual named Eric Meyer created a Google Maps tool to map the effects of nuclear explosions. And, assuming a yield of 550 kilotons from a Soviet SS-19, my house would have been destroyed in the initial blast. Click this link to see the map.

On reading the map: Everything in the smallest circle would be flat. The next smallest circle represents 5 PSI, that means that most buildings that aren't blast-resistant would be destroyed. My old house falls in the outer area of that region. Since it's made of wood, we can safely say that my house would have been flattened in WW3.

Have a nice day.