Are ObL nuclear weapons fears a hoax? Declan McCullagh, in his mailing list, has done alot of footwork on this issue; I’m retracing his steps:
As I noted below, The Times of London reported last week that partly burnt documents in a hastily abandoned
safe house indicated that al Qaeda could have nuclear weapons.
Quite bizarrely, rotten.com after analysis of photos of the documents claims that at least one is a well-known geek-driven spoof which originally appeared in 1979 in the wonderful, and now defunct (but succeeded by the Annals of Improbable Research) Journal of Irreproducible Results:
The project will cost between $5,000 and $30,000, depending on how
fancy you want the final product to be. Since last week’s column,
“Let’s Make a Time Machine”, was received so well in the new
step-by-step format, this month’s column will follow the same
format.
Did al Qaeda not recognize the tongue-in-cheek nature of the article? Did they recognize it and think they could deceive US intelligence? Did someone else plant the documents in order to attribute them falsely to the terrorists?
US Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge conceded the information could
have been found on the internet but administration sources remain concerned. Among those who follow the nuclear threat, there’s pretty much a consensus that your average college physics major could make a bomb, given the materials.
Interestingly enough, the United States government conducted a
controlled experiment called the Nth Country Experiment to see how
much effort was actually required to develop a viable fission weapon
design starting from nothing. In this experiment, which ended on 10
April 1967, three newly graduated physics students were given the task
of developing a detailed weapon design using only public domain
information. The project reached a successful conclusion, that is,
they did develop a viable design (detailed in the classified report
UCRL-50248) after expending only three man-years of effort over two
and a half calendar years. In the years since, much more information
has entered the public domain so that the level of effort required has
obviously dropped further.
