From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Date: Mon Oct 14 2002 - 13:43:38 MDT
On Sun, 13 Oct 2002, Anders Sandberg wrote:
> See http://www.wws.princeton.edu/~ota/disk3/1979/7906_n.html for
> classic, if depressing reading.
Since many of you will probably not take the time to read this,
I'll give you the gist of my read of the first couple of chapters.
1) It is a *really* good thing that the cold war is over and we
are slowly dismantling its machinery. Especially given the
fact that the report doesn't do a worst case analysis of what
was possible using the technology that was developed:
http://www.thebulletin.org/research/qanda/bombsize.html
The WTC event was a nonevent compared with a single large
(weapons class, e.g. > 1 MT) nuclear bomb explosion.
2) Surprisingly, the harm likely to be caused by ~ kilo-ton sized
weapons (those most likely to be obtained by terrorists) is not
as bad as I thought it might be. Its still bad -- but not
anywhere near as bad as that produced by the MAD strategy.
The U.S. could probably withstand a terrorist class event
(perhaps even several of them) without the development
vector taking a significant hit.
Of course the URL mentioned pointing out the fact that ~11 kg of
plutonium is the minimum required for a critical mass does raise
the interesting question of whether one could come up with a
smaller nuclear weapon if one used a more radioactive material?
Robert
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