U.S. Publishes Guide To Building Atom Bombs To Web

Jeff writes "The New York Times is reporting that the feds have shut down the 'Operation Iraqi Freedom Document Portal' due to concerns from weapons experts that the 'papers give detailed information on how to build nuclear firing circuits and triggering explosives, as well as the radioactive cores of atom bombs.' One diplomat is quoted as saying, 'If you had this, it would short-circuit a lot of things.' Indexes to older (less sensitive) documents (and some html from pdfs) are still cached at Google today. Rep. Pete Hoekstra pushed for the public release of the archive to help determine 'whether Saddam Hussein destroyed Iraq's weapons of mass destruction or hid or transferred them'. Critics have said the archive was created to perpetuate misinformation about WMDs."

Predictable.

[sammy baby]

The truly predictable thing about this mess is that Republicans have been asserting that this is a) proof that Hussein was within a year of building a nuclear bomb (it isn't), and b) that this is the NYT's fault.

I mean, nevermind that righty-blogs were falling all over themselves pressing for the release of these. Somehow, they were convicned that opening these documents would unleash an "Army of Davids," and the President pushed to have the documents declassified and published before anyone had the chance to read them. Now that it turns out that, oops, hey, instructions on how to build a nuclear bomb are in there, Andrew Card is blaming - who else? - the NYT [thinkprogress.org].

And this is after they'd already found instructions on how to make sarin in there.

Unbelievable.

Won't make a difference

[vertinox]

Designing an Atomic weapons isn't that hard. Just get a bullet with appropriate fission material and shoot it at a core of enriched Uranium or for you hydrogen bomb... Get some plutonium and put it in a sphere and detonate with appropriate explosives to get it to implode.

The hard part is getting the enriched Uranium or Plutonium.

If you are able to design systems to refine either material, then its a cakewalk making the bomb.

Re:Wait I thought Iraq had no Nuclear Program

[AK Marc]

But didn't Iraq have no Nuclear program and Bush lied to us?

You are correct. Bush did lie to us, and Iraq had no functional WMDs at the time of the invasion. These are old documents from before the first Gulf War. Putting them out now helps Bush lie again with the implication that there were WMDs and also helps the administration give valuable research to real terrorists for free. So not only did he lie then, but he is lying through implication again, as well as giving away nuclear secrets to terrorists. But I'm glad you caught it and noticed that Bush did lie to us. So many morons out there still think that he didn't lie multiple times to us in order to have an excuse to send our troops to die for no reason. But Haliburton is doing well with the war. I wonder why...