Iranian terror plot intercepted

[Dr Mordrid]

My dream night of TV: a Burn Notice/NCIS crossover

In part I Michael Westen gets seduced by Ziva David. In part II Fiona finds out, and the guys all hide in a nuclear bunker while the wildest catfight in history plays out.

Unrated

[Dr Mordrid]

More good news -

Iran is domestically building a new class of subs based on, but highly evolved from, the Russian Kilo class - a very quiet diesel-electric. The class is said to serve both as an attack and missile platform. Lead boats first mission was 67 days.

[RedRed]

Evening all!

By Dr M, on page 1 you said that that Iran could add a fat boy equivalent to their medium range ballistic missile.....

Tosh - the launcher has managed to launch 50 KG as a sattelite launcher....

Fat boy was 4.4 tons (Metric)

Please tell me that they have the tech to engineer a small suitcase nuke.... I will laugh out loud.

A stichup of the highest order, I think...

RedRed

[TransformX]

Evening all!

By Dr M, on page 1 you said that that Iran could add a fat boy equivalent to their medium range ballistic missile.....

Tosh - the launcher has managed to launch 50 KG as a sattelite launcher....

Fat boy was 4.4 tons (Metric)

Please tell me that they have the tech to engineer a small suitcase nuke.... I will laugh out loud.

A stichup of the highest order, I think...

RedRed

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_Man

Weight 10,213 pounds (4,633 kg)
Length 10.7 feet (3.3 m)
Diameter 5 feet (1.5 m)
Blast yield 21 kt (88 TJ) ~75 Million sticks of dynamite.

http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/France/FranceArsenalDev.html

TN-71 thermonuclear warhead:
Weight: less than 175 kg
Blast yield 150 kt.

[Evildead666]

Like Iran has suddenly the capability to build Nukes like France
The French have let off plenty of Nukes to build better weapons, no way Iran is going to catch them up.
Maybe a Russian built nuke, but even they won't allow Iran to have the capability to build their own nukes.

This looks very very suspiciously like preparing the US population ( and possibly the rest of the world also) for a potential invasion of Iran.
Syria will likely follow, and then quite a bit of the Worlds Oil production will be under US control.

Don't even think Europe will get a look-see. Too busy having money troubles. Caused by what Sub-primes from which country ?

Maybe its just because Oil is becoming very difficult to extract today, why else are they drilling at huge depths ?

The US military functions on Oil. It MUST collect and protect as much of the remaining Oil resources left, they won't let Russia do it, and they don't trust a whole lot in the Middle East. Sure they have pals over there (for now), but I don't expect they trust them 100%.

Our governments have failed us all, in the name of supremacy. When the shit hits the fan, money isn't going to help much. It will have devalued enough to be worthless, and we'll be back to swapping resources and supplies for what we need.

Maybe I watch too much sat TV.

Good old Scout motto : Be Prepared.

Must take my meds

[TransformX]

Like Iran has suddenly the capability to build Nukes like France
The French have let off plenty of Nukes to build better weapons, no way Iran is going to catch them up.
Maybe a Russian built nuke, but even they won't allow Iran to have the capability to build their own nukes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TN_71 - Entering service in 1985 on M4-B ballistic missiles

That's how many years ago?

Now just as an FYI as to how small those things can become:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TN_75

It is a miniaturised, hardened and stealthy successor to the TN 71.

Development began in 1987 and developmental testing of the warhead ended in 1991, but French president Jacques Chirac asserted in June 1995 that a full yield proof test was needed prior to deployment, causing an international outcry. Its first full-yield test was probably the 110 kt detonation on the 1 October 1995 at Fangataufa.

That's over 15 years ago...


edit: but sure, go on with your superiority complex. I mean, what do some Middle Easter/Asian camel riders know about technology and nukes, right? How could they ever dream to match European ingenuity even 20 years apart. Right? Right???

[Evildead666]

OK, they can make relatively small nukes in France.

Its still a supposition that Iran has any, and we all know how that worked out in Iraq.

[Dr Mordrid]

Little Boy was literally an encased cannon barrrel with a sealed end containing half the fissionable material and the shells projectile the other half - a plug to fit into several segmented rings. In parallel the US designed Fat Man, a spherical compression wave bomb. Both weighed several tons..

By 1953 we had The Mk 9 nuclear artillery shell at 360 kg.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XT5jo7aZzTw

and by 1956 we had the W33 warhead that could fit into an 8" artillery piece and had a yield of 40 kilotons. The actual warhead only weighed about 30-35 kg - and it was a very simple, but evolved, gun type like Little Boy.

Virtually none of the basic design changes for nuclear weapons in the last 50 years are secret - most all graduate physics students, and many smart undergrads, can design a basic and rather small bomb. It's getting the materials and the safety systems that's hard. Many don't even use the gun or spherical designs either. Some are wedges or other configurations. Many are downright tiny. It's just a matter of adequately compressing the material in the presence of a neutron source, and that latter part's easy.

Then there is the fact that Pakistani bomb designer A. Q. Khan offered Iran, then Libya and NK, centrifuge designs and materials as early as 1989, and he sold a working bomb design later. Iran is a fast learner.

[MultimediaMan]

...By 1952, the "Swan Device" had shrunk the primary from 60 inches to 11 inches and from 4000KG to 65KG . Two-Point detonation systems developed as a result of the Swan Device proved more reliable and robust than any gun type, and was several orders of magnitude safer...

As Doc had mentioned, most of the "arms race" of the 1950s to the early 1960's was getting practical information on what it took to build a reliable bomb...then how to build it smaller and lighter. The first thermonuclear weapons were essentially short run prototypes until the first ICBMs were delivered... by that time most of the basic research and development had been completed: the huge expenditures of manpower and money resulted in quantum leaps of efficiency, yield and even safety. Considering minuscule amount of computing power available in the 1950's... and the ongoing refinement of the basic "hydrocode" from the 1960s (bits and pieces of this being leaked from time to time as "Astronomic Simulations") until today, it's not all hard to engineer a fully capable fission device on paper which could be built in an average CNC machine shop.

The materials are what's rare, folks... that's all.

[Dr Mordrid]

The big advantages now are indeed CNC machines and cheap computer systems that can run CFD and other software to design bombs & run bomb simulations. Hell, the US Air Force Research Lab built the 500 TFLOP Condor Cluster supercomputer out of 1,760 PS-3's. Last I checked it's the fastest interactive system on the DoD network

[cjolley]

It'd be like taking a rock to a gun fight.
They know they would be a lake of molten glass a couple of hours after they actually used one.
So it doesn't really matter how big or small it is. They would detonate one as a test and to show off and that would be it.

[Dr Mordrid]

Ah, but would the test be under ground in Iran or in Times Square? With good simulations about all you need to physically test are the electronics, explosives etc.

[KRSESQ]

IF the religious faction holding power in Iran is indeed crazy-stupid enough to use their one and only nuclear device in a one-shot attack on the US, they wouldn't target Times Square. They would target D.C. at the height of tourist season, when Congress is in session and the President is meeting with his cabinet. If they're VERY lucky they might even get the VP AND the Speaker. Wall Street on a big trading day would be their secondary target (and would probably do greater long-term damage).

One thing is certain: they WOULD be meeting their messiah.

[MultimediaMan]

This is my concern: Iran is building a bomb for purely ideological purposes, IMHO. There is no reason to produce one other than to:

a) Use it. (Possible, but not likely)
b) Threaten with it. (More Likely)

It would take quite a bit to for them to build an IRBM which was accurate enough to hit Tel-Aviv... but Israel itself is a sure thing. But, looking at the Map... Israel is about the same distance as Moscow (as far as IRBMs go...) Russia has a lot more surface area, too.

Looking Eastward, Kabul, Islamabad and Kashmir are in play as well.
Looking South... there is Riyadh, Kuwait City and Dubai.

Quite a few nations have a stake in this... Britain, France, Russia and the US are all players...so are Pakistan and India: all of them in the Club. We all know how most of the players would respond (Hang Out The Now Paving Signs to a direct nuclear attack)...but Britain has ICBMs with ultra small dial-a-yield <1KT to 15KT warheads on their SSBNs which are tailor-made for counter strike scenarios such as what might occur. The US has been training for years for deep strikes with Ground-Penetrating weapons... an the B61 has a hard-target variant.

I think Iran's intentions are to seize the gulf in some way... it's the only play which requires nuclear weapons as a defense. Nothing else makes monetary or military sense.

[Dr Mordrid]

I think they would use it on the US, but not directly. They'd give it to their buddies in Hizbollah and let them smuggle it in from their enclaves in and around the Tri-Border region bordering on Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina. They've been smuggling people, money, and contraband in & out of the US from there with cartel help for years.