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from the pulling-out-is-the-best-prevention dept.
Trump to Pull US Out of Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty
President Donald Trump announced Saturday that the US is pulling out of the landmark Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty with Russia, a decades-old agreement that has drawn the ire of the President.
[...] The treaty forced both countries to eliminate ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges between approximately 300 and 3,400 miles. It offered a blanket of protection to the United States' European allies and marked a watershed agreement between two nations at the center of the arms race during the Cold War.
Former State Department spokesman Rear Adm. John Kirby, a CNN military and diplomatic analyst, explained that the treaty "wasn't designed to solve all of our problems with the Soviet Union," but was "designed to provide a measure of some strategic stability on the continent of Europe."
"It's the dirt that does it."
Donald Trump: US will build up nuclear arsenal
President Donald Trump has warned that the US will bolster its nuclear arsenal to put pressure on Russia and China. Speaking to reporters, he repeated his belief that Russia has violated the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty, which he has threatened to leave. Russia denies this.
The Cold War-era treaty banned medium-range missiles, reducing the perceived Soviet threat to European nations.
Russia has warned it will respond in kind if the US develops more weapons. Mr Trump said the US would build up its arsenal "until people come to their senses".
[...] Meanwhile, US National Security Adviser John Bolton has been holding talks in Moscow after Russia condemned the US plan to quit the deal. Mr Bolton was told that the US withdrawal would be a "serious blow" to the non-proliferation regime.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday October 24 2018, @07:24AM (1 child)
But before the first Gulf War. Recall that the Israelis bombed a nuclear reactor that Iraq claimed was "for the peaceful generation of electricity".
After that first war, international arms inspectors found declassified Manhattan Project patents all over the damn country. That all but one of Manhattan's secrets were declassified in 1965 was no doubt the result of wiser thinking than I personally am capable of.
(The one remaining secret is the Initiator, which emits some neutrons at just the right instant to get the Plutonium Bomb cookin'. When I read about that in 1994, I said to myself "That just has to work a certain way", and have always figured I could design one in just one month with just the UCSC Science Library and the 386 box I owned at the time. Computational Physics was much much slower during WWII, as a "Computer" was some smart kid with a table of logarithms and an adding machine.)
Those inspectors also found Calutrons in underground facilities, powered by cables that ran hundreds of miles underground from the generating plants. A Calutron is an Industrial Size mass spectrometer. They work quite poorly - with some of those declassified patents explaining how to improve them somewhat - but they are easy to build. Uranium Hexafluoride Gas Turbine Cascades work far better but are quite difficult to build.
One such Calutron appeared in a photo about the Iraq nuclear program in that sensationalist propaganda mouthpiece known as Scientific American. Can I turn it up in image search?
Yes. [globalsecurity.org] It's all smashed up because those arms inspectors wanted to ensure that it wouldn't be used again in the future.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by Whoever on Monday October 29 2018, @03:25AM
I think you are confusing the first and second Gulf wars. There wasn't much need to lie about the justification for the first Gulf war: Iraq had invaded Kuwait.
The Calutrons were discovered by inspectors in 1991 and later (shortly after the first Gulf war). They were destroyed (as evidenced by the picture you linked to).
The lying that I referred to was the justification for the second Gulf war. There is no evidence that the Calutrons were still operational in the time just before the second Gulf war.