Clinton’s folly, part 2

According to the New York Times, a Bush-Cheney official has just announced that “some” intelligence officials believe they have just discovered “an advanced nuclear testing site” at Youngdoktong, North Korea. As a result, their “best guess” is that Kim Jong-Il could have a “miniaturized” nuke within a year!

Why do “some” believe it’s an advanced nuke testing site?

Well, satellite photos show that conventional explosives are being tested there and the site is near North Korea’s main nuclear complex.

So what?

Well, implosion-type nukes use high-explosives to compress a sub-critical mass of fissile material to super-criticality.

So what?

Well, Kim Jong-Il claims to be recovering weapons-grade plutonium from the 8,000 fuel-rods subject until recently to International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards.

So what?

Well, apparently “some” intelligence analysts have concluded that Kim Jong-Il has cracked the secret – plutonium implosion – of making a small, lightweight nuke to put atop his ballistic missiles.

If that’s the kind of intelligence analysis the CIA turns out these days, no wonder we haven’t found the weapons of mass destruction “some” analysts insisted Saddam Hussein had.

In the first place, IAEA inspectors visited this Korean high-explosive test site way back in 1992 and concluded there was nothing going on there that was nuke-related. And, until Kim Jong-Il kicked the IAEA out a few months ago, nothing did.

In any case, the “secret” to making a fission weapon small enough and light enough to be carried by a ballistic missile is not the use of high-explosives to implode plutonium.

The Fat Man we dropped on Nagasaki was a plutonium-implosion device and it weighed five tons. Kim’s missiles wouldn’t get the Fat Man off the ground.

Most of that five tons comprised the high-explosive needed to uniformly compress the sub-critical mass of plutonium to supercritical density, so that an uncontrolled nuclear chain reaction could be initiated.

We weren’t sure the implosion system would work. So, before testing the design with a fissile plutonium sphere, we built and tested several devices containing an ordinary uranium sphere – which could produce no nuclear yield – to see if the theoretical uniform compression of the sphere was actually achieved.

It took us years of computer simulation and uranium sphere testing to develop an implosion system that only weighed a ton, and even that was too heavy to be delivered by ballistic missile.

Saddam Hussein intended to substitute highly enriched uranium for plutonium in his implosion-nuke design. But the critical mass of HEU is significantly greater than plutonium. A new and more powerful implosion system would have to be developed to drive the HEU to supercriticality. Saddam’s nuke was never built, because he didn’t have the HEU, but the IAEA estimates it would also have weighed at least a ton.

The secret to actually making a nuke small enough and light enough to be delivered by ballistic missile was revealed to the world in Chapter II of the “Cox Report.” It’s called “boosting,” and if you want to “boost” your nukes, you need a tritium production facility.

Pakistan has one, and they claim the HEU nukes they tested in 1998 were “boosted.” A boosted HEU nuke would be much heavier and larger than a boosted plutonium nuke, but the Pakistanis claim their nukes can be delivered by missile.

The Pakistanis insist they have not shared their boosted HEU-implosion nuke design with the Koreans. But it would explain why the Koreans have recently attempted to acquire or produce HEU. It also might explain why the Koreans recently restarted their plutonium production reactor. Tritium can be produced in a such a reactor.

The IAEA’s principal concern has been that Kim would simply sell his plutonium to the highest bidder. But the Koreans may attempt to build their own Fat Man.

Developing a Fat Man implosion system is difficult enough. Developing an implosion system for a boosted nuke is orders of magnitude more difficult. Anyone whose best guess is that the Koreans could do that in six-months or a year doesn’t know much about nukes.

So why did some Bush-Cheney weenie announce to the world that our “best estimate” is that some time next year Kim Jong-Il will be able to nuke you soccer-moms in Seattle via ballistic missile?

To scare you into supporting a pre-emptive strike to disarm Kim before he sells his plutonium – or a Fat Man – to terrorists?

No, to scare you into supporting Dubya’s construction in Alaska of Bill Clinton’s zillion-dollar anti-ballistic missile system.