🚀 go-pugleaf

      November 1, 2004
      October Surprise


      by Gordon Prather
      http://worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=41189
      To the dismay of the neo-crazies, the Iraqi puppet government has just 
reported to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that 195 metric 
tons of HMX, 141 metric tons of RDX, and 5.8 metric tons of PETN have gone 
missing.

      Why report that to the IAEA? Because Iraq had imported or manufactured 
all three of these high-explosives for use in their illicit nuke program 
Hence, the Iraqi stocks had been subject to the IAEA Safeguards and Physical 
Security regime ever since they were discovered at al-Qaqaa in 1991.

      How long have they been missing?

      The IAEA last checked the integrity of their seals in March 2003, just 
days before Bush attacked Iraq. Bush has not allowed the IAEA back in Iraq 
since.

      Mohammed al-Sharaa, who headed, then and now, Iraq's Safeguarded site 
monitoring department, says, "It is impossible that these materials could 
have been taken from this site before the regime's fall."

      An IAEA spokeswoman says that after hearing of the looting at the 
principal Safeguarded site at Tuwaitha in April 2003, the IAEA formally 
expressed concern "about the security of the [Safeguarded] high explosives 
stored at al-Qaqaa."

      But not to worry. One of the Pentagon neo-crazies - John A. Shaw, the 
deputy undersecretary of defense for international technology security - has 
just told Gullible Gertz at the Washington Times that he "believes" Russian 
special forces, working with Iraqi intelligence, "almost certainly" took 
custody of all those Safeguarded high-explosives and smuggled them out of 
Iraq - to either Syria or Iran - just before Bush invaded.

      Neither Shaw, nor Gertz, nor even John Kerry seems to have grasped the 
import of Shaw's accusations.

      A Bush administration weenie has just formally accused the Russians of 
conspiring with the Iraqis, Iranians, and perhaps the Syrians to subvert the 
IAEA Safeguards regime and to assist Iran or Syria acquire a nuke 
capability, in flagrant violation of the Treaty on Non-Proliferation of 
Nuclear Weapons!

      Maybe it would help you to know what Shaw knows about HMX and RDX.

      In a first-generation implosion-type nuke - like the Fat Man we 
dropped on Nagasaki - a spherical sub-critical mass of fissile uranium is 
surrounded by "shaped charges" of chemical high-explosives (HE). When 
detonated, the HE shaped charges create a spherically-symmetric imploding 
shock-wave, which compresses the 7-inch-diameter sub-critical sphere into a 
teeny-tiny highly super-critical sphere. A fission chain reaction is then 
initiated, which continues exponentially until enough fission energy is 
produced to blow the supercritical mass apart.

      Since half the nuclear yield comes from the last generation, the art 
of the nuke designer is to compress the fissile material as much and as 
quickly as possible and then to keep it supercritical for as long as 
possible.

      To do that, the nuke designer needs a special kind of HE that didn't 
really exist in 1944. As a result, the Fat Man - which used conventional 
explosives - had a low yield but weighed about 10,000 pounds. So, to get the 
yield up and the weight down, U.S. nuke scientists began developing their 
own high energy, but relatively insensitive, explosives.

      By 1947, scientists at Los Alamos had created RDX, the first 
plastic-bonded explosive. Soon afterwards, scientists at Lawrence Livermore 
developed the even more energetic HMX. Most of the nukes in our stockpile 
today utilize RDX and HMX plastic-bonded explosives.

      So, the HMX and RDX the IAEA found at al-Qaqaa was for Iraqi nukes. 
They had built an RDX production plant at al-Qaqaa. It was destroyed in the 
Gulf War and never rebuilt.

      However, the Iraqis were unable to produce significant quantities of 
fissile uranium, so the HMX and RDX stocks were never needed.

      But RDX and HMX can be used for other purposes, such as mining, 
tunneling, or demolition. Hence, the Iraqis were allowed to keep their 
stocks of HMX and RDX - safeguarded by the IAEA - until they could come up 
with plans for using their stocks peacefully.


      Until now, the pre-election brouhaha has focused on the possible use 
in Iraq of those "missing" hundreds of tons of "conventional" 
high-explosives.

      But in the extremely unlikely event that Shaw is not crazy, it might 
be a good idea for Kerry to bring up the nuke programs the neo-crazies 
allege Iran and North Korea have jump-started because Bush invaded Iraq.

      Iraq had RDX and HMX for nukes, but no fissile material. But both Iran 
and North Korea have - or soon could have - fissile material for nukes, but 
no RDX or HMX.

      So, who says you're safer now than before Bush invaded Iraq?



      Physicist James Gordon Prather has served as a policy implementing 
official for national security-related technical matters in the Federal 
Energy Agency, the Energy Research and Development Administration, the 
Department of Energy, the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the 
Department of the Army. Dr. Prather also served as legislative assistant for 
national security affairs to U.S. Sen. Henry Bellmon, R-Okla. -- ranking 
member of the Senate Budget Committee and member of the Senate Energy 
Committee and Appropriations Committee. Dr. Prather had earlier worked as a 
nuclear weapons physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 
California and Sandia National Laboratory in New Mexico.