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My childhood nightmare has returned

This is pitchblende, its the source ore for Uranium.

300px-Pichblende.jpg

Once its scooped from the earth, it gets processed into this stuff. It's called "Yellowcake".

Yellowcake.jpg


This material is then processed into a gas and then that gas is spun around in one of these things, a gaseous diffusion centrifuge. This one is from Oak Ridge Tennessee, sometime in 1944.

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What comes out of the centrifuge is something called "enriched Uranium".

Once you have few pounds of this material, you can put it in something like this:

Gun-type_Nuclear_weapon.bmp

It's a simple device actually. You see, once enough enriched uranium is brought into close proximity, the material will cause a chain reaction with itself. In fact, its so simple that most people dont know that this device, the bomb known as "Little Boy" didnt need to be tested by the scientists on the Manhattan Project as it was virtually certain that it would work when used. They tested the hard bomb, the Plutonium Bomb "Fat Man" because they werent sure it would work. They never had any doubt about "Little Boy", they just didnt have enough enriched uranium to make very many of them.

"Little Boy" was a Uranium Bomb. It was the "easy" Bomb.

This is what happened when that bomb was tested for the first time:

Hiroshima_aftermath.jpg

A few thousand pounds of pitchblende, into a few hundred pounds of yellocake, into a few pounds of enriched uranium, add some 1940's technology, stir with a pinch of patience and 100,000 people living in a city that was alot like Long Beach California ceased to be in a flash.

Today, this man said his country had created, "Enriched Uranium" and thus joined the "Nuclear Club".

bearded_hitler.jpg

This man works every day prays every night for the death of me, my family and my civilization. This man says that the Holocaust never occured. This man says that "Israel should be wiped off the map".

I am not Jewish, I don't pretend to know what it is to be Jewish, but today, for the first time in my life, I feel jewish.

When I was a little boy, some crazy bastard went and put some nuclear missiles 90 miles off our shore, and the world nearly went into global thermonuclear war and as a result, putting an end to my young life and millions of others before it had a chance to get started. My parents always talked about the Cuban Missle Crisis as "the scary times". My dad always talked about the plans he made with Mom, about how she was to take my sisters and I out of the city if "things got bad" while he was away at sea during the crisis. This was the talk around the kitchen tables of America in October 1962.

Today, I look back on those days with nostalgia as a period of relative sanity and calm.

Posted @ April 11, 2006 01:17 PM | Current Affairs

Comments

What I find most worrisome are the peaople who want to rely on conventional deterrence against people who have repeatedly and publicly stated that they have a religeous imperative to eliminate all of us who are not of their faith.

Posted by: RPD at April 12, 2006 07:47 AM

My childhood nightmare was American impotence in the face of the Iranian hostage situation. Nuclear war had a vague, omnipresent spectre, but the fact that the greatest country in the world could not take out terror mongers who killed and kidnapped our people - in Iran, Lebanon, and countless other places...that these people wore hoods and targeted innocents, and even tough talking Reagan didn't seem to have answers...

That damn colored hood. The coward with a gun and a thirst for blood. My blood. My parents blood. And we didn't do a thing.

Now your nightmare meets mine.

Here's the Good News. This ain't the Carter Administration, and the Cold War is over. I may have been an impotent, fearful child when terror had its reign, but now I'm grown, I can vote and I can, and will fight.

Aside from the hijackers, there was one other victim whose death we can all rejoice over: the era of American appeasement perished in a fireball. The tragedy is that it had to take many of our countrymen down to make it so.

Posted by: Dan at April 12, 2006 09:05 AM

Every time people like you bring this up, I need to change my underwear. Honestly, getting a couple wads of uranium into the US over the Canadian border or even the Mexican (or, from Puerto Rico via boat) is sooooo easy. Just need to take a direct flight from Iran to Hugo's or Fidel's house. Grab an iron tube, some explosives and then level a random city. Great. Just great.

Posted by: mdmhvonpa at April 13, 2006 11:39 AM

Ah, the Cuban Missle Crisis. The good old days.

It was another year or so 'til I joined the Navy. Early Nov '63.

Posted by: M. Simon at April 17, 2006 06:00 AM