Snowden and the Pulitzer

Is it really plausible that terrorists could get and use a nuclear bomb?

Yes. Unfortunately, terrorist use of a nuclear bomb is a very real danger. During the 2004 presidential campaign, President George W. Bush and Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.) agreed that nuclear terrorism was the single greatest threat to U.S. national security. Published estimates of the chance that terrorists will detonate a nuclear bomb in a U.S. city over the next ten years range from 1 percent to 50 percent. In a 2005 poll of international security experts taken by Senator Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), the median estimate of the chance of a nuclear attack in the next ten years was 29 percent — and a strong majority believed that it was more likely that terrorists would launch a nuclear attack than that a state would. Given the horrifying consequences of such an attack, even a 1 percent chance would be enough to call for rapid action to reduce the risk.
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http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/publication/17529/nuclear_terrorism_faq.html

Attacks using improvised nuclear devices or biological weapons, as well as outbreaks of a pandemic disease, pose a serious and increasing national security risk,
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http://www.whitehouse.gov/issues/homeland-security/

How much do you think a nuke going off in Manhattan would cost the economy, off the top of your head?

What is the cost, morally and emotionally, of not doing everything within your power to prevent mass murder when you know you have ways of doing so?
 
Peephole said:
Lol, as if you can build an atomic bomb undetected.
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Yea, i find the arguments of the supporters of that mass surveilance rather funny, in a sad way.

On one hand it's like "Uh, we all basically knew that, but now the terrorists do as well". Which somehow implies that they are stupid and ignorant of technology. As if they openly twittered or used public IRC chats, instead of being very careful about the ways they use to communicate.

OTOH then is the idea that they are brilliant enough to be able to build a nuke, get it to the target destination and then set it off. All in secrecy and undetected.

Greetings,

Chris
 
Peephole said:
Lol, as if you can build an atomic bomb undetected.
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You have no *********** idea what you're talking about.
How much expertise is needed to make a nuclear bomb? Would a large operation be required?

Unfortunately, government studies have concluded that once a terrorist organization had the needed nuclear material, a handful of skilled individuals might be able to make a crude nuclear bomb using commercially available tools and equipment, without any large fixed facilities that might draw attention, and without access to classified nuclear weapons information. Getting nuclear material and making a crude nuclear bomb would be the most complex operation terrorists have ever carried out, but the risk that a sophisticated group could pull it off is very real. Roughly 90 percent of the effort in the Manhattan Project was focused on making nuclear bomb material; getting stolen nuclear material would allow terrorists to skip the hardest part of making a nuclear bomb.

The simplest type of nuclear bomb, known as a "gun-type" bomb, slams two pieces of nuclear material together at high speed. The bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, for example, was a cannon that fired a shell of HEU into rings of HEU. Plutonium cannot be used to make a gun-type bomb with a substantial explosive yield, because the neutrons that all plutonium emits cause the bomb to blow itself apart before the nuclear reactions proceeds very far. To make a bomb from plutonium would require a more complex "implosion-type" bomb, which would be more difficult for terrorists to build — but government studies have repeatedly concluded that this possibility also cannot be ruled out.
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Or what kind of "detection" do you think you're knowledgeable about?
Once a nuclear bomb or nuclear material has been stolen, could we stop it from being smuggled?

The chances would not be very good, unfortunately. The amounts of HEU or plutonium needed for a bomb are small and easy to smuggle. These materials are not radioactive enough to require any special equipment to carry them, or to make them easy to detect. After they have left the site where they are supposed to be, they could be anywhere, and all the later lines of defense are variations on searching for needles in haystacks. With hundreds of millions of people and vehicles crossing U.S. borders every year, making sure no one gets in with a suitcase of potential bomb material is an immense challenge. Even if governments screened every container coming across their borders with a radiation detector, terrorists would not be likely to send their nuclear bomb material through one of the readily-observable radiation detectors, but would use one of the many other possible routes to avoid inspection. Moreover, if HEU was shielded with lead, detectors now being deployed would not be able to detect the weak radiation it emits (unless it was contaminated with the isotope U-232, and the detector was designed to look for the gamma rays from that decay chain). If the United States cannot stop the flow of illegal drugs and illegal immigrants across its borders, it is unlikely that it will succeed in stopping nuclear material. Even an assembled nuclear bomb might fit in the hold of a yacht, in a truck, or in a small plane.
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Just more fearmongering from the man trying to keep us down, steal our freedoms?
 
It's *********** disgusting. He uses the chance to promote the canard that he has been vindicated in the States and then asks a softball question giving Putin the opportunity to propagandize for himself. Seeing as the leaks have benefited no one in the world more than Putin, this is just more evidence Snowden is a moron. Who honestly believes what Putin says? Honestly it made me want to puke. Look for some interesting comments from the State and Justice departments on this display of stupidity.
 
383LQ4SS said:
Well great...glad we got that over with. Thanks :rolleyes:
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I think you imagine a disconnect in my statements where there is none.

I'm suggesting the debate should be about whether or not Snowden's actions were completely necessary, whether or not he took all legal avenues available, whether he should decide what should be secret, or whether elected representatives and the judiciary, all three branches of government, should decide what is secret. There is no debate about this. He is wrong.

You can't have a debate over whether or not we should use secret methods against our enemies by publishing them because you have ended their use and effectiveness by exposing them to the enemy. This is so stupid it blows my mind that people go around talking about how important the debate is.

This is the consequence of living in a country that is at war, some people, like Snowden, are too immature to be given any responsibility. Indeed, he tricked people into them giving him their passwords in order to pull this off, all of those people lost their jobs.
 
Could have something to do with the fact that Putin is the only thing keeping him from growing old in prison. Were you expecting him to ask a question about the Magnitsky Act?
 
Joey McGee said:
I don't agree.I don't agree.You don't think that the vast amount of people we've killed and arrested from al-Qaeda has any connection with the lack of terror attacks?
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Nope. Go ahead and demonstrate that there is a connection besides your opinion.


I don't agree.These "reports" amount to opinions. When we are forced to rely on opinions, I look to the most reputable and relevant expert opinions.
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Who are they?


For instance, the majority of the military intelligence community says that these things have been useful and could be useful in the future.
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Evidence?


I'm going to stick with those guys on this issue. :confused: The Terrorists. We have done a fantastic job of killing them and putting them in prison. It's the number one proven way to prevent someone from attacking you again when they have declared war on you.
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Evidence?


Joey McGee said:
I highly doubt you acutely understand either the risks or the amount of money being spent.
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Demonstrate that you do understand. Otherwise it's all posturing.
 
Skeptic Ginger said:
It's incomprehensibly naive, Joey, to think the government isn't spying on political dissidents as well as reporters.
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I hope they are. Because political dissidents are often dangerous people, and reporters aren't always harmless either.

In fact I hope that they are spying on everybody - and not just looking at what numbers we are dialing but also emails, internet forums, electronic transactions, street cameras - the more data they can collate and analyze, the better will be the result. The ultimate system would be one like in Person of Interest, where an unbiased and incorruptible 'machine' identifies perpetrators in time for us to prevent acts of violence, not just mop up after them.

Christian Klippel said:
the massive collection of phone record meta-data seems to have very little to no effect on terrorism prevention at all.
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The reason for that is simple. What the NSA is collecting now is only barely scratching the surface. To be more effective the surveillance needs to be more comprehensive.

Christian Klippel said:
conducting things like drone attacks to eliminate a suspected terrorist, while that person is, let's say, at a funeral or wedding, and thus also killing a bunch of innocent civilians that happen to be at the same place, will surely cause the general population to get angry.
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I agree. Better intel helps to avoid mistakes, and military action based on bad intel usually causes more harm than good. Enlightened foreign policy should help to improve our relations and remove the causes for anger.

But there will always be a hard core of haters that will never go away, no matter how nice we are. And let us not forget that domestic terrorism is still the greater threat. These are the people who don't just hate our freedoms, they use them against us.
 
Roger Ramjets said:
I hope they are. Because political dissidents are often dangerous people, and reporters aren't always harmless either.

In fact I hope that they are spying on everybody - and not just looking at what numbers we are dialing but also emails, internet forums, electronic transactions, street cameras - the more data they can collate and analyze, the better will be the result.
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It's already been shown in this thread that what you're saying is not the case.
 
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