THE SIGHTLESS BIRD BLACK HOLES

THE SIGHTLESS BIRD

THE BACK HOLE

The main principle on which nuclear bombs are built, is that mass can be turned into energy, and the equation that precisely predicts that conversion is E = mc^2 the famous equation that is derived directly from Special Relativity. 

Otto Hahn, a German scientist independently discovered nuclear fission of heavy elements back in 1938.  Yes, America got lucky. It turned out to be an exothermic reaction, which released large amounts of energy both as electromagnetic radiation and as kinetic energy. 

When this news was announced, Einstein wrote to the then president of the United Sates - F.D.Roosevelt - warning him about the possibility that the Germans were building an atomic bomb, and this was a factor that resulted in the start of the Manhattan project

[The Manhattan Project was a research and development project that produced the first nuclear weapons during World War II.] 

It seems to me, the real catalyst for making nuclear weapons was the discovery of nuclear fission. The work that went into this was quite independent of Einstein's work and interests, and quite disconnected from the relativity theory.

General relativity

{\displaystyle G_{\mu \nu }+\Lambda g_{\mu \nu }={8\pi G \over c^{4}}T_{\mu \nu }}

A nuclear reaction can be described by an equation, which must be balanced. The symbol for an atom or atomic particle includes the symbol of the element, the mass number, and the atomic number. The mass number, which describes the number of protons and neutrons, is attached at the upper left of the symbol.

A nuclear explosion is an explosion that occurs as a result of the rapid release of energy from a high-speed nuclear reaction.

Nuclear chain reaction: A possible nuclear fission chain reaction. In the first step, a uranium-235 atom absorbs a neutron, and splits into two new atoms (fission fragments), releasing three new neutrons and a large amount of binding energy.

The driving reaction may be [nuclear fission] or [nuclear fusion] or a multistage cascading combination of the two, though to date all fusion-based weapons have used a fission device to initiate fusion, and a pure fusion weapon remains a hypothetical device.

The first man made nuclear explosion occurred on July 16, 1945 at 5:50 am on the Trinity Test Site near Alamogordo, New Mexico in the United States.

 The event involved the full-scale testing of an implosion-type fission atomic bomb.

In a memorandum to the U.S. Secretary of War, General Leslie Groves describes the yield as equivalent to 15,000 to 20,000 tons of TNT.

Following this test, a uranium-gun type nuclear bomb (Little Boy) was dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, with a blast yield of 15 kilotons; and a plutonium implosion-type bomb (Fat Man) on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, with a blast yield of 21 kilotons.

In the years following World War II, eight countries have conducted nuclear tests with 2475 devices fired in 2120 tests.

NORTH KOREA

Documents published by the Washington Post in 2011 appeared to suggest that North Korea managed to bribe top officials in Pakistan’s military to share their country’s nuclear secrets.

One insider, Abdul Qadeer Khan, claimed that he had personally transferred more than $3 million to corrupt officers.

Huge amounts of cash and jewels were apparently transferred inside cardboard boxes of fruit, in return for sensitive information.

The Pakistani officials have denied the claims, but US intelligence officials believe the evidence is authentic.

Khan says that he was involved in selling components to Iran and Libya, as well as North Korea. But he claims he was acting on behalf of other senior leaders in Pakistan.

THE ISLAMIC BOMB

Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal is growing at a rate that will make it the fourth-largest in a decade behind only the United States, Russia and China.

IT MAY BE A COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE FOR PAKISTAN IF IT CAN EXTORT THE WEST TO BUY THE PROGRAM FOR $ 250,000,000

 A.Q. Khan, the “father” of Pakistan’s bomb, in which he claims that “... it was an Indian nuclear explosion in May 1974 that prompted our nuclear program, motivating me to return to Pakistan to help create a credible nuclear deterrent and save my country from Indian nuclear blackmail.”

The Manhattan Project was the codename for the secret US government research and engineering project during the Second World War that developed the world’s first nuclear weapons. President Franklin Roosevelt created a committee to look into the possibility of developing a nuclear weapon after he received a letter from Nobel Prize laureate Albert Einstein in October 1939. In his letter, Einstein warned the president that Nazi Germany was likely already at work on developing a nuclear weapon. By August 1942, the Manhattan Project was underway

Pakistanis may proudly hail Khan as the father of the “Islamic bomb,” but what is generally not mentioned is that Khan’s PhD is in metallurgical engineering. Khan was certainly responsible for stealing blueprints for the manufacture of enriched uranium from a Dutch laboratory in 1972, but he was not involved with the actual design, development and testing of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons. He wasn’t even living in the country when Pakistan’s nuclear weapon program was secretly launched in 1972. Khan was only put in charge of Pakistan’s uranium enrichment program in 1976.

A New York Times report describes China’s vital contribution to the genesis of Pakistan’s nuclear program:

“China, a staunch ally of Pakistan’s, provided blueprints for the bomb, as well as highly enriched uranium, tritium, scientists and key components for a nuclear weapons production complex, among other crucial tools. ‘Without China’s help, Pakistan’s bomb would not exist’ said Gary Milhollin, a leading expert on the spread of nuclear weapons.”

The evolution of nuclear weapons started in the 1930s, when the Germans began attempting to purify uranium-235...Albert Einstein wrote a letter to FDR when he learned that Nazi Germany was embarking on this scientific conquest. Countries have used the data generated over the last decades to create their own nuclear weapons. 

AMERICA’S MOBILIZATION

By 1944, six thousand scientists and engineers from leading universities and industrial research labs were at work on the development of the world’s first-ever nuclear weapon.   WOW! WHO HAS 6,000 NUCLEAR SCIENTIST????.

Robert Oppenheimer, a physicist, headed the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Manhattan Project’s principal research and development facility. For security reasons, the facility was located in the desert near Los Alamos, New Mexico.

Major General Leslie Groves oversaw the Manhattan Project for the US government. Private corporations, foremost among them DuPont, helped prepare weapons-grade uranium and other components needed to make the bombs. Nuclear materials were processed in reactors located in Oak Ridge, Tennessee and Hanford, Washington. At its peak, the Manhattan Project employed 130,000 Americans at thirty-seven facilities across the country.

Barely four years after the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japan in August 1945, the Soviet Union detonated its own in August 1949, much sooner that expected. The Soviets did not lack for available recruits for spying.

Just as America Soviet physicists paid close attention to the news of the discovery of fission in Germany in 1938. Throughout 1939, leading Soviet physicists attempted to reproduce the fission experiment that Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann had conducted in Berlin and began to make measurements and calculations to determine under exactly what conditions, if any, a nuclear chain reaction would take place.

After Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Soviet nuclear physics work largely ceased. Scientists and engineers were drafted or assigned to work on projects, such as radar, that were seen as more pressing. However, a small fraction of physicists continued to explore the possibilities of uranium. Peter L. Kapitza, a high-ranking physicist, remarked in October 1941 that the recent discovery of nuclear energy could be useful in the war against Germany and that the prospects of a uranium bomb seemed promising. Soviet leaders learned that both the United States and Germany had embarked on efforts to build an atomic bomb. In February 1943, the Soviets began their own program led by nuclear physicist Igor Kurchatov and political director Lavrentiy Beria.

 

THE SOVIET ATOMIC BOMB PROGRAM DURING WORLD WAR II

The Soviet atomic program during the war was puny compared to the Manhattan Project, involving approximately twenty physicists and only a small number of staff. They researched the reactions necessary to produce both atomic weapons and nuclear reactors. They also began exploring ways to generate enough pure uranium and graphite, and researched uranium isotope separation methods.

WHEN WE WERE FRIENDS

Work on the program sped up quickly in 1945, however, especially after the Soviets learned of the Trinity test. At the Potsdam Conference in July 1945, Truman told Joseph Stalin about the United States atomic bomb program for the first time. According to Truman, "I casually mentioned to Stalin that we had a new weapon of unusual destructive force.

The Russian Premier showed no special interest. All he said was he was glad to hear it and hoped we would make good use of it against the Japanese."

While Stalin may have appeared uninterested, he privately told his top advisers to speed up work on the Soviet atomic program: "They simply want to raise the price. We've got to work on Kurchatov and hurry things up.”

The Soviet regime immediately stepped up their program. General Boris L. Vannikov (who has been compared to General Leslie Groves) headed an engineering council that oversaw the project. Its members included Kurchatov, M.G. Pervukhin, A.I. Alikhanov, I.K. Kikoin, A.P. Vinovgradov, Abram Joffe, A.A. Bochvar, and Avraamy Zavenyagin.

Following the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Stalin called for an all-out crash program in atomic research and development. In 1946 Yuli Khariton was appointed by Kurchatov as the program's lead scientist. He was tasked with directing atomic research, development, design, and weapons assembly, and helped select and establish the site of the secret Soviet nuclear weapons facility, known as Arzamas-16 and nicknamed “Los Arzamas.”

 

The Soviet Atomic Bomb and the Cold War

On December 25, 1946, the Soviets created their first chain reaction in a graphite structure similar to Chicago Pile-1. After encountering some difficulties with the production of plutonium and the isotopic separation of uranium over the next two years, Soviet scientists managed to get their first production reactor working satisfactorily in the fall of 1948. It would only be a matter of months before the U.S.S.R. exploded its own atomic bomb. The Soviets successfully tested their first nuclear device, called RDS-1 or "First Lightning" (codenamed "Joe-1" by the United States), at Semipalatinsk on August 29, 1949.

THE MONEY

To determine the cost of one nuclear weapon, you have to account for the costs:

·      Production

·      Delivery Systems

·      Maintenance.

"South Korean government analysis has put North Korea's nuclear spending at $1.1 billion to $3.2 billion overall," reported Reuters last year, "although experts say it is impossible to make an accurate calculation given the secrecy surrounding the program, and estimates vary widely."

The U.S. government believes North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has up to 60 nuclear weapons, though some independent experts say the total is smaller. If North Korea does indeed have around 60, that puts the cost of each warhead at between around $18 million and $53 million.

LET’S DO THE MATH

$1.1 BILLION

The U.S. nuclear program provides a more reliable picture of cost, though not all nuclear development information is public. In "Atomic Audit," published in 1998, Stephen I. Schwartz claimed the U.S. had spent $5 trillion since 1940 on developing and maintaining its nuclear arsenal.

The U.S. government is now estimated to have 6,800 nuclear weapons at its disposal, but America hasn't actually built a new warhead or bomb since the 1990s. It has refurbished several types in recent years to extend their lifetime..

The B61-12 atomic bombs, for instance, are to undergo a life-extension program that will cost roughly $9.5 billion. There are 400 to 500 of these bombs, says Gronlund, which means refurbishing one will cost about $20 million.

W-80 warheads, another type being refurbished, are estimated to cost $75 million each when you account for the price tag of the B52 bombers that deliver them. The national administrator of the Nuclear Security Administration, estimated that the total cost of the W-80 life extension plan will be $7.3 billion to $9.9 billion over 17 years.

It is predicted that, in total, the U.S. will spend $250 billion on its nuclear program in the next few decades.

As for North Korea, the new U.N. sanctions that China and Russia agreed to impose  will likely set it back. The banned exports is expected to cost them a third of their annual $3 billion earnings.

U.S. analysts believe North Korea has nuclear warheads that can fit inside of missiles, the Washington Post reported on Tuesday.

The insight comes just weeks after the regime fired a missile that landed within 230 miles of the Japanese coast.

SIMPLE TIMES?

Iran's nuclear program was launched in the 1950s with the help of the United States as part of the Atoms for Peace Program.

]The participation of the United States and Western European governments in Iran's nuclear program continued until the 1979 Iranian Revolution that toppled the last Shah of Iran.

In the 1990s, Russia formed a joint research organization with Iran, providing Iran with Russian nuclear experts and technical information.

On 1 May 2018 the IAEA reiterated its 2015 report, saying it had found no credible evidence of nuclear weapons activity in Iran after 2009

Iran's first nuclear power plant, the Bushehr I reactor, was completed with major assistance from the Russian government agency Rosatom and officially opened on 12 September 2011. The Russian engineering: Atomenergoprom said the Bushehr Nuclear Power Plant would reach full capacity by the end of 2012.  Iran has also announced that it is working on a new 360 Megawatt Darkhovin Nuclear Power Plant, and that it will seek more medium-sized nuclear power plants and uranium mines in the future.

As of 2015, Iran's nuclear program has cost $100 billion in lost oil revenues and lost foreign direct investment because of international sanctions ($500 billion, when including other opportunity costs).

WHY GIVE UP THE PROGRAMS

TO RECOUP WASTED COST

?

The 2015 agreement freed up Iranian assets that had been frozen under sanctions. Called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the deal included Iran and the United States, China, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom and the European Union.

The agreement only affected sanctions imposed to punish Iran for its nuclear program. Iran has other assets that remain frozen.

Some conservatives have put the amount released after lifted sanctions as high as $150 billion, which is the highest of estimates we have seen.

Another estimate from Iran’s Central Bank topped out at about $29 billion in readily available funds, with another $45 billion tied up in Chinese investment projects and the foreign assets of the Iran’s Oil Ministry.

After talking with officials at Iran’s Central Bank, Nader Habibi, professor of economics of the Middle East at Brandeis

University, believes the actual total is between $25 billion and $50 billion.

In July 2015, U.S. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew told lawmakers Iran would gain access to $56 billion.

It’s important to know that little of that money was under the control of the United States or any U.S. bank. Most of it, Habibi said, was in central and commercial banks overseas. Furthermore, it was Iran’s money to begin with, not a payment from any government to buy Iran’s cooperation.

TRUE, RESEARCH THE IRAN CONTRA SCANDAL.

The Congressional Research Service, the nonpartisan analytic arm of Congress, reviewed this cash transfer in a 2018 report. It gave a total of $1.7 billion.

That was the amount that U.S. and Iranian negotiators settled on to resolve an arms contract between the United States and Iran that predated the Iranian revolution in 1979. Iran had paid for military equipment, and it was never delivered.

As of 1990, there were $400 million in that account. Negotiators agreed that accrued interest would add $1.3 billion to the amount, which is a lot of money — but 25 years is a long time for interest to build up the balance.

The United States sent the money to Iran in euros, Swiss francs and other currencies. Trump embellished when he mentioned barrels and boxes. Reports at the time said the money was packed and loaded onto pallets, similar to how other bulk goods are shipped.

The high-end estimate from the U.S. Treasury Department in 2015 was $56 billion, and outside analysts believe the number could be lower.

WHERE IS THE MONEY???

The Iran nuclear deal generated huge economic expectations that quite frankly were never going to be met. “Sanctions relief was not as broad as it was presented to the Iranian people. It’s very easy for capital to flee but it comes back very slowly.”

There were expectations that changing the sanctions policy would bring overnight prosperity.

“Iran’s economy continues to suffer from immense challenges—including perennial budget deficits, rampant corruption, and one of the worst business environments in the world

U.S. intelligence has believes that Iran is in a massive hole from which it will take years to climb out.”

If a nation wants a massive economic development BLACK HOLE start a Nuclear Program. Much of your nation’s development future will vanish 

The hopes pinned to the end of the economic restrictions may have played a role in the new Iran demonstrations, which analysts say are notable for beginning with typically conservative and working-class populations, not the urban middle-class that has taken the lead in past Iranian protests. The end of sanctions “exposed the reality that Iran’s economy is not managed very well.”

“Iran’s leaders have raised the expectations of their people that sanctions relief will improve their lives,” Obama said in 2015. “

Even a repressive regime like Iran’s cannot completely ignore those expectations.”

The latest wave of public outcry in Iran—and its anti-regime tone—may stem from the way these expectations have refocused popular attention on their own government and away from foreign states.

Another sanction attack would be cribbling.

AFRICA

South Africa ended its nuclear weapons programme in 1989.

All the bombs (six constructed and one under construction) were dismantled and South Africa acceded to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons when South African Ambassador to the United States Harry Schwarz signed the treaty in 1991.

South Africa had become the first nation to give up its nuclear capability voluntarily, leaving the African continent again free of nuclear arms. But the event passed without public notice, because the government kept the decision to scuttle the weapons secret, having never acknowledged developing them in the first place.

The task was formidable, considering the program's estimated cost of $800 Million, its total workforce of about 1,000 people and its production of six bombs weighing a ton apiece plus a seventh that was half-finished. Each bomb could have easily wrecked a large city and killed more than 100,000 people.

South Africa shrewdly took great pains to keep key nuclear assets -- such as the nation's principal bomb factory and storage site -- hidden from U.S. spy satellites for nearly two decades. Also, its bomb-building program was sufficiently low-tech to avoid extensive reliance on foreign assistance, officials said, an approach that effectively insulated the program from the restraints of international trade sanctions leveled against the apartheid system.

"Remember that we are dealing with a situation in which we are operating totally in isolation," said Tielman de Waal, director of Armscor, the government-owned arms conglomerate that was secretly assigned to make the bombs in 1974 by then-Prime Minister John Vorster. "We were not trying to recruit . . . {scientists who} had worked overseas on a similar program because it was such a security risk."

The country's initial challenge was to transform its abundant reserves of natural uranium into a large stockpile of highly enriched uranium suited for use in nuclear weapons. For that purpose, engineers designed and constructed an elaborate network of pipes and caldrons at a large site west of Pretoria known as Valindaba -- a Zulu word meaning "we don't talk about this at all."

America, you just cant leave this stuff laying around.

South got an accidental discount

Valindaba is adjacent to Pelindaba, South Africa's main nuclear research center, where for nearly a decade scientists had operated a U.S.-built civilian reactor fueled by imported, highly enriched uranium.

Most of the work followed what officials said was a standard recipe for making either bombs or fuel rods, which could be pursued by virtually any country with a supply of uranium, skilled technicians, abundant energy supplies and extensive experience handling nuclear materials.

Yellow Cake From Yellow Gold

Natural uranium slurry, or yellowcake, collected from gold mines was converted to uranium hexafluoride gas.

The gas was then fed into 112 "separating units" connected in parallel in three long buildings at Valindaba constructed of concrete deliberately colored light brown to blend in with surrounding terrain.

The separators isolated and concentrated a key fissionable isotope, uranium-235, and roughly a year after getting started, according to de Waal and other officials, produced significant quantities of a uranium gas enriched to slightly less than 90 percent

Instead of fashioning the material into fuel rods, however, South Africa secretly converted it into dense, heavy blocks and machined it into bomb parts with imported, high-precision tools.

An engineer who worked at the enrichment plant recalled in an interview that a portion of the process was worked out by South African scientists who kept a U.S. article debunking their technique tacked to a bulletin board over their desks. "It was a challenge we met," said Hendrik Hendriks.

Modeled on Hiroshima Bomb.

Afrikaner Ingenuity From +400 years isolated in Africa

A Garage Made Bomb

De Waal, the Armscor director, said the highly enriched uranium was installed in fairly primitive weapons that were much easier to engineer than, say, a self-propelled howitzer Armscor completed last year.

Armscor designed the weapon to operate much like the bomb detonated by the United States over Hiroshima during World War II, officials said. It was fashioned out of two chunks of highly enriched uranium, one in the shape of a sphere with a hole part way through the middle, and the other in the shape of a cylinder designed to fit in the hole.

The chunks were separated by a superbly made gun barrel. When the bomb was detonated, an explosive charge would propel the cylinder-shaped uranium down the barrel and into the hole in the sphere-shaped uranium, creating a critical mass of fissionable material so suddenly that it would promptly explode with a force of 10,000 to 18,000 tons of TNT.

Most of the work on the bombs was performed at Advena laboratory, a large windowless structure nestled against a hill roughly 25 miles west of Pretoria, at the edge of a sprawling test range for drivers of fast automobiles. Signs warn the curious not to take photos and to approach "at your own risk."

Officials said that the government took great pains to keep satellite photo analysts from learning the building's function. The building's green roof, for example, was installed before its internal walls were constructed or any telltale equipment was brought to the site.

Still, "we were surprised that between the International Atomic Energy Agency and the CIA, this had never been identified" before its disclosure by Pretoria in March, said Waldo Stumpf, executive director of the South African Atomic Energy Corporation.

Officials in Washington instead focused their suspicion on another building closer to Valindaba where South African officials now swear no weapons work was ever done.

NO IMMIGRANTS

Officials said only those physicists, chemists and engineers who were South African-born citizens or had lived in the country for at least 15 years were allowed to join the effort, and no more than 10 people were permitted to learn all of its secrets. Roelof F. Botha, the country's minister of foreign affairs, was not informed until four years after he joined the cabinet.

Roughly 150 people worked inside the main Advena lab and a nearby building that housed top weapons designers, with some working on bomb components at long tables and others guarding vaults where halves of each finished weapon -- containing a "sub-critical" portion of enriched uranium -- were stored on trolleys in airless canisters.

De Waal said a crude prototype was completed by 1977.

Nuclear Poker

Just as Washington created an elaborate system of safeguards to ensure proper command and control of U.S. nuclear weapons, so too did Pretoria take unusual steps to ensure that its arsenal was not misused, officials said. To get into the vaults, for example, required approval from the country's president and knowledge of at least three combinations for mechanical and electronic locks.

South Africa decided from the outset to build seven bombs, officials said, because that was the number judged to present a "serious" deterrent to conventional attack by Angola and Mozambique, two nearby black-ruled, communist-led nations that achieved independence the year the bomb project began.

The government never wanted to use the weapons, officials said in interviews, because it suspected from the beginning that one superpower or the other would retaliate massively.

So Pretoria's strategy in the case of overwhelming attack from Soviet-backed forces to the north was not to respond directly but to play a form of nuclear poker with extraordinarily high stakes: By threatening to explode a bomb, Pretoria expected to coerce the United States, Britain or France into intervening on South Africa's behalf before the country was lost.

"You would say, I am now going to pick up the phone, phone the American president or the British prime minister, and tell them, 'Look, if you do not apply pressure on the U.S.S.R. to withdraw these forces, we are going to activate the bomb,' " de Waal said. "And the reply would probably be, 'You have no bomb.' "

So South Africa would explode one or two weapons to demonstrate its nuclear capability, de Waal said. "Then you would say, 'We have got five more. Do you really want to look for trouble?' "

If all else failed, South Africa was prepared to drop the weapons from its Buccaneer, Mirage or Canberra jet aircraft, officials said.

This plan nearly became reality in 1987, when Pretoria responded to some victories by Cuban troops in Angola by ordering the Kalahari site -- which had been dormant for 10 years -- reopened, inspected and covered by a hangar in preparation for a possible nuclear blast.

The end of the Cold War, the withdrawal of Soviet-backed troops from Angola and Pretoria's desire to keep the bombs from falling into the hands of the African National Congress, which by then was expected to assume control of the country eventually in a gradual transition to black-majority rule, officials said.

A lost opportunity to execute a BEE DEAL for the Bomb.

Why didn’t South Africa negotiate a payment?