From the Mar. 13, 2006 issue of TIME magazine
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1169860,00.html
Posted Sunday, Mar. 05, 2006
Iranian Bombshell?
Bush Administration officials are readying a new intelligence briefing
for council members on Tehran's weapons programs.
By ELAINE SHANNON
As the U.N. security Council prepares to debate Iran's nuclear
ambitions--perhaps as early as next week--Bush Administration
officials are readying a new intelligence briefing for council members
on Tehran's weapons programs.
It will rely mainly on circumstantial evidence, much of it from
documents found on a laptop purportedly purloined from an Iranian
nuclear engineer and obtained by the CIA in 2004.
U.S. officials insist the material is strong but concede they have no
smoking gun.
They do, however, have diagrams that they believe show components of a
nuclear bomb.
According to a Western diplomat familiar with the U.S. intel brief, a
Farsi-language PowerPoint presentation on the laptop has "catchy
graphics," including diagrams of a hollow metallic sphere 2 ft. in
diameter and weighing about 440 lbs.
Other documents show a sphere-shaped array of tiny detonators.
No file specifically refers to a nuclear bomb, but U.S. officials say
the design of the sphere--an outer shell studded with small
chemical-explosive charges meant to detonate inward, which would
squeeze an inner core of material into a critical mass--is akin to
that of classic devices like Fat Man, the atom bomb dropped on
Nagasaki during World War II.
"Because of the size and weight and the power source going into it and
height-of-burst requirements," says the diplomat, Western experts have
concluded that the design "is only intended to contain a nuclear
weapon. There's no other munition which would work."
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Yawn. uh huh
Harry
"When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago"
Friedrich Nietzsche
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