Stardate 20020929.0138

(On Screen): Several have written to me about the uranium seizure in Turkey. One asked whether I thought it was a deliberate setup, timed to affect the debate in the UN and Congress about Iraq.

What I thought when I first read about it was that this has happened before. Several times now there have been reports that a uranium smuggler had been stopped and that "weapon's grade uranium" had been seized. Then later it would come out that it hadn't actually been weapon's grade. In a couple of cases it was natural uranium, and in more than one it turned out to be depleted uranium. (Resulting in a horselaugh on the part of those who understand these things.)

Weapon's grade uranium is nearly pure U-235. If this had actually been weapon's grade, then the quantity involved would have been enough to permit production of a weapon using a relatively crude design. If the design is more sophisticated, less uranium is required, but with this amount it would be pretty easy to make a weapon if you had any idea what you were doing.

But natural uranium is only 0.72% U-235, with the remainder being made up of non-fissionable U-238. (U-238 is also only radioactive by courtesy. It's an alpha source with a halflife of 4.3 billion years.) "Depleted uranium" or DU is pure U-238, which isn't fissionable at all. I'm more radioactive than an equal mass of DU, and I'm about as fissionable. (All humans are radioactive because of small amounts of potassium-40 and carbon-14, both of which as beta sources are far more dangerous than U-238 is.) For purposes of making weapons, even "dirty bombs", DU is pretty close to useless. In cases where it developed that someone had tried to buy DU, what that meant was that they were being taken.

Anyway, in this case all the initial reports were that it was indeed weapon's grade, nearly pure U-235. But now they're backing off from that claim, just like all the other times. If what they have is 34.6 pounds of natural uranium, then the whole thing is a tempest in a teapot. 34.6 pounds (15.75 kilos) of natural uranium contain 113 grams of U-235 which would have to be enriched to be of any use at all (a process involving a lot of equipment and a lot of power), and it isn't possible to produce a fission weapon with only 113 grams of U-235. That isn't remotely enough.

And if it's actually DU, then there isn't any U-235 at all because it was already removed. DU is what's left over, the 99.27% of natural uranium that's useless for making nuclear weapons.

So until we really know what kind of uranium this is, there's little point in speculating about anything else. That said, no I do not think this was a deliberate setup by the CIA or Mossad.