I just love reading news articles which portray a James Bond-style plotline about how Pakistan/China etc supposedly gave "nuclear secrets" to some other country. They're so compelling in how they weave such an elaborate plot around total bullshit. You may be shocked to learn that the design of nuclear weapons is NOT a secret, certainly not one exclusive to "high tech" countries like Pakistan. And so the next time some moronic reporter claims that Country X gave "secret nuclear design documents" to Country Y, you should laugh in his face, then punch him in the nose for being such a moron.
As I was l reading up on the history of the US atomic weapons program, I ran across a book at the Housing Works Bookshop called "At Work in the Field of the Bomb" by Robert Del Tredici which, among other things, has fascinating photos of US military nuclear facilities taken from above.
The book was published in the 1980s but I still can't figure out how the author managed to get an airplane to fly over the (presumably restricted?) sites. In any case, the photos were reproduced at NuclearFiles.org & one of the interesting photos was of Howard Moreland holding a model nuclear bomb.
Howard Moreland was the author of an article in the left-leaning Progressive magazine in 1979 in which he claimed (perhaps accurately) to have elucidated the inner workings and design of the hydrogen bomb. This resulted in an attempt by the US Department of Energy (which administers the US nuclear weapons program) to prevent the publication of the article on national security grounds -- however the DOE failed to do so when it became obvious that Moreland had relied on non-secret sources to write his article (including a children's encyclopedia found at any local library.) Also, by then others had started collecting and disseminating information about the bomb, such as Chuck Hansen.
But others had also elucidated the workings of nuclear weapons a decade earlier. In fact, in the early 1960s, the Lawrence Livermore Labs (which designs and makes nukes) decided to conduct an experiment called the Nth Country Experiment to see how easy it would be for "amateurs" to come up with the design of The Bomb using only open-source material. So they hired a couple of recent physics graduates to do exactly that. They were probably quite surprised when the students managed to come up with what was apparently an accurate design of a nuclear weapon, using nothing more than pencils and their public library cards.
Remember - that was in the 1960's - long, long before the "information age" and personal computers and the internet.
To top if off, since then both the US and UK governments (and presumably others) have inadvertently declassified and released highly detailed nuclear weapons design information, made freely accessible to anyone who wanted to see them.
So, let me get to the point that I have made before, but it bears repeating. It is claimed that Iran was given a 4,7, or 15 page document by the Pakistani nuclear scientist AQ Khan, which shows how to make a uranium sphere of the sort that is used in nukes. We're all supposed to conclude from this that Iran was seeking design information on nuclear weapons -- nevermind that according to even Albright, the document did not contain details to make it actually useful. Considering the amount of information found in a public library even in the 1960s on nuclear weapons designs, do you really think that modern Iran needed a 1970's-era document from Pakistan to figure out how to make nukes?
Get real.
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