Nuclear News You DIDN'T Hear

Have you heard the one about the deal between
Saudi Arabia and Pakistan regarding nuclear weapons? No? Maybe the news
was too busy focusing on what inanimate object Miley Cyrus was having
sex with this week.



Stolen Cobalt-60



A truck delivering 40 grams of cobalt-60 pellets, material used in radiotherapy, was hijacked last week in central Mexico. The truck and the cargo was recovered near Hueypoxtla, and the hijackers are believed to have received a fatal dose of radiation.



This was another narrow miss. There is an increasing number of nuclear incidents in the world today. Cobalt-60 is particularly deadly and persistent isotope that was proposed in use for area denial weapons. An area exposed to the fallout of a cobalt bomb would be uninhabitable for 100 years due to lethal levels of radiation. Had this stolen material been placed in a truck bomb like the kind that destroyed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, it could contaminate an area of four square miles[1]. If set off at Wall Street the plume of radioactive debris would probably reach the Empire State Building.



Iranian Nukes



"Saudi King Abdullah and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu were
not won over by President Barack Obama's pledges in personal phone calls
to the two Middle East leaders last week not to allow Iran to acquire a nuclear weapon. Their skepticism only grew."



He probably said something along the lines of "if you like your nuclear program, you can keep it*"



*"Program" does not include "programs Oblahblah does not like," or "programs that do not include abortion on demand until three years after birth." "Like" is a subjective term, subject to verification by Oblahblah and his bureaucrats.



This is exactly what the mullahs wanted. Oblahblah is eating out of their hands. After stalling for time "negotiating," they managed to get Oblahblah to back down and give them everything they wanted and more. Experts estimate that Iran  has enough material to make four nukes already.



Leaders in Saudi Arabia have made clear that if Iran gets a nuke then they will be forced to get one as well, since they may well be the primary target of attack, before Israel even, due to the fierce hatred between rival Muslim factions. Saudi Arabia funded Pakistan's nuclear program, and if push comes to shove they claim to have an agreement whereby Pakistan will deliver weapons to them as compensation.



Both Iran and Saudi Arabia are ticking time bombs in the region. Both are ruled by horrible, knuckle-dragging, mouth-breathing, prehistoric, amoral, psychopathic monsters. The war in Syria is, in part, a proxy war between these two repressive regimes that threatens to suck the entire world in with it. If either one gets their hands on a nuke it would be a disaster for every freedom loving, moral human being on the planet.



Iran will not negotiate at all with Israel, and probably won't negotiate with Saudi Arabia either. In the world of inter-tribal warfare the aim is always extermination, and both proto-nuclear nations most definitely are run by tribal strongmen.







Notes

1. "Here the lethal combination of glass and a bomb projected shards at high
speed causing 5 per cent of the deaths and 69 per cent of the injuries
outside the buildings for a radius of over 10 blocks from the blast
centre."



10 blocks, as seen on a map, is about one mile. A circle with a radius of 1 mile has an area of exactly pi square miles. I rounded up to 4 to be safe.