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Not an U.S. citizen, just a wild guess: It's not very wise to give somebody, even altered, nuclear blueprints. It's a similar type of stupid stuff that NSA does
by js8 10y ago
Not an U.S. citizen, just a wild guess: It's not very wise to give somebody, even altered, nuclear blueprints. It's a similar type of stupid stuff that NSA does when it puts backdoors into devices or cryptosystems.
- tomschlick 10y agoIt's not a bad plan as the idea is that the victim would spend billions developing a weapon that is flawed from the drawing board. Nothing would work right and they would have to start over setting them back many years from a workable weapon.
- LeifCarrotson 10y agoRewrites are a bad idea in software, where the code has no cost, and are an even worse idea in physical projects. Starting with a a slightly flawed design is much, much closer to a working weapon than starting from scratch. It would be incredibly naïve for the victim to assume their stolen plans are perfect and perfectly implemented. They would run the test, it doesn't work quite right, they fix the flaws, and they're now far ahead of where they would have been.
- dv_dt 10y agoIt's a terrible plan if you forget to account for the fact that the victim likely employs smart people too, and that before setting out on a billion dollar endeavour they might do a lot of cross checking. And indeed that's what happened, and much quicker than planned: "Operation Merlin backfired when the CIA's Russian contact/messenger noticed flaws in the schematics and told the Iranian nuclear scientists." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Merlin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Merlin
- kafkaesq 10y agoIt is a bad idea if you grossly underestimate the operational competence and general cognitive fortitude of your adversaries, as the CIA appears to have done in this case. (Apparently the alterations were easy to spot, and it turns out the Iranians weren't so dumb as to blindly go out and execute them, as the operation's planners had hoped).
- nl 10y agoWell if they were getting the blueprints somehow anyway, subtle alterations to make them fail aren't a bad idea. The similarities with stuxnet are obvious, and that worked pretty well.
- travmatt 10y agoThere's not really an analogy with student to make. One program sabotaged the operation of existing technologies. The other program advanced the technological state of nuclear weapon development in hopes that its flaws wouldn't be discovered until operation. At best, this program pushed the Iranian nuclear program two steps ahead and one step back.
- rabidrat 10y agoIt turns out that a bunch of tacit knowledge is required to build working nuclear weapons. The designs are not sufficient at all, and it does make sense that you might be able to deter development by subtly leading developers down known dead-ends. http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/awc/2013_buffet.pdf http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/awc/2013_buffet.pdf > The Soviet and British programs, and in fact all subsequent nuclear programs, took longer to produce initial results than the original 23-month Manhattan Project. Each program involved hundreds to thousands of science staff and each faced substantial practical problems. MacKenzie and Spinardi posed that the spread of nuclear weapon capacity following the Manhattan Project progressed more along the lines of re-invention than technology transfer.