5 ms·
Nuclear secrecy is a fascinating blog about this sort of thing. The designation “top secret” was first used for the Manhattan project, which of course the milit
by Synaesthesia 3y ago
Nuclear secrecy is a fascinating blog about this sort of thing. The designation “top secret” was first used for the Manhattan project, which of course the military developed in secret, and then unleashed upon an unsuspecting world by announcing it had destroyed the two Japanese cities.
But still to this day, all the nuclear weapons stuff is shrouded in mystery and secrecy. How they dispose of the waste … classified, how the bombs work, people have ideas, but all classified. The nuclear policy is also opaque and non-democratic.
- liamwire 3y agoFor those interested, Restricted Data is a fascinating book in this vein.
- hoppyhoppy2 3y agoThe blog they referred to and the book you mentioned are both by the same author :)
- jameshart 3y agoAlex Wellerstein. Why is everyone in this thread so cagey about revealing information? Is it on a need-to-know basis?
- oldgradstudent 3y agoAs an outside observer, the US is a beacon of transparency on this topic. In Israel the topic is under strict military censorship. What little discussion is allowed has to periodically sprinkled with the incantation "according to foreign sources".
- Synaesthesia 3y agoIsrael's entire nuclear program leaked out thanks to one guy, whom they later entrapped on a cruise ship and extradited to Israel. No buy the US keeps all the good secrets.
- canadianfella 3y agoNo buy? What does that mean?
- amanaplanacanal 3y agoProbably but rather than buy
- oldgradstudent 3y agoHe was presuaded to leave the UK for Rome, where he was kidnapped, drugged, and transported to a waiting Israeli Navy ship that carried him to Israel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mordechai_Vanunu#Pursuit_and_capture_by_Israeli_government https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mordechai_Vanunu#Pursuit_and_c...
- GuB-42 3y agoWe don't even know if Israel has nuclear weapons. Most people think they they do, but it is neither confirmed nor denied by any official source.
- jacquesm 3y agoConfirmation or denial wouldn't mean a thing, the real confirmation will come from either an insider leak (unlikely), a test (unlikely) or actual use (unlikely). So to all intents and purposes it is better if this is never resolved one way or the other, but the smart money is on Israel having between 80 and 100 warheads, with various bits of evidence to back that up. The bigger question in my opinion is what size those warheads are rather than whether they have them or not and whether or not any of them are H-Bombs rather than just fission devices. Other questions revolve around operational readiness. Let's hope we'll never know for sure because I believe the most likely of those three unlikely possibilities is actual use. And that would be very bad news for the world indeed.
- _dain_ 3y ago>the real confirmation will come from either an insider leak (unlikely) Already happened years ago, see elsewhere in this thread. There's also the Vela incident, for which one of the few plausible explanations is an Israeli-SouthAfrican bomb test.
- jacquesm 3y agoI'm aware of that but it didn't - as far as I understand it - conclusively prove that the Israelis actually had working devices and could well have been a misinformation campaign. I've read a lot about this and even though that would be quite far out I can't rule out the possibility, there are just too many layers to all of this to know with 100% certainty what is true and what is not. Also note that we're talking about the present, what happened years ago may or may not be reflective of what the situation was back then, but it definitely won't say much about what the state of affairs is today.
- jacquesm 3y ago
- jameshart 3y agohttps://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/ https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/ - for anyone concerned that googling ‘nuclear secrecy’ might get them put on a list.
- nwoli 3y agoI honestly don’t mind that it’s opaque and non democratic