AP is reporting a breaking news story that officials of a country hostile to Iran (hint, hint) have leaked an Iranian diagram that plots the force of the explosion of a simulated nuclear device:
Iranian scientists have run computer simulations for a nuclear weapon that would produce more than triple the explosive force of the World War II bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, according to a diagram obtained by The Associated Press.
The document, produced in 2008 or 2009 is supposed to put the lie to the notion that Iran stopped its nuclear weapons program in 2003, as the U.S. NIE claims.
My highly-placed Israeli source says that the diagram was stolen by the Mossad from an Iranian computer. The means of the theft were one of the various malware programs Israel has used to infiltrate Iran’s computer network. Though Stuxnet is the most famous of these programs, it’s unlikely it was used for this job. Duqu, another in the Stuxnet-Flame series of kissing cousin malware, is just the ticket. It was discovered in 2011, but was active as early as 2008 and possibly even 2007.
An independent source confirmed, in the article, that the diagram was the same one supplied by an unspecified intelligence agency (ahem, the Mossad) to the IAEA last year. This provides corroboration of the fact that the Mossad is supplying the IAEA with much of the evidence it uses to evaluate Iran’s nuclear program. While that doesn’t totally invalidate the agency’s work, it certainly warns us to review any of its findings with great care.
But let’s return to the document itself and examine whether it’s the smoking gun the Mossad makes it out to be. First, the passage above claims it is the research output of Iranian scientists. While this may be so, the story doesn’t identify who created the diagram nor explain anything about its provenance. As Prof. Muhammad Sahimi, a professor of chemical engineering at USC and expert in Iran’s nuclear program pointed out to me, any decent undergraduate physics student could produce the same drawing:
Too many graphs like this can be generated by a competent undergraduate student. The graph itself looks low quality, as if it has been drawn by hand. I have asked my students to compute the dashed curve, given the continuous curve…to see whether the guy who drew it even knew that much! In addition, it only shows energy and power versus time, without saying what the source of energy was!
Let’s return to an important observation Sahimi makes above. Reviewing the actual graph, it looks like it was indeed drawn by hand. What nuclear physicist that you know prepares a hand-written graph as he’s about to produce a nuclear explosion? Does this mean that Iran’s nuclear program is so primitive that its scientists don’t have computer programs that enable them to prepare such a graph more professionally? And can we believe that a country that prepares such hand-written graphs has the technical and engineering know-how to explode a nuclear bomb, solely based on this evidence?
The Mossad “summary” (i.e. hasbara talking points) offered to AP says:
The intelligence summary named nuclear scientists Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, Majid Shahriari and Fereidoun Abbasi as key players in developing the computer diagrams…
So Israel wants us to believe that Iran’s three most senior nuclear scientists prepared a hand-written graph of a simulated nuclear explosion and that this document proves Iran lied when it said it wasn’t building a nuclear weapon. In fact, it proves, supposedly, that Iran is pursuing such a weapon right now, as you read this. Maybe, maybe not.
Leaving aside the grandiose claims of the AP article, what do we really know about the diagram? That it was produced by someone in Iran possibly between 2008-2009. That it models a nuclear explosion three times that of the U.S. bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That such a large explosion would be extremely unlikely in any experimental program of a nation currently pursuing a nuclear weapon.
In other words, this diagram could’ve been produced by any enterprising Iranian graduate student as part of a class project. It may or may not have anything to do with an Iranian nuclear weapons program. You simply can’t be sure based on the evidence and details offered in the AP article. This is yet another example of the Mossad snookering the world media into reporting “evidence” of Iranian WMDs that isn’t evidence in any sense of the word that you or I know it.
One of the three scientists listed in the Mossad report above was assassinated by Israel in 2010. A second was almost killed in an assassination attempt on the same day. If my source’s claim that the Mossad retrieved this summary via a computer intrusion is true, and the Mossad truly did believe the graph is the product of these three scientists, then this tells us what specific information Israeli cyber-attack tools like Stuxnet and Flame are seeking. Besides exposing the nature of Iran’s nuclear program, they’re attempting to identify suitable targets for elimination. It’s also possible that, whether or not the diagram was truly produced by the three individuals named, that Israel is attempting to justify its assassination program by offering proof that they were indeed working on nuclear weapons.
I’ve written this here before, but can you imagine the Russian NKVD assassinating Edward Teller or J. Robert Oppenheimer in 1949 in order to stop U.S. nuclear weapons development? What would our response have been?
On a related subject, in the past few days Symantec has reported (Kaspersky’s article is here) a hitherto unknown computer virus that attacked corporate and business networks inside Iran in 2010 and possibly before. My Israeli source confirms that this malware too was a product of Israel’s cyber-warriors. Here is how the virus is described:
…We recently came across an interesting threat that has another method of causing chaos, this time, by targeting and modifying corporate databases. We detect this threat as W32.Narilam…What is unusual about this threat is the fact that it has the functionality to update a Microsoft SQL database…
The malware does not have any functionality to steal information from the infected system and appears to be programmed specifically to damage the data held within the targeted database. Given the types of objects that the threat searches for, the targeted databases seem to be related to ordering, accounting, or customer management systems belonging to corporations.
Our in-field telemetry indicates that the vast majority of users impacted by this threat are corporate users.
…Unless appropriate backups are in place, the affected database will be difficult to restore. The affected organization will likely suffer significant disruption and even financial loss while restoring the database. As the malware is aimed at sabotaging the affected database and does not make a copy of the original database first, those affected by this threat will have a long road to recovery ahead of them.
Considering which businesses in Iran would use such databases for ordering supplies, and account and customer management, there are two main candidates: the oil industry and banking sector. The software was designed to sabotage the single most important revenue producer for the embattled Iranian economy. As such this is an example of national industrial sabotage.
On a concluding note: Prof. Sahimi’s new website is Iran News and Middle East Reports. Highly recommended.
George Jahn himself is a Mossad hack… Nobody in their right mind can take this guy seriously anymore.
Remember: “I have in my hand a piece of paper with the names of 200 Communists in the State Department” (or whatever McCarthy is said to have said. Point [1] is: he was lying. Point [2] “we” don’t know where the alleged piece of
paper came from (in the event he actually was not lying about the piece of paper being in his hand). [3] etc.,
I’m not myself clever enough to produce a computer file looking like a photograph of (or computer-generated) graph WITH Farsi writing. Among other things, I don’t know Farsi. But I bet a lot of people other than Iranian nuclear scientists could hoke-up such a computer file. SO, as in ART WORKS, PROVENANCE is everything.
How do hackers “prove” provenance? To whom do they “prove” it? Gullibles or HardHeadeds? Which type is the CIA these days? With Petraeus? with Harmon? Which type is Obama?
There’s an article in the 1959 edition of the Chambers Encyclopedia which tells you more than that diagram does.
It doesn’t represent a simulation which would be any help in the design of a nuclear weapon: the bits you need to simulate and authenticate are in the compression sequence before this graph happens, really. The graph shows what happens when the difficult bit actually succeeds, and it was patently obvious to almost everyone from the moment chain reactions were first recognised as a possibility.
Three times the yield of the Hiroshima bomb is what you would expect to get if the Nagasaki bomb had employed core boosting.
Going back to the days when the United Kingdom employed anything like this (ie: about when I was born):
Red Beard MK1, yield when tested with no boosting: 10Kt, expected yield with boosting switched on, accidentally admitted by MoD in the late nineties: 60Kt.
Red Beard MK2, yield when tested with no boosting: 20Kt, expected yield with boosting switched on, accidentally admitted by MoD in the late nineties: 90Kt. (This device had a more efficient neutron initiator than the MK1 device was otherwise apparently the same.)
Hiroshima bomb: depending on source, 15kt to 20kt.
Nagasaki bomb: 15Kt.
I’d be a bit surprised if the device being discussed was made primarily with the enriched uranium currently feeding all the hysteria: compact, 45-60Kt core-boosted devices will tend to have plutonium cores, or, like Red Beard, composite cores, with a minimum amount of plutonium (with tritium/deuterium boost gas) surrounded by a larger amount of 80% enriched uranium. If you’ve got a critical (when compressed) mass of plutonium in the middle, the uranium does not need to be enriched to the 97% you need in a pure uranium device. The tiny bit of fusion from the boost gas produces a shower of high energy neutrons, and plutonium produces a greater number of neutrons if the fission is caused by one of these than it does when the fission is caused by a low-energy neutron from another fission reaction.
So the boosted device gets off to a faster start, and that increases the amount of fission that happens before the components get blown away from each other.
The easiest way for Iran to make a bomb would be with synthetic U-233 bred from thorium in a pretty basic heavy water reactor, which I think I’ve mentioned before, and which appears to be what the Indians did.
The Iranian graph is not necessarily an analysis of an Iranian warhead: it could be an attempt to estimate the efficiency and power of someone else’s design: Pakistan or Israel, say.
Probably better to keep the hand-drawn issue out of arguments that the diagram is a fake, which is (much) more convincingly demonstrated by the fact that it appears to be a technical nonsense.
As a technical editor who has had to redraft diagrams like this from scientific and financial authors for 20 years – and diagrams exactly like this still keep coming in! – I can vouch for the fact that both curves are computer-drawn. Obviously the Power (bell) curve is, as can be seen from the stepped jaggies in the tails. But so is the dashed Energy curve – I have redrawn hundreds of similar curves output by graphics programs used on Windows platforms. I work on a Mac, so can’t identify the program(s) that might be responsible. When magnified, these curves exhibit exactly the same crude wiggles as are seen here in the Energy curve. These would be difficult if not impossible to draw by hand. I’ve looked at the AP graph in the largest size I could find (1280 x 1150).
So the supposedly crude “hand-drawn” nature of the Energy curve should be dismissed as an argument against the graph’s authenticity. It’s irrelevant.
Incidentally, the caption in Farsi has been correctly translated. I was initially suspicious that in the numbering of the figure (“shekl (5)”) the ‘Arabic’ numeral 5 has been used rather than the Persian numeral ۵. However a quick search for diagrams published on Iranian sites showed that this is quite normal. The caption could of course readily have been produced in Israel as there are many first generation Iranian-Jewish emigrés now living there.
Hum, the graph shows the power declining to the same shape and gradient of curve with which it rose.
This ain’t right, children: the near to last generation of neutrons releases nearly as much energy as all the ones before put together, so what you actually get is a steep upward curve and almost a vertical line back down, which becomes a curve expressing the “power” of radioactive decay of all the fission products, some of which have half-lives in microseconds.
This came from a classroom: it’s teaching the mathematical relationship between the power and energy of a bomb, not actually showing the power curve as it would be.
Yes, from a classroom–and so Mossad (or their partners in MEK) didn’t murder Teller or Oppenheimer anyway, just some graduate assistant who could have been sitting with them over a beer talking about soccer or guitar players.
If anyone wanted to murder Teller, it was the Inuit, who were told by Teller that the experiment he wanted to try: using a massive nuclear explosion to create a deep water harbour in Alaska, was so precise he could make the hole in the shape of a polar bear. Given that the site is now known to be right over a big, albeit deep, oilfield, it’s doubly lucky that someone in the US Government managed to stop him.
If there is no Iranian Teller at all, they may be spared several blind expensive alleys for each actual breakthrough.
Whenever I talk to a Jew who is from or supports the Apartheid Jewish State and he or she raises the issue of the Iranian Nuclear Program, I simply tell them that I am against Iran having nuclear weapons (he/she starts smiling at this point) and then I add that I am also against ANY COUNTRY having nuclear weapons (the smile disappears at this point). They stop talking about nuclear weapons at this point in the conversation which is exactly what I aimed for.
It is amazing that many people still fail to understand the importance of the NARRATIVE. Put the Appartheid Jewish state and its supporters on the defense from the start of any discussion and do not let them control the discourse.
Man, you are a dreamer – you want to impose your outlook on others?. But how can anybody hope to do that in THIS world? You can try to do it in one on one encounters but broader than that – with million Internet blogs and many media channels? It`s information anarchy now – all narratives have followers, including the most ludicrous ones.
In addition, what may seem central to you, Israel and how bad it is, may look as a footnote to somebody else for whom what goes on (if we confine ourselves to the Mid-East) in Syria, Sudan, Bahrain and Iran, for example, could be predominant – so it`s not just the narrative , but also the issues-at-focus that is at variance.
Thanks for reinforcing my point about the importance of the narrative. You tried to go from the subject at hand to talk about other issues. Very celever way to distract!
If such a diagram could “justify” targeted assassinations, then Israeli targets would also be justified as Israel is a nuke state. History demonstrates that Israel is aggressive, does not recognize international law or borders, reaching into any sovereign territory including the US and is not averse to using heavy weapons especially on civilians. Israel is the threat.
I think that the claim that such or any other diagram, which could have been taken out of high-school physics books, justifies targeted assassinations does not hold in reality.
You are absolutely right, history does demonstrate that Israel is aggressive, while its aggression is usually focused at states/organizations that are perceived as a threat to the Israeli state or the security and well being of its people (and such perception is BTW normally distributed among the Israeli political map).
Current Israeli leadership (which enjoys wide support among the population and is likely to remain in power) views Iranian nuclear program as an existential threat, both based on the rhetoric of the Iranian leaders themselves as well as on open Iranian support of terrorist organizations, such as Hezbollah and the Islamic Jihad, that call for the destruction of the Israeli state and target its civilian population using Iranian weaponry.
I personally doubt that the Iranian regime would actually use nuclear weapons against anyone, yet having it would definitely change the balance of power in the middle east, both limiting Israeli ability to protect its citizens and potentially leading to a nuclear arms race in the region as part of the Shia-Sunni conflict.
Thanks for those nonsense neocon talking pts. Please stop spouting nonsense. When you can come up with any country in the region that doesn’t have nukes that will immediately start a process to get one, let me know. Egypt? No. Turkey? No. Saudi Arabia? No. Syria? Unlikely now.
Syria is now (still) Shia/Allawi governed, while Turkey (lets assume that it is Sunni governed), Saudi Arabia and Egypt definitely see nuclear armed Iran as a significant threat.
I have googled this up just for your convenience – have a look and let me know how this is also a zionist plot:
https://www.google.co.il/search?q=nuclear+weapon+saudi+arabia&rlz=1C1CHKZ_enIL433IL433&aq=f&oq=nuclear+weapon+saudi+arabia&aqs=chrome.0.57j0l3j62l2.6535&sugexp=chrome,mod=6&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
Who do you think they see as more of a threat? Israel which has 200 (at least) nuclear weapons or Iran which has none and may, or may not ever build one?
Besides, this comment is off-topic and hasbarist in nature.
I may be wrong (since it appears to be hand-drawn it’s difficult to know) but this looks to me like the graph of the probability density of a normal distribution (ie “bell-shaped distribution”) and its cumulative distribution function (dashed line). It’s Statistics 101. The numbers on the side might add meaning but the curve itself is pretty simple. Also I don’t understand the text and it may say something deeper, but I fail to understand why you need to run computer simulations to produce a graph like this or indeed why you would produce a hand-drawn graph in those circumstances. Any half-competent engineering student could write computer code to generate this graph in about 5 minute or less.
There is nothing on the graph to indicate that it’s a pdf. The x and y axes as labeled have units of time and energy/time, respectively. It is a graph of two time dependent functions, power and energy. Power is energy per unit time. Power output over time results in an increase in energy. The integral with respect to time at any given instantaneous time, say t = 2.0 microseconds, of the power function will be the area under the power curve from that point on the x-axis (x=2.0) inclusive of everything to the left (earlier in time). The integral of power from 0.0 to 2.0 microseconds (boe) should be about 400,000 kT. The energy curve at 2.0 microseconds says about 10 kT. This is a huge discrepancy: the energy function presented is not consistent with the power function. Someone made a mistake.
It could be as simple as someone being careless with labeling of axis units. It happens all the time in ‘working’ (as opposed to publication quality) graphics. Regardless, even if it did come from Iran, it is not evidence of an CURRENTLY active nuclear weapons program. The graphic looks like a scan of a circa 1970 printer job. I don’t believe that their best people (and they are neither morons nor completely bereft of resources) would still be using such antiquated office technology in 2012. Good software is free, e.g. R, and modern pc printers are dirt cheap and widely available.
slight clarification: The x and y axes as labeled have units of time and energy/time, respectively. FOR THE POWER … They are time and energy, respectively, for the dotted energy curve.
It’s still a gaussian curve – (1/sqrt(2*pi*t^2) exp(-(1/2) *(x-m)^2/t^2). My point, which I didn’t make too well obviously, was that it doesn’t look like anything that might have come out of complex realistic simulations of a nuclear explosion.
Exactly, gaussian — not exactly real world or Monte Carlo simulation. Ridiculous.
Richard’s source is correct — this is student-level work. Undergrad physics play. Amazing it has received such wide coverage. It also looks like one of a series — you collapse the core in a short period of time (solid line) and the shorter the compression time, the more energy you get out of the explosion because you get less nuclear pre-detonation. There is no cause-and-effect from the overall shape of the pulse, just its rise time and time-to-peak.
In this case, the time to collapse the core is about 2.05 microsecond, with a distribution (pulse width) due to measurement issues, trigger issues, or the rise time of the explosive shock wave that rams the core pieces together.
You would do this sort of run VERY early in the design phase to see how good a trigger you need. You would run a range of simulations, from, say, a microsecond to 3-4 microseconds for each combination of bomb material and bomb fissile weight, and get a graph like this for each one. The right-hand tail would be irrelevant — once the core is compressed the bomb blows apart anyway. that’s why the energy curve flattens. U233 is a lousy bomb material because you need to compress it very fast. U238 is too stable. So U235 is the material of choice unless you have a VERY fast trigger… or can breed plutonium 239 in a reactor. This looks like a U235 bomb with about maybe 5 kg of U235, or a U233/235 mix that’s bigger, or a plutonium 239 with some 240/241 contamination that’s bigger still.
All this says is that Iran may be training physicists to do bomb design work specifically… or that curious kids are playing around, as they do on American campuses (I did a survey of American students on whether they could design a bomb, back in the mid-1970s, and wrote an article on it at the time in New Engineer magazine).
In short: You don’t start a war over this particular bit of nonsense.
If I were a betting man, I’d lay my money on this being a rushed Israeli forgery job with the objective of distracting attention from tomorrow’s UN vote on Palestine. Yeah, yeah, I know there is no evidence to support that assertion. However, there is no evidence to support the assertion that it came from Iran. Anyone with more than 2 brain cells to rub together who has been paying attention during the last decade knows that the Israelis have an active political operations forgery unit. Hopefully our intelligence people can do some forensics analysis (like try to figure out which software package produces that kind of output, default plot axes scaling, fonts, etc) so we don’t get bamboozled by the Israelis AGAIN.
If you ask me, this image looks like it was taken from an Iranian physics workbook for college students.
I just did a back-of-envelope calculation and the power and energy curves don’t match up.
An estimate of the area under the curve as (1.6 * 10^13 kT/sec) * (0.15 * 10^-6 sec) = 2,400,000 kT is correct within an order of magnitude. This is 48,000 times as much energy as the ~51 kT that the asymptotic energy curve tends to at the 2.3 microsecond mark!
If this is a genuine Iranian nuclear weapons document from 2008-2009, then it is unlikely that anyone has anything to worry about, except perhaps fleeced Iranian taxpayers.
@Fred, Factoid, Kern – congratulations.
At long last I read here posts that one can actually benefit from – and, well, I am impressed. I wish people could apply such scientific standards also to political statements where even the greatest nonsense passes as a legitimate view (exactly because no objective appraisal criteria apply) .
I wish Bibi have benefited from your wisdom before he made his cartoonish presentation to the UN!
Take it lightly. A bit of gimmickry fits the theatrical nature of present-day politics.
Do you know how many human beings died or got sick because of the economic sanctions on Iraq and then war for a lie called WMD? Do you know how people are suffering in Iran from the sanctions? All of that human suffering is supposed to be “taken lightly because a bit of gimmickery fits the theatrical nature of present-day politics” according to you!! It is amazing how some build shrines and fill libraries with books and films about THEIR SUFFERING at the very time that they, with very cold blood, ENGINEER the same suffering on others based on LIES! Hey, take it lightly…..
Shrines and libraries: This phenomenon alone is grist for hundreds of dissertations. The kvetching has been institutionalized, codified and legislated worldwide. One’s imagination cannot outpace the deployment and redeployment of Jewish suffering. It is an embarrassment.
Slightly off topic, because the relevant article is so far back, but readers with a long memory might recall that I thought that the EDL and their “Islamist” opponents (chucked out of the Bury Park Mosque for being Jihadees, after some of them had been chucked out of the Queen’s Park Mosque for being druggies, and indeed, stashing H in the mosque)) were essentially dealing drugs for the same distributer?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-20528031
Nicked for doing this.
Mossad will have to find new tools for stirring racial conflict in Luton.
Mind how you go.
● RE: “It’s also possible that, whether or not the diagram was truly produced by the three individuals named, that Israel is attempting to justify its assassination program by offering proof that they were indeed working on nuclear weapons.” ~ R.S.
● FOR AN EARLIER INSTANCE OF THIS, SEE “How Mossad Justified Its Murder of an Innocent Iranian Electrical Engineer”, by Gareth Porter, TruthOut.org, 3/17/12
ENTIRE ARTICLE – http://www.truth-out.org/how-mossad-justified-its-murder-innocent-iranian-electrical-engineer/1331747276
Good stuff, thanks!
Strange: The effects of nuclear weapons has long been studied; notably at the Lovelace Foundation. Perhaps the most widely available summary of the work can be found in The Eccects of Nuclear Weapons, first published in 1950. The 1977 edition comes with a circular slide rule to calculate blast, reflected overpressure, translational velocities for man, thermal and radiation effects, initial nuclear radiation, early fallout dose rate, crater dimensions, maximum fireball radius and minimum height of burst for negligible early fallout.
Methinks the much brayed about graph exposes nothing new and is perhaps an ignorant fraud.
See: The Effects of Nuclear Weapons. Glasstone, Samuel and Philip .J. Dolan (eds), USDOE & USDOD (any edition).
For a brief early history of these effects see: Sam White, 91, Researcheron Effects of A-Bombs, Dies. NYT 2 May 2004.
AP’s graph is a sham, it wasn’t obtained by any “Mossad hacking”.
http://m.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/nov/29/ap-iran-nuclear-program-graph-explanation