Date: Thu, 11 Oct 2001 00:02:06 -0700 From: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> To: Salvo Bartolotta <bartequi@neomedia.it> Cc: cjclark@alum.mit.edu, "Crist J. Clark" <cristjc@earthlink.net>, Ted Mittelstaedt <tedm@toybox.placo.com>, "P. U. (Uli) Kruppa" <root@pukruppa.de>, freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Use of the UNIX Trademark Message-ID: <3BC543EE.9D65DFA8@mindspring.com> References: <000601c15084$87edd360$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com> <1002663600.3bc36eb096ee5@webmail.neomedia.it> <20011009231343.C387@blossom.cjclark.org> <1002731960.3bc479b899603@webmail.neomedia.it> <20011010140126.M387@blossom.cjclark.org> <1002753678.3bc4ce8e10a73@webmail.neomedia.it>
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Salvo Bartolotta wrote: > > Take one of the most interesting scientific > > and engineering efforts of the century, the Manhattan Project. That > > research took place amongst a _very_ small but able scientific > > community sequestered in the desert. It was quite a while for that to > > be shared with the world at large; we all know why. Same story for the > > hydrogen bomb or any other technology developments placed under the > > cover of national security. The idea that all information "needs to be > > free" is a rather naive one. > > I would say yes. And no. Essentially because Science != technology. > > Nuclear reactions (fission & fusion) are described in many Physics books. > _Understanding_ or _knowing_ Science does NOT necessarily imply eg having the > technology to produce a fission or H bomb. Security through obscurity never works. It is relatively trivial to build such devices; the book: The Curve of Binding Energy John A. McPhee Noonday Press ISBN: 0374515980 gives sufficient information to calculate the neutron numbers, and therefore the critical mass, for any radioactive material that is capable of fission. The 1972 World Book Encyclopedia gives designs for two fission devices in sufficient detail to work out the rest. The way we control such things is to control the availability of the critical raw materials very, very carefully. One of the reasons we have been so careful to court Pakistan and Uzbekistan must be that they are Afghanistan's neighbors, and are both members of "the nuclear club". The U.S. has controlled Nitrogen-Phosphorus fertilizer, one of the components of the device used by McVey in his attack on the Oklahoma City Federal building; this was supposedly one of the materials being brought in over the U.S.-Canada border for the planned "millenium attack" which never happened, because bin Laden's man was captured at the border. > Plutonium (and other) technologies, yes, those (hopefully) > should be kept secret. Here I am afraid I have to agree. :-) They aren't, but access is controlled. In one case, it was controlled by Israel bombing an Iraqi breeder reactor factility to prevent them from producing enriched nuclear materials for use in weapons. -- Terry To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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