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Date:      Thu, 11 Oct 2001 18:29:47 +0200 (CEST)
From:      Salvo Bartolotta <bartequi@neomedia.it>
To:        Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com>
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:  <1002817787.3bc5c8fbddbfd@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.



<snip>



Science != technology.

Today primary school pupils know about the equivalence of matter end energy. 
Secondary school pupil/student [may] know about critical masses for nuclear 
reactions.  Better yet, some of this information is written in [more or less] 
scientific encyclopedias (/me having read those and other data at about 9/10).
 
Obscurantism is NO solution.  Talebans anyone?


"Dangerous" technologies, that is, the precise details of how to _work_ eg 
plutonium to make a bomb out of it, *should* be kept secret.  Alas, this is 
not always possible, but they should.





> 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".




Yup.  I had left out one of the most important details.

--Salvo

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