Countdown To Zero
I dont believe it.
It makes no sense.
"There is something so strange."
"Perhaps you could suggest some
fantastic explanation. "
"Could'nt it be this sort of thing"
He turned the drawing round.
"Yes," she said,
"That is what I mean."
This was the first explanation
of the splitting the atom.
Robert Oppenheimer said:
"Impossible."
But within 15 minutes he decided
it was real.
He realised it would release
some great amount of energy,
That you could
generate power
and make bombs.
Within one week, on
Oppenheimer's black board
There was a drawing of
the bomb.
Enrico Fermi stood
in his office
and looked out of Manhattan.
He kept his hand to
the size of a tennis balll.
"A little bomb like that" He said
"And it would all disappear."
Countdown To Zero
There is no doubt in my mind
if the terrorists had
acquired a nuclear weapon,
They would not have hasitated to use it.
Could They Ever Get One?
Al-Qaida is determined
to acquire nuclear weapons
and use them if they get them.
In the early 90's
they tried to buy highly
enriched uranium in Sudan
They got scammed
Just prior to the
we do know that Osama bin Laden and
his lieutinent Zawahiri
sat down with two
Pakistani nuclear scientists
and discussed
nuclear weapons.
Before releasing sarin gas
in the Tokyo subway
the Japanese cult
Aum Shinrikyo
attempted to acquire a
nuclear bomb in Russia.
They bought a sheet
farm in Australia
to mine uranium to
build their own bomb.
The objective of Al-Qaeda is:
is to kill 4 million Americans
including two million children
This is in his calculations,
the..which is required to
balance the scales of justice.
He takes
various incidents
from Shatila to
the war in Iraq,
and counts up the
bodycount and says
"Thats how many people
we owe:
4 million. "You are not going to get
hijacking airplanes and
crashing them into buildings.
Actually, I am not that worried
about nuclear weapons.
Its not one of my main worries.
Isnt everyone worried about
nuclear weapons?
There are all concerned
nuclear war?
Thats a stupid answer,
no
I don't know. Its never been something
that I actually had to think
in my everyday life.
It might get on your conscience
and maybe then disappears
I do not think anybody is going
to use in this day and age
it is ridiculous to even think about it.
What can you do?
Nothing.
At the end of the day a small button
and there is going to be a big mess at the end of that
Somebody is going to make a mistake one day
and we are all going to suffer for it.
There are three ways to
acquire a nuclear weapon:
You could steal a bomb,
You could buy a bomb
and you could build a bomb.
Of all the things I've learned after 9/11,
about terrorism iintent
the most startling discovery
for me personally
was realising they were trying to
build a bomb.
The hardest part of
making a nuclear bomb
is getting the material,
highly enriched uranium
or plutonium.
Many countries have
these materials,
and often they are poorly guarded
But if I were
a terrorist
intending to build
a nuclear bomb,
and i wanted to blow up
a major city
I would look to the countries of
the former Soviet Union.
There have been many cases
involving the theft
of highly enriched
uranium or plutonium.
And every time there has been a black market ceasure
andthey were able to
track to its source
It came from Russia.
There was a case at a Russian naval base
in the early 1990s.
One of the naval personel told a relative of his
where the highly enriched uranium at this place was
This relative walked through a gapping hole
and a security fence
walked upto what you and i would
consider to be a tool shaft
snapped the lock
with an iron bar.
He set off no alarm.
It was not detected at all.
The Russian military prosecutor in that
case said, quote:
"Potatoes were guarded better ".
At a facility called Luch,
where they fabricate fuel made from
highly enriched uranium,
there was a worker there who knew
that as long as the output
was within about 3 percent of the input
they figured it was normal loses to waste
and they didnt bother to investigate.
So he kept stealing
small amounts
of highly enriched uranium
day after day,
over a long period of time.
Eventually he stole a kilogram and a half
of 90% of highly enriched uranium
He set off no alarms.
Noone noticed.
He had friends
who were making their living
stealing car batteries.
And they said:
"Maybe the guy in Moscow who buys or is still in car batteries
"will Buy your
stolen uranium . "
So they went down to
the train station together,
and the police came in and arrested the car battery thieves
and he got arrested along with them
Thats the only way he was ever caught .
We have cases in which people
from the Russian nuclear arsenal
were sellling material
and they were captured
We have cases in which people from
Russian nuclear labs
were selling materials
they was captured.
Almost all of those cases
until the material was seized
and had never been noticed
to have been missing.
All the black market seizures that
I am ware of were serendepetous
They were caught by luck.
So we dont know weather it is
the iceberg or the tip of the iceberg.
Once you have managed to acquire
highly enriched uranium,
you need to smuggle it out of the country
Georgia is located
along Russia's southern border
and things like highly enriched uranium
could be smuggled from such a place
by Azerbaijan,
Iraq, Iran,
Turkmenistan, Afghanistan
and so on so forth.
The Georgians invented a so called man
of Turkish nationality
who said he was a Muslim and
representing a
serious organization.
Oleg Khintsagov
believed he was selling
highly enriched uranium
to make an atomic weapon to terrorists
If a truck driver
can get hold of it,
a small time husler
who just wants to become a rich guy
imagine what
professionals could have done
Real professionals
with an ideology,
with an agenda
with brains
Once you have moved the
highly enriched uranium,
you could use
any number of ports
in the Middle East
or the Mediterranean
to ship the
HEU to your destination.
smuggling highly enriched Uranium
into the United States,
is pretty straight forward
lead pipe will
shield the HEU.
The detector would have be
within a few inches
to pick up any radiation.
And then hide it amongst
everyday goods
A hundred pounds of highly enriched uranium
is smaller than a football.
It would fit in a 6 pack beer cans
go to the united states everyday
Every way the drugs come to new york city
would be the same way you would imagine
highly enriched uranium coming.
If you have any doubt about
the ability of al-Qaeda
to bring highly enriched uranium
into the U.S.
They could always hide it
a bale of marijuana.
Terrorism is just one threat
the deliberate threat.
There is also the
unintentional threat
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"Countdown To Zero" Scripts.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 4 Dec. 2024. <https://www.scripts.com/script/countdown_to_zero_5968>.
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