SOVIET CELL PHONES AND SUITCASE NUKES

It’s a common debating trick to focus on one perceived error in your opponent’s argument, ignore all the other points, and pretend that if you can refute that one point every other point and therefore the entire argument is refuted.

Thus I have gotten a lot of flack over my noting, in The Hiroshimic Imposture , that so-called Soviet suitcase nukes built in 1988 could not be set off with a cell phone as claimed because there were no cell phones back then.

As Joe Farah kidded me in a Front Page interview, “The cell phone is 30 years old. I had a cell phone in 1988. Jack’s memory is a little faulty here.”

I’m sure Joe is right – about his having a cell phone the size of a brick back then. The only guy I saw with one in those days was Ollie North. So yes, there were American cell phones. But Soviet cell phones? Nope, no such thing. The first cellular systems were introduced into Russia in 1992 after the collapse of the Soviet Union, using the analog NMT (Nordic Mobile Telephony) protocol.

Further, even if there were Soviet cell phones back in the 1980s which there weren’t, you couldn’t use one to trigger a nuke here in the US because it would operate on a different band frequency. Remember our TDMA and CDMA protocols years ago? You still have to buy a “quad-band” phone in order to talk both here in the US and in foreign countries (like Russia) because of protocol incompatibilities.

You couldn’t re-wire a Soviet suitcase nuke for a different (US) frequency because it, like all nukes, is booby-trapped to prevent tampering. You may have the detonation code, but not the instructions for disconnecting the booby-trap. Only the scientists who built the thing know that, not the Spetznaz boys who allegedly sold it.

Besides, the method of triggering a bomb with a cell phone relay is extremely recent, such as with terrorist IEDs in Iraq. Such a method was non-existent in the 1980s. It’s just one example from many showing how the description of these “Soviet suitcase nukes” is fabricated.

So let’s look a little deeper into this claim that the Soviets planted nukes here in the US back during the Cold War, that Al Qaeda has paid off the Russians who know where they are, and are going to blow them up in an “American Hiroshima.”

Such bombs made 20 or more years ago are now useless. Plutonium gives off a lot of radiation, which “cooks” the explosives packed around it that are needed for the implosion initiating the fission chain reaction. This deterioration requires that the explosives be replaced every few years.

In addition, plutonium “stiffens” over time, as the radiation causes crystal structure changes which make it less fissionable. So about every decade or so depending on the amount in the bomb, the plutonium “pit” has to be taken out and refabricated.

In other words, if the Spetznaz boys sold some archaic suitcase nukes supposedly buried here years ago to Al Qaeda for millions, they took Al Qaeda to the cleaners.

Let’s go even deeper. Spontaneous neutron emissions pour out of plutonium that are almost impossible to shield, meaning it would be almost impossible to hide a suitcase nuke from a neutron detector.

The US military has highly trained NEST specialists – Nuclear Emergency Search Teams – whose job it is to locate a US nuke if somehow one gets lost. These guys regularly fly grid patterns over US cities – no terrorist is going to set off a nuke in the boonies – in aircraft equipped with neutron detectors and other devices such as pulse neutron generators.

If there is a hidden Al Qaeda nuke in Manhattan, Chicago, LA, or other US city, the NEST guys would have found it.

Always remember: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Not only is there a complete absence of extraordinary evidence for the extraordinary claims of “American Hiroshima,” there is virtually a complete absence of any evidence at all. All we’ve got is scaremongering claims of sensationalist journalists like Paul Williams who says, “I talked to somebody and he told me�.”

You cannot prove a negative. It is fallacious to argue, “Well, can you prove Al Qaeda doesn’t have nukes?” The burden of proof is on the claim. When the claim is as preposterous as this one, you and I need lose no sleep at night over it.

And neither does Joe. I don’t for a picosecond question his sincerity. He’s a great American who’s genuinely spooked and afraid for his country. He’s been a buddy of mine since the Reagan days – and I trust he’ll be one for a long time to come. He just needs to run the science of these things by me first.

So what Joe and I need to do is have a few beers together and talk about the real scary stuff, America’s vulnerabilities that we can’t discuss in public because we can’t let Al Qaeda know about them. OK, Joe? I’m buying. I know a pub in DC that has Newcastle Brown on draft.