Bryan,

If true, this is something of a bombshell (no pun intended). Too bad no one will ever hear about it. Even if it is true, it will never make it to the mainstream. The press will play down, twist, de-emphasize or just plain omit this story, and it will never make it to the “American Street” as common knowledge. It will “die on the blog,” so to speak.

Bush needs a better PR person. Why doesn’t the administration take advantage of these facts when they become available?

I don’t know, and it thoroughly boggles my mind. Part of the reason I’m becoming more and more pessimistic about actually winning this war is that the White House has become so awful at PR, and PR is a huge part of a shadowy, confusing war like this. They seem to have forgotten that the people need to hear from our leaders occassionally, if only to reassure us once in a while.

They seem to have gone from warning us every day about every little thing to just not telling us what’s going on at all. Somebody up there needs to restore some balance.

138 is probably a typo or a reporting mistake. U-238 is the most common natural isotope; making a bomb requires isolating the small number of U-235 atoms in the natural ore.

And I agree strongly with James. Why does this administration keep on using weak arguments when strong ones are available?

They may claim to be protecting “methods and sources”, but it looks far more like CIA/CYA. In the current environment, having the best available justification is vastly more important than preventing embarrassment, and even more important than sacrificing some informants. Losing national morale will kill far more than revealing a “method or source”.

This doesn’t sound particularly credible. First of all, there is no such thing as U-138. This could be a misprint of U-238, but that is a non-fissionable isotope. U-235 is the fissionable isotope.

Enriched Uranium increases the ratio of U-235 to U-238, that’s what “highly enriched uranium” means. The process requires tons of U-238 as input, a great deal of technical sophistication and large scale industrial facilities for either ultracentrifuge, cascade or laser isotope separation. (National Review has a fairly chilling set of orbital photos of Iran’s facilities).

I’d be more worried about NK or Iran providing a weapon to Al Q or some other group of wackos, or about Al Q obtaining enough cobalt or other rad source for a dirty bomb.

In short, lots to worry about, but this isn’t it.

Rocket Scientist, what about the threat of a dirty bomb being made from U-238? The linked article says that’re a more likely use for this Congo uranium than a true nuke.

Odds of making a dirty bomb from U-238? Zero. U-238 is radioactive mostly in a technical sense. It’s less radioactive per unit volume than you are, Bryan. U-238 is also known as “depleted uranium”. You can’t make a dirty bomb out of it for the same reason DU munitions aren’t a radiological health hazard (which is not to say DU is safe — it’s a heavy metal and has the standard heavy metal toxicity).

However, the article claims that the substance was “enriched”, which means it has U-235 in it (as a previous commentor noted). U-235 is in fact something you can make a dirty bomb out of. It depends very strongly on just how much enriched it was. There’s simply no way to tell from this article how dangerous it really is. However, based on the frequent scams that have been run on the Jihadis in this area, I suspect that they were sold pure U-238 which is cheap, not illegal and much easier to obtain than enriched uranium.

That sounds plausible. Al Qaeda types may be crafty, but they’re certainly no rocket scientists.

Then again, don’t tell the anti-war types that DU is relatively safe. They’ve been waging a low-level campaign against its use, and of course agains the Bush administration as though it’s the first and only government to use it (it isn’t—the Clinton admin and probably several other admins used stocks of DU), for a while now.