Those leaked nuclear secrets

Below is a YouTube link to a Keith Olberman report on the story of the Arabic documents containing nuclear secrets that the Cheney-Bush administration posted on the Internet. I can't improve on Glenn Greenwald's brief summary:

Right-wing pundits and bloggers have long demanded that the Bush administration make public the hordes of government documents which were obtained from Saddam's files by the U.S. military in Iraq. Those documents, they argued, would finally vindicate their faith-based belief that Saddam really did have WMDs. It was in order to satisfy those demands that the Bush administration - at the personal direction of the President - published those documents on the Internet (including, as we now know, how-to instructions in Arabic for building a nuclear weapon).

See also this commentary at Daily Kos, where I first saw the YouTube link.



It's one thing to have an understanding of the broad physics or the overall design of a nuclear bomb. Those things have been available in open sources for decades. Knowing that stuff doesn't enable someone to build a bomb. To do that, you need the very, very precise measurements of the materials and processes involved. The kind of material that the Cheney-Bush administration had posted on the Internet contained just those sorts of precise measurement.

Notice in the Olberman report that the International Atomic Energy Commission (IAEA) had warned the administration in September that the material should be taken down. They didn't do it until last week.

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