> John Lacny asks:
>
>>To be honest, I'm having a hard time believing that there will be an
>>actual
>>war against Iran; even the Bushites are not that stupid or crazy. Or am I
>>just out of touch?
>
> -------------------------------------------
> Not according to the below article in the WSJ, which is usually a good
> barometer of the administration's thinking.
>
>
> * * *
>
> The Iranian Tipping Point
> By Fred Kempe
> Wall Street Journal
> January 17,2006; Page A15
>
> The operators of Iran's Natanz nuclear-enrichment plant called it the
> "Yankee virus" even though they couldn't establish its source. What they did
> know was that "the industrial accident" it spawned had shut them down and
> done such serious damage to their facility that it would take months to
> repair.
>
> The software virus had triggered an irregular vibration of one of the 164
> ultra-high-speed centrifuges used to separate out heavy uranium 238 for use
> as nuclear fuel. The centrifuge malfunctioned, knocking out the others until
> the whole system seized up.
>
I would give that article more heed if it did not commit a cardinal sin by getting the uranium isotope wrong. Uranium-238 makes up more than 99% of all natural uranium: there is no need for centrifuges or other equipment to enrich it. (To make a bomb from U-238 typically requires a heavy-water reactor, the ability to separate the resulting plutonium-239 out of the fuel assemblies, the ability to separate out any residual Pu-240, and then the engineering to shape the Pu-239 into the right sort of charges.)
What the WSJ probably meant to mention was that U-235 is enriched in centrifuges.
--tim francis-wright