Jordan Thwarts Al-Qaida Plot
October 22, 2012 13:49 by Pesach Benson
Everything you need to know about today’s coverage of Israel and the Mideast. Join the Israel Daily News Stream on Facebook.
Today’s Top Stories:
1. Gazans fire rockets at Israel. IDF strikes back, killing two. Details at YNet. Hamas can’t afford an escalation — the Emir of Qatar confirmed his plans to visit Gaza in the coming days. AP has more information about that.
2. Jordanian security thwarted an Al Qaida plot targeting Western diplomatic missions and shopping centers. More at AP and the BBC, which writes:
It seems mortar bombs were being sourced from Syria, technical bomb-making expertise from al-Qaeda operatives in Iraq, and detailed on-the-ground reconnaissance of the targets to hit gathered in the Jordanian capital, Amman. The range of those targets is both ambitious and terrifying, from shopping malls, to embassies, foreign tourists and hotels.
3. A day after the funeral of Lebanon’s assassinate intelligence chief, the country’s still on edge. Judging from Reuters, you can cut the tension with a knife.
Rest O’ the Roundup
• YNet: Are the PA and Israeli Arab crime families in cahoots to launder money?
Post-war model of "Little Boy"
• One letter to the editor drawing a lot of attention online. Thomas C. Reed, a former secretary of the Air Force, who designed thermonuclear devices, wrote to the Wall St. Journal:
Once any nuclear wannabe gets 160 pounds of uranium enriched to 80% U-235 (the enrichment level of the Hiroshima bomb and of South Africa’s Melba) he has a weapon. “Little Boy,” the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, did not need to be tested; we knew it would work. The design is now in the open literature: It is 1940s technology, easy to build.
Iran’s first nuke will not be fired at a target, any more than was India’s, Pakistan’s or North Korea’s. A confirmed Iranian nuclear detonation within a mountain or in the desert will let the world know the game has changed.
• Daily Telegraph: A senior aid to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is laundering money in Austria to help Tehran evade sanctions.
• Thumbs up to CNN for a handy who’s who of key players in the Lebanese crisis.
• NPR looks at the latest in the Israeli newspaper wars.
• The BBC aired the second part of its look at Jewish refugees from Arab countries.
• Heh: Iran’s judiciary blocked Mahmoud Ahmadinejad from visiting his own aid in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison. The Atlantic Wire rounds up all you need to know.
(Image of Little Boy via Wikimedia Commons)
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Bernard Geron
4:37 pm
Oct 22, 2012
Why did the dog not bark? (The Hound of the Baskerville by Sherlock Holmes)
The world’s attention is directed at Iran’s huge Uranium Enrichment enterprise for all its propaganda purposes. But what about a possible Plutonium facility? No word about that. In September 2007 (ptesumably) Israeli warplanes destroyed a Plutonium breeding reactor in a remote area in Syria. The size and outside architecture of that building did not raise ant suspection. Only a lucky Intelligence chance caused (presumebly) Israel to act. “little Boy”, the rude Uranium (Hiroshima) bomb weighted 5000 kilograms. The Iranis have no means to transport such a device, even if they acquired the needed mass of Uranium.
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Bernard Geron
4:51 pm
Oct 22, 2012
For a modern day device far less mass of Uranium or Plutonium is required. But what is required is neutron initator and flawlessly working implosion device. The Iranians are known to have conducted tests with those detonating devices in their Parchin facility. “Strangely”this has not attracted the world’s attention. No dog barked. The unknowns about a possible Plutonium program and the state of Iran’s mastering of an atomic detonator is very disturbing, the more since world’s attention is fixated with the centrifuge halaboo.
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