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...Chilean earthquake carried the power of 10,000 Hiroshima bombs. It severed power and communication lines, closed highways, sparked looting and led the country's President to declare a state of emergency. Within minutes of the quake, Bieniawski had gathered the NNSA officials in a hotel lobby, where the group spent the next four hours trying to make contact with two sites - a military base and research reactor - where the uranium had been stored. Unable to reach one of the sites by phone, the head of the Chilean nuclear agency, Fernando Lopez-Lizana, eventually had to drive there himself...
...Real HEU is of particular concern because of the relative ease with which it can be turned into a mushroom cloud. The uranium bomb exploded over Hiroshima was never tested, so simple was its mechanism. Peter Zimmerman, former chief scientist of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, says a group of terrorists in possession of HEU could build an atom bomb using readily available hardware at a cost of around $2 million; if detonated in a city, such a bomb could kill hundreds of thousands. In Chile, I asked Bieniawski if he felt confident that al-Qaeda was still pursuing nuclear...
...crane operators regained control of the container, and a few moments later Chile no longer possessed a bomb's worth of HEU. In the bright morning sunshine, the first ship sailed out of the harbor, a Chilean gunboat darting in front of it like a little duckling. Onshore, the group piled back into the embassy van, and soon the remaining bottle of Champagne was uncorked. As Bieniawski slapped backs and offered high fives, his deputy remained quiet. Chuck Messick, a Navy man, has worked on the HEU-retrieval program since its inception in 1996. The HEU, he reminded anyone...
...Kyrgyz themselves are of Turkic stock, one of the many confederations of Central Asian nomadic tribes that coalesced into an ethnic group over generations of war and migration. Their founding national myth is the Epic of Manas, a 500,000-line poem that is 12 times the size of The Odyssey and claimed by some to be one of the few examples of oral literature preserved in its original form for nearly a thousand years. It tells of a heroic warrior, Manas, as he united the Kyrgyz and smote enemy invaders upon the steppe. It's a tale that...
...While the coup against Thaksin came as a surprise because there hadn't been one in 14 years, military ousters have been commonplace throughout modern Thai history. The military has staged 18 successful coups since 1932, when a group of army officers and intellectuals overthrew the last absolute monarch. Since then, the military has ruled overtly or has influenced politics from behind the scenes. In May 1992, Bangkok's middle class rose up against a general who usurped power following an election in which he was not a candidate. Soldiers responded with deadly force. King Bhumibol intervened...