Word: plutonium
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...Atomic Energy Commission, insisted that the continued French presence would make it "impossible" for Iraq to stockpile the material to manufacture atomic weapons. If the Iraqis did try to cheat, he said, France would have cut off further supplies of enriched uranium. Pecqueur granted that a "significant quantity" of plutonium could be obtained by irradiating uranium in the reactor, then extracting it in the Italian-built "hot cell," a laboratory designed for handling radioactive materials. But he maintained that the process, difficult for Iraqi technicians, would be easy to detect, especially since sealed, French-installed cameras would be monitoring...
...face of these claims, Israeli officials still adamantly asserted that Iraq had planned to build bombs. The main evidence: Baghdad's insistence on being supplied with weapons-grade uranium and the existence of the Italian hot-cell lab capable of extracting plutonium. But Umberto Colombo, chairman of the Italian Nuclear Energy Commission, said last week that producing plutonium in tangible amounts would require extra equipment and technology. Said he: "It is absolutely impossible for these facilities we are supplying to be used to make plutonium for bombs...
...know how to build bombs. Even U.S. college students, poring through declassified Government technical papers, have put together designs for rudimentary A-bombs. Articles have been written about the subject. The key ingredient for both the bombs and the reactors is the same: fissile material such as uranium or plutonium, whose atoms can readily split, scattering tiny, fast-moving particles called neutrons. When neutrons score bull's-eyes on the nuclei of neighboring atoms, they split them as well, unleashing still more neutrons, which in turn cause more breakups, all of which release energy...
...diverting enriched U-235 is not the only option for the bombmaker. A-bombs can also be fashioned out of plutonium, which is a byproduct of the modern alchemy that occurs in reactors. Even relatively small reactors can produce several pounds a month of a type of plutonium that lends itself to bombmaking. Equally important, plutonium, unlike the nearly identical isotopes of uranium, is a separate element with its own distinctive characteristics. Thus it is relatively easy to pick out by ordinary chemical means from other radioactive material...
After only a year or so of operation, enough plutonium (about 35 Ibs.) could be generated in a small reactor to build two or three bombs of the type dropped on Nagasaki. The plutonium would be formed into a hollow sphere containing a small neutron source that might be made of radium and beryllium. The plutonium itself would be wrapped in a beryllium or uranium reflector, which helps contain neutrons and prolong the chain reaction. This shield would in turn be covered by a layer of TNT charges, the most critical aspect of the design. The charges would have...