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October 11, 2009
The Ignoble Nobel
Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize. It is officially Upside Down Land (tm).
What he won it for, I have no idea. Because he met with Iran, without preconditions, perhaps? Sean Hannity drilled home during the campaign that Obama said he was open to meeting without preconditions and took a lot of heat for it; people claimed that wasn't what Obama meant. That may be, but it IS what he did. That whole civilian nuclear thing worked out really well with North Korea, didn't it? It didn't? Oh, fetch.
Part of the deal is that we allow Iran to ship fuel to Russia, who then enriches it to nearly 20% and ships it back to Iran, ostensibly for a civilian nuclear reactor programme. I am not an expert in nuclear reactor design, and the reference books I have are older, but I did find this article on the web about uranium enrichment for bombs and reactors, and it jives with my book at home.
Basically, standard reactors (Type I for instance, graphite or heavy water moderated), require uranium enriched to approximately 3%. (Fissile uranium isotopes make up only a fraction of a percent of the composition of naturally occurring uranium). Fast neutron reactors (a more advanced design) require 10% enrichment and above.
A nuclear bomb could be made with material with enrichment as low as 20%, but it would be prohibitively large, although I would add at that concentration, there is a potential dirty bomb scenario, I believe. In order to make an efficient nuclear weapon, you are looking at enrichment in the 80%-90% range.
At the recent talks with Iran, a deal was struck whereby Russia would enrich Iran's 1500 kg of enriched uranium to 19.75%, which according to what I have read, is a higher enrichment level than they would need for a reactor, but not high enough for bomb grade. With the revelation of another Iranian secret site, I am not convinced that Iran couldn't improve on the enrichment percentage. I don't trust them, not when Ahmadinejad vows to wipe Israel off the map and Iran has supplied al Qaeda and the insurgents in Iraq with weapons. Colour me suspicious.
So is that what the Messiah won the Nobel Peace Prize for? Because you know, there are true heroes who deserved the award:
Potential laureates included Hu Jia, locked up since December 2007 after exposing government abuses and the plight of China's AIDS sufferers, and Wei Jingsheng, a onetime electrician who spent 18 years in prison after brazenly challenging former leader Deng Xiaoping to bring democracy.
Huang Ciping, an engineer turned activist who is executive director of Wei's Washington-based foundation, said that China "has come to such a turning point that the prize might have helped."
"The Nobel Peace Prize committee has the full right to decide to give coal to those who suffer and struggle or to present flowers to the powerful," she said.
But she said of the decision: "It is both a pity for the Chinese people and a danger to world peace."
All this after Obama snubbed the Dalai Lama too.
I heard a commentator on Fox state it perfectly; a Nobel Prize seems to be awarded to those who diminish America's standing in the world. Whether it's Al Gore who pushes global warming and Kyoto, which would cripple our economy and damage our standard of living, to Jimmy Carter, who was highly critical of the US during Bush's term, to Obama, who seems intent on emasculating America. As Mr. Man said last night, the Nobel Peace prize has become a barometer for whether you are doing something good; in other words, if you're pushing for positive changes, don't expect to win it.
Obama's change (and the world's applauding of it) is not anything I can believe in.
Posted by hanyap at October 11, 2009 10:15 AM