it posits a scenario where Himmler set up a parallel program to Heisenberg, headed by a more talented physicist who did succeed in building the bomb,

When he set off the bomb, everyone’s attention would be immediately drawn to the explosion, taking eyes off of him just long enough to shoot at Trump without drawing sniper fire (either by his own calculation, or as a plausible excuse by his alleged handlers).

The Butler cop peeking over the roof at him was NOT in the plan, and threw him off his sequence.
Worthy of Mission: Impossible, if so.

This was revealed, at least to people willing to see it, during Obama’s elections.
Powerline was all over the story of suspicious donations, disabled credit card checkers, and other hall-marks of fraud and illegal operations.
The FEC pretty much ignored all of it, except IIRC one or two low-level wrist-slap fines.

And we all know that the Clinton Foundation, an alleged charity, was a money laundering scheme for their personal and political benefit.

It’s not just the design that is significant (and you’re assuming the Pakis are enamored of the Iranians getting weapons… The only thing Muslims hate more than America and Jews is other Muslims of other sects and nations — otherwise Israel would have long since been wiped from the map), but also the exacting calculations that need to be developed as well as the very precise machining techniques and the physio-chemical separation techniques.

Realize, enriching uranium and plutonium isotopes cannot be done chemically — they are, by definition, chemically, the same element… they are just different isotopes. This is where high-quality centrifuges come into play. You have to separate them out like milk from cream.

And even there — suppose you separate out 10 pounds of the Uranium or Plutonium you seek to use (mind you, its not “pure” even there — it has to be a certain percentage of both isotopes within a very fine difference) — you still have to machine this stuff into amazingly fine tolerances — the USA in the 1940s just barely had the capacity to do it! — You have to make very very perfect hemispheres, with an amazingly flat surface between them with no bumps, bubbles, or other imperfections — and they have to fit together perfectly as well, no bumps, bubbles, or imperfect “angles” to keep the two hemispheres apart AT ALL. I am dead serious when I say the tolerances are in a similar realm as that needed for making high end electronics — keeping a surface truly flat and unwarped over a 10 sq. cm area is not easy to do, even with modern equipment… most of which is not set up to those kinds of tolerances (there are some wonderful machining videos out there on general machining which discuss this general problem, not applying to nuclear weapon creation.. look into “Inheritance Machining” as one source, if this seems of any interest)

OK, now, having done this — you have to also construct a mechanism with just the right explosive values — a sphere that sets off all at exactly — i do mean EXACTLY — the same time, at precisely the right distance to force those two hemispheres together, and keeps them together, without blowing them to pieces or making them strike imperfectly, so one piece chips off another… and so forth.

This complexity is the reason why nothing short of a government has the ability to manage it, at least, so far. It requires a whole array of different types of expertise at very high levels to produce such a weapon, spy-terrorist fantasies aside. Any actual “small group” built bomb will probably be from some absolute lunatic genius who has figured out an entirely different approach from the “brute force” means we currently know how to do it with. Hopefully, said genius will have much better things to do with that same genius.

And then, lastly, you have to get it within a mile or so of your target location — which itself is not likely to be too easy, as I’m willing to bet we have a lot of sensors up in space able to spot a moving bit of radioactive material. Remember, the Voyager Satellite is basically US getting a signal from a 10w light bulb that is 5x the distance to the sun away from us. That same kind of sensor-sensitivity can probably (my guess) be applied to look down at the earth for certain likely sources of radioactivity. This is not advertised, but it seems to be pretty likely to exist.

So — missile — probably nothing in their arsenal can handle weight of the payload — bomber — probably likely to be shot down by the very very good Israeli Air Force — or a truck. I could see a truck, but again, that’s where those “eye in the sky” things come in. As well as any ground-based sniffers planted by the very competent IDF on the approaches to Israel from all the surrounding areas.

Small, fist-sized sensors that point towards roads and routes towards Israel and scream bloody murder if they spot something radioactive crossing their paths. To block that radioactivity requires enough lead to make the truck unable to move…

He’s correct on this. Fatman was a “modern” compression-type bomb, with an explosive surround designed to force two sub-critical halves of a sphere to a critical sphere, and hold it there long enough for the chain reaction to initiate and at least partly succeed.

Most such are fairly “dirty” — they don’t actually split a lot of the Plutonium mass, which gets vaporized and spread around with all the other crap that is irradiated by the event.

H-bombs have, at their heart, an A-bomb, which creates the thermal requirements for the hydrogen to fuse which causes the “H” part of the explosion, much much more energetic than the “A” part, by at least two orders of magnitude (10-20 kilotons vs. 500k-50 megatons**)

============
The Tsar Bomba was 50mT. Typical of the 60s was more like 5-10mT, with smaller and smaller yields being used as the technology became much more accurate (a sniper, rather than a shotgun) and also backed up by MIRVs, which allows a single missile to “shoot multiple targets”. The higher accuracy and numeracy led to missiles being aimed at other missile silos rather than at cities, the idea being to, hopefully, take out the other side’s weapons before they were even launched. By the collapse of the USSR, a typical individual MIRV warhead may have been down to as little as 500kT — still 25-50x what was used in Japan.

I have long wondered about this, too. Did last summer’s “Oppenheimer” suggest that there’s more to the story? It turns out that a gunshot style trigger was not going to work. The movie did indeed imply that there’s more crucial ingredients needed to build an A-bomb!

Somebody produced and shared on YouTube a fast paced yet brilliant little 10 minute primer answering the question: how do you trigger an atomic fission device” Welch Labs title for this is, appropriately, “Oppenheimer’s Gamble.”

As readers may well know, the key ingredient used was plutonium. Except that this transuranic material existed in minute if not infinitesimal amounts.

Of course, scaling up man-made production was only the start. The next problem was designing a trigger to focus the fissile material sufficiently to reach supercriticality in microseconds!

This task had never been achieved before, too.

Thus, the video explains how mathematics and theory only took these pioneers so far. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W06g7gIfwRE

The road to resolution involves a tank and scientists who managed to start a forest fire while testing out machinable designs in a remote location near Los Alamos, New Mexico.

The level of precision required had never been done before. Perhap’s Oppenheimers gamble was overseeing this trigger building project for about 18 months (IIRC), and the ultimate distribution of 20,000 triggering devices (!!!) throughout the half-dozen or so Federal labs.

Did this means that the solution was reached only after many trial and error engineering experiments? I believe so.

Although I’ve watched “Oppenheimer’s Gamble” twice, I’m going to view it again (I book marked this fascinating story). Perhaps our resident experts like physicsguy will give it a go and enlighten us beyond my layman’s rubric?

Cutting back to the chase raised by our aforementioned posters here, is there more to building a fission atomic bomb than having sufficiently enriched uranium? Yes. And this gets demandingly technical and specialised. Iran has more obstacles to overcome. (Although I’m sure Iran would like to buy this information from either Pakistan or North Korea. But I’m sure they’re jo prepared to have a US bulls-eye effectively painted on they’re backs.)

A fun and fine cinematic footnote to this drama comes to us in the form of the origins tale of Hitchcock’s great spy-noir, “Notorious” (late 1945, IIRC).

Ben Hecht wrote this masterpiece screen play. The story find’s Cary Grant seducing Ingrid Bergman as the daughter of an unrepentant Nazi, to go and spy for the OSS in Brazil where her father’s German scientist buddies are working on something, immediately after the war ended. Only late in the film do we learn the object of all the secrecy is…enriched uranium!

In the Spring of 1945, this notion was so unknown that the producers were very dubious about the plot premise concerning an obscure metallic ore! They leaned on Ben Hecht’s insider word on the secret US developments lucidly explained in “Oppenheimer.”

Thus, Hitch and Hecht arranged to interview a research scientist at CalTech.

They asked him about how uranium could be enriched? The very question resulted in a fast conclusion to the interview, as the scientist blurted out “Why are you asking me such questions? Do you want to get me arrested?” he said, obviously alarmed by their query.

This “Maguffin” was thus revealed as, indeed, the right one to hold post-August 1945 audiences in climactic suspense! Hitch then ditched his backup plan, a diamond heist.

Nevertheless. The FBI tailed Hitchcock for three months after this encounter at CalTech.

First, a week or two before the J13 attempt to assassinate Trump, he told a friend over dinner that a Black Swan event like a Trump shooting might be coming.

Now, he says he expects at least two more before the election is over. It might be war somewhere. But other than that he’s pretty nonspecific, except that these will be consequential surprises — they may alter events like the election outcome.

Second, he explains that there are many FBI/SS whistleblowers waiting in the wings. While they are eager to have their say, whether because of conscience or outrage, he’s working to arrange fallback protection. They expect to lose their job or posts. And this keeps many in the closet.

O’Keefe says they have reached to him because they trust him. And feels obliged to make arrangements they can fallback upon.

Finally, he tells us that the ActBlue campaign laundering scheme is wildly out of control.

ActBlue is a Democrat PAC, and people without much means are “donating” thousands of times to it in amounts pushing over $100,000.

He’s convinced this is an organised money laundering operation, often involving money from abroad, in hopes of buying the election outcome.

Expect more revelations exposing this enormous scam to be revealed soon
https://www.infowars.com/posts/breaking-video-james-okeefe-predicts-multiple-black-swan-events-to-stop-trump/

I don’t know about you — None of this surprises me. As we keep saying, these are such interesting times.

David Strom has two good posts at Hot Air, which cover most of the information known to date (and there isn’t nearly enough of it), but look particularly at the update of Crooks clambering around on the roof, and then consider the observation from Bongino.

https://hotair.com/david-strom/2024/07/31/members-of-congress-are-now-saying-it-the-secret-service-was-set-up-to-fail-for-political-reasons-n3792498

I have really bent over backward to give the Secret Service more than reasonable slack to explain how they could fail so catastrophically in their duty to protect once and future president Donald Trump.

I really have, and am still pretty certain that nobody in the government was involved in the specific attempt on the life of Trump in Pennsylvania. It doesn’t bear thinking of, so I am not going to unless there is extraordinary evidence to prove it. It seems beyond belief that Secret Service agents around Trump, who have been with him a long time, would participate in something so evil. And Trump is confident that his agents didn’t.

But I am well past the point where I have to conclude that the Secret Service was set up to fail in protecting Donald Trump and that it was a goal of the Biden Administration to have him put in danger and possibly killed.

It actually pains me to say that because, while I think that the Establishment has been getting increasingly scummy and have malicious plans for Americans, I thought there were limits beyond which they would not go. This is the United States of America, and we should still be able to assume that our leaders are not outright evil, or at least that they would recoil from anything this evil.

I no longer believe that, and serious Members of Congress–not the fringy ones you might expect to go there–are voicing the same concern.
…
Now, Alejandro Mayorkas has replaced Director Cheatle with the man whose job was to oversee the protective details, which failed.

Let that sink in. The man who should be one of the investigated is RUNNING the investigation.
…
The “investigators” haven’t been talking to the local police who were there, if you can believe that. The snipers from Pennsylvania were supposed to meet with the snipers from the Service before the event, but were stood up.

What is going on?

https://hotair.com/david-strom/2024/07/31/ridiculous-local-law-enforcement-in-butler-strike-back-at-secret-service-director-n3792512

It was the locals’ fault? The Secret Service didn’t meet with the local snipers on the day of the rally–they blew a scheduled meeting off! The Secret Service was warned by the locals that a man with a gun was on the roof and sent an armed response, and the Secret Service ignored the warning and allowed Trump on stage.
…
Rowe shouldn’t just be fired; he should be investigated for complicity in what increasingly looks like a plot to put President Trump at risk of assassination.

We’ve learned that the assassin flew a drone hours before the shooting. Rowe says that the Secret Service couldn’t for some reason. A technical failure?

Hard to believe. A kid could do it but not the Secret Service?
…
There are too many unanswered questions, and both the FBI and the Secret Service keep pleading ignorance and a need to investigate weeks after the shooting. They can’t answer the most basic questions, which means that they WON’T answer them. It is impossible to believe that they don’t know why posts were abandoned. That is not exactly rocket science to figure out. There is no deep psychological profile needed.
…
UPDATE: There is video of him [Crooks] on the roof shot from the grandstands behind Trump.

https://pjmedia.com/matt-margolis/2024/07/29/bongino-these-trump-assassination-bombshells-are-coming-soon-n4931153

He also revealed a couple of things that he expects outlets to widely report next week, including why counter-snipers waited so long to shoot the would-be assassin.

“I’ve got from as close a source as you’re gonna get to this, okay?” he said before going into detail about what he found out. “The reason they waited and hesitated was because they were unsure if that was in fact the locals who were supposed to have that post. Apparently, they waited for the muzzle flash, which is an unbelievable lapse in security, before they realized ‘That’s not us.‘”

Impossible to believe is right: the security people from Butler and the SS (variously) knew there was a suspicious character, saw a guy on the roof with a clear view of Trump, and waited for the muzzle flash?

They had no idea if he was a champion sharp-shooter or a dud, and even the latter could get lucky. He wasn’t wearing the usual LEO uniform-style clothing, he didn’t seem to handle his weapon like we’re used to seeing in pix of LEOs on the news, in TV shows, and in this instance.

But they weren’t sure if he was one of “us?”

Trump survived because the grace of God used his own impulsive nature to nudge a decision to use a Jumbotron chart at just the right time. (IMO; YMMV)

But the curious thing to me, putting all of the revelations together as they have dribbled out, is that Crooks did not seem to have any fear that he would be stopped for acting suspicious with his drone and bike and backpack and ladder and explosive-rigged car, be questioned about his range finder, be found climbing onto the roof, or be shot before he could act.

NONE.

Was he that naïve?
I suppose that’s possible.

Or did he have some assurances from someone that the improvised explosive device in his car really would create a distraction so he could escape after shooting Trump?
(Never mind that the forensics gurus afterward could identify the owner of the car.)

And, more importantly, that the sniper teams who would HAVE to respond to the “muzzle flash” would somehow not hit him?

Pick one of the doors.
They are both unbelievable.

https://twitchy.com/amy/2024/07/31/big-tech-ceo-crosses-the-rubicon-to-endorse-trump-for-president-n2399110

AesopFan:

I don’t know if the SS missed it at the time, though it wouldn’t surprise me.

However, I’m sure they’ve know it for some time and they know much more than they are saying now because they know how utterly damning it all is.

They are looking for their best “limited hangout route” — to put the coverup into Watergate terms.