"Why are you ruining the prestige of the [UN nuclear] agency for absurd US claims?" Mr. Ahmadinejad asked, speaking before a flag-waving crowd in the central Iranian town of Shahr-e Kord. "The Iranian nation is wise. It won't build two bombs against 20,000 [nuclear] bombs you have. But it builds something you can't respond to: Ethics, decency, monotheism and justice."The red herring that Ahmadinejad is presenting here, casting aspersions on the idea of Iran engaging in an "arms race" with the US or any other nuclear power, is part of the problem.
Contacted by the newspaper, the 76-year-old scientist, now retired, refused to discuss his work in Iran, saying only: “I’m not a nuclear physicist and I’m not a father of Iran’s nuclear programme.”
His former colleague confirmed Mr. Danilenko’s words. Vladimir Padalko, head of a company producing nanodiamonds, said experts from the IAEA and the U.S. State Department had interviewed him several times about Mr. Danilenko’s work in Iran.
“I explained to them that nanodiamonds have nothing to do with nuclear weapons,” Mr. Padalko told Kommersant.
He confirmed that Mr. Danilenko did work in Iran in the second half of the 1990s: “He worked there on nanodiamonds and read lectures, which later became the basis for a monograph on the subject.”"In a meeting with Ambassador on the eve of the two-week Board of Governors (BoG) and General Conference (GC) marathon of mid-September, IAEA Director General-designate Yukiya Amano thanked the U.S. for having supported his candidacy and took pains to emphasize his support for U.S. strategic objectives for the Agency. Amano reminded Ambassador on several occasions that he would need to make concessions to the G-77, which correctly required him to be fair-minded and independent, but that he was solidly in the U.S. court on every key strategic decision, from high-level personnel appointments to the handling of Iran's alleged nuclear weapons program."But it turns out that the foreign expert, who is not named in the IAEA report but was identified in news reports as Vyacheslav Danilenko, is not a nuclear weapons scientist but one of the top specialists in the world in the production of nanodiamonds by explosives.Are IPS and the blogger seriously arguing that if Danilenko had written reports on how to build a nuclear implosion device, you're supposed be able to find that information in some diamond synthesis journal, or any other publicly available resource? Look it up on JSTOR perhaps?
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The member state obviously learned that Danilenko had worked during the Soviet period at the All-Russian Scientific Research Institute of Technical Physics in Snezhinsk, Russia, which was well known for its work on development of nuclear warheads and simply assumed that he had been involved in that work.
However, further research would have revealed that Danilenko worked from the beginning of his career in a part of the Institute that specialised in the synthesis of diamonds. Danilenko wrote in an account of the early work in the field published in 2006 that he was among the scientists in the "gas dynamics group" at the Institute who were "the first to start studies on diamond synthesis in 1960".
Another chapter in the book covering the history of Russian patents related to nanodiamonds documents the fact that Danilenko's centre at the Institute developed key processes as early as 1963-66 that were later used at major "detonaton nanodiamond" production centres.
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Danilenko's recollections of the early period of his career are in a chapter of the book, "Ultrananocrystalline Diamond: Synthesis, Properties and Applications" edited by Olga A. Shenderova and Dieter M. Gruen, published in 2006.posted by Anything at 12:47 PM on November 11, 2011
"After a four-year search for hidden atomic facilities in Syria, U.N. officials appeared this week to have finally struck gold: News reports linked a large factory in eastern Syria to a suspected clandestine effort to spin uranium gas into fuel for nuclear bombs.
But after further probing by private researchers, Syria’s mystery plant is looking far less mysterious. A new report concludes that the facility and its thousands of fast-spinning machines were intended to make not uranium, but cloth — a very ordinary cotton-polyester.
“It is, and always has been, a textile factory,” said one of the researchers, Jeffrey Lewis, a nuclear policy expert at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies."« Older Barbara Grier,founder of the lesbian publishing co... | Climate Variability and Climat... Newer »
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He's full of it, of course. But I do like his style.
posted by Trurl at 9:51 AM on November 11, 2011 [3 favorites]