Date: November 23rd, 2017 11:28 PM
Author: thriller spruce cuckoldry stag film
The Index
Posted on November 23, 2017 by gcochran9
I heard an interesting true story: a CIA analyst, around the time the Iraq war started, said that anyone that didn’t believe in an Iraqi nuclear program was a racist.
The Baathists were broke & under sanctions. More than half the population was either in open revolt (Kurds) or still seething after revolt (Shi’ites). We were watching – spy satellites, recon planes, other ‘national technical means’ – and had seen nothing. There are five (now six) ways of preparing fissionable materials – and all are difficult, especially if they must also be invisible.
Iraqis were/are poorly educated and unskilled. Not much of an industrial economy – just oil.
And they’re dumb. Of course they didn’t have a nuclear program.
Personally, I keep (in my head) a rough index of national technical capability: what could country X do, what could they not do? Could Brazil build a fission bomb? Sure. Could they build LIGO, or the Large Hadron Colider? Probably not. Might we see important new mathematics come out of Nigeria – or any other new and important ideas? ? Nope. Holland? Quite possibly. For every country on Earth: the CIA does not do this, and is apparently unable to do so. Not just because they don’t know much – although they don’t – but because figuring it out would be racist.
An expanded version of that would rank corporations and other entities according their technical capabilities. What could GE do, what is Los Alamos capable of? Etc.
Advertisements
(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3807332&forum_id=2#34759636)