Where do we go from being brilliant?

Monday-November 22, 2010

Where do we go from being brilliant?

Last week, Vice President Joe Biden said that, “the reason people don’t get the president is that he’s so brilliant.” What does that say about us? I wrote last week that you have to be intelligent to run for president, but that you need to be smart when you are president.

We have had many leaders who have occupied the Oval Office. Some have been smart and some have been brilliant. Eisenhower won World War II with brilliant intelligence and was smart enough to become President. Kennedy demonstrated how smart he was to guide this country and Russia through the Cuban Missile Crisis. Reagan was an actor, he was not the best that Hollywood turned out. However, he was a brilliant politician and a smarter President. Because of that, he was responsible for bringing Russia to the point of collapse. George H.W. Bush then went onto complete the job and bring down the wall that Reagan was smart enough to ask Gorbachev to tear down.

Einstein was brilliant and he had the intelligence to develop nuclear energy. He was smart enough to know the dangers of what nuclear energy could do, if it wasn’t used for peaceful measures. This will be the focus over the next few weeks as the nuclear question raises the eyebrows of both the brilliant and more so the smart ones among us.

It was reported over the weekend that North Korea has, in fact, built nuclear centrifuges and are now producing fuel from these centrifuges. It has also been confirmed that Iran, Syria and North Korea have been trading secrets and exchanging technology, as these countries now move into the nuclear age. Siegfried Hecker, a Stanford Professor, was given a tour of one of these North Korean facilities. He walked away and in his words was “stunned” at what he saw. These are complex facilities capable of producing vast amounts of nuclear fuel. Over the course of the last fifteen years North Korea, with the aid of Iran and Syria, has been developing their nuclear programs. The question is, is it for peaceful or military purposes? The Obama administration said this is a “provocative act of defiance.” The Chairman of The Joint Chiefs, Mike Mullen, has serious concerns over this development.

North Korea would sell its technology and/or a bomb to any buyer with cash. If our enemies, such as Al Qaeda, could buy a bomb they would and it could be bought in North Korea. The fear is this could be a profit center for the regime of Kim Jong il.

It takes intelligence to produce the capability and develop the technology for producing nuclear fuel. It takes a brilliant person to cover their tracks in this process. It takes a smarter person to recognize this. Our intelligence sources are limited in detecting the development of these facilities. Spy satellites cannot detect the fingerprint that denotes a centrifuge facility. These buildings are constructed fast and are in many cases hidden from view. The facilities number in the hundreds and house thousands of centrifuges.
What exactly is nuclear fuel and a centrifuge?
Uran­ium is an element that is similar to iron. Like iron, you dig uranium ore out of the ground and then process it to extract the pure uranium from the ore. When you finish processing uranium ore, what you have is uranium oxide. Uranium oxide contains two types (or isotopes) of uranium: U-235 and U-238. U-235 is what you need if you want to make a bomb or fuel a nuclear power plant. But the uranium oxide from the mine is about 99 percent U-238. So you need to somehow separate the U-235 from the U-238 and increase the amount of U-235. The process of concentrating the U-235 is called enrichment, and centrifuges are a central part of the process.
U-235 weighs slightly less than U-238. By exploiting this weight difference, you can separate the U-235 and the U-238. The first step is to react the uranium with hydrofluoric acid, an extremely powerful acid. After several steps, you create the gas uranium hexafluoride.
Now that the uranium is in a gaseous form, it is easier to work with. You can put the gas into a centrifuge and spin it up. The centrifuge creates a force thousands of times more powerful than the force of gravity. Because the U-238 atoms are slightly heavier than the U-235 atoms, they tend to move out toward the walls of the centrifuge. The U-235 atoms tend to stay more toward the center of the centrifuge.
Although it is only a slight difference in concentrations, when you extract the gas from the center of the centrifuge, it has slightly more U-235 than it did before. You place this slightly concentrated gas in another centrifuge and do the same thing. If you do this thousand’s of times, you can create a gas that is highly enriched in U-235. At a uranium enrichment plant, thousands of centrifuges are chained together in long cascades.
At the end of a long chain of centrifuges, you have uranium hexafluoride gas containing a high concentration of U-235 atoms.
The creation of the centrifuges is a huge technological challenge. The centrifuges must spin very quickly -- in the range of 100,000 rpm. To spin this fast, the centrifuges must have:
1.Very light, yet strong, rotors
2. Well-balanced rotors
3. High-speed bearings, usually magnetic to reduce friction

Meeting all three of these requirements has been out of reach for most countries. The recent development of inexpensive, high-precision computer-controlled machining equipment has made things somewhat easier. This is why more countries are learning to enrich uranium in recent years.

Now you need to turn the uranium hexafluoride gas back into uranium metal. You do this by adding calcium. The calcium reacts with the fluoride to create a salt, and the pure uranium metal is left behind. With this highly concentrated U-235 metal, you can either make a nuclear bomb or power a nuclear reactor.

I am not intelligent enough to construct a facility to produce nuclear material. However, I am smart enough to see the dangers of this type of program. With men like Kim Jong il of North Korea, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran and Bashir Assad of Syria trading their secrets and technology, this will result in complete control of their regions. The bigger problem, as I see it, is what happens when they want control over each other.

I am smart enough to understand that in our system of government we have elections. Our elections make it possible for us to elect a brilliant leader’s or a smart leader’s. In Korea, Iran and Syria their people do not get a chance to elect their leaders. This is why these programs go unabated and the construction of these facilities goes unnoticed by the masses.

I am smart enough to understand that we have a Constitution and that our leaders are restrained by the scope of the constitution. When our leaders display tendencies that threaten our well being we have an opportunity and duty to use our voice. When our voice is spoken the rest of the world takes note. When our leaders hide behind their brilliant deductions it is viewed as weakness, but when our leaders are smart and use their brilliant deductions to an advantage our adversaries take note.

The problem I have is that the administration doesn’t think we understand the president, because he is so brilliant. However, I am smart enough to realize the consequences of him not being very smart. Take your choice do you want a brilliant leader or do you want a smart leader?

Gregory C. Dildilian
Founder and Executive Director
Pinecone Conservatives

A footnote: I am sure that our great leaders were smart. I am also sure that they were not so brilliant that we couldn’t understand them!