Why would you load a nuke you aren't intending to drop on a plane that you're sending to do a conventional bombing mission over hostile territory?

Nukes would simply be a part of the plane's arsenal, if such an arsenal were verifiable at all. My point was that the article makes no assertion about a nuclear payload actually being delivered. Whether or not the jets were armed thusly is also open to speculation - nuclear missiles are not necessarily marked as such, such that they are visible to observers. Nevertheless, it's clear that US sorties do fly armed with nukes occasionally, whether or not they are delivered.

I'm not sure what's in "bunker buster" bombs... but its plausible that they might use uranium-238 to make them. Uranium is extremely dense, and thus falls HARD... but only uranium-235 can be used for nuclear weapons, and you can't make U235 from U238... so there's no risk in flying over enemy territory with U238 tipped weapons.

Maybe the reporter got the types of uranium mixed up, and thought they were flying with nukes...

Although I'm pretty sure modern US nukes use plutonium...

--
http://bexhuff.com
Of COURSE you can trust the US Government! Just ask the Indians.

www.aljazeera.net/etc

One speculation: maybe Syria is going to invite an outside party to examine the site and they want an explanation for any detected radioactivity.

Precisely how is it again that we became certain that this site is the one in question, anyway? Through what channels of info?

...and Paul Brannan at ISIS based on commercial overheads, confirmed off the record by the IC. Albright has a very, very good rep.

"A survey data set containing imputed values should not be analyzed uncritically as if all the data were real values." ~ Graham Kalton

...and he doesn't even have relevant academic creds, nor any indication that he's ever done this kind of work before.

Brannan was part of the WMD crowd when the Iraq invasion was being planned. Although he questioned some of the "evidence" (you'd had to be an idiot not to), he never came out against the invasion.

Another "think tanker".

...mixed up. This particular Paul Brannan was an undergraduate during the runup to Iraq - are you maybe thinking of the Paul Brannan that works for the Beeb?

Funny, where I come from "think tank" isn't a pejorative. Or is it only when one disagrees with them?

"A survey data set containing imputed values should not be analyzed uncritically as if all the data were real values." ~ Graham Kalton

I said "Brannan" in connection with Iraq, when I meant "Albright", his boss. But I'm not impressed with Brannan's credentials. From the ISIS website:

"Brannan graduated from Franklin and Marshall College in 2004 with a B.A. in Government and a concentration in International Affairs. He has been with ISIS since September 2004."

That's it--the whole of Mr. Brannan's CV. That really qualifies him as a satellite surveillance expert, doesn't it?

Albright was the one I was thinking of. From The Great WMD Hunt:

Take the ubiquitous David Albright, a former U.N. inspector in Iraq. Over the years, Albright had been cited in hundreds of news articles and made scores of television appearances as an authority on Iraqi weapons. A sample prewar quote from Albright (CNN, 10/5/02): "In terms of the chemical and biological weapons, Iraq has those now. How many, how could they deliver them? I mean, these are the big questions."

But when the postwar weapons hunt started turning up empty, Albright made a rather candid admission (L.A. Times, 4/20/03): "If there are no weapons of mass destruction, I'll be mad as hell. I certainly accepted the administration claims on chemical and biological weapons. I figured they were telling the truth. If there is no [unconventional weapons program], I will feel taken, because they asserted these things with such assurance." (Recently, Albright has become a prominent critic of the government's handling of prewar intelligence on Iraq.)

It's Albright whom I really question. The facility in question was built in 2003. Now the story is that because the bombed site's been cleared, it must have been a reactor.

What the story doesn't have is independent verification. "Ubiquitous" certainly does describe the guy.

..."when one disagrees with them."

As to Mr. Brannan's credentials, well, how to put this delicately? I'd stack three years of working day in and day out with overheads at ISIS up against the other talking heads on this one - yours, mine, the Pope's for that matter. In another life I did a significant bit of microscopy (pretty much every day for six years) - it, like image interpretation near as I can tell is something one learns through practice over time. I'm sure there are folks that have much better technical skills than Mr. Brannan out there, but frankly this one just don't seem to require "da mad skillz". It's a great big building with unusual proportions that are allegedly broadly consistent with a known nuclear reactor profile, in a semi-secluded location, that was apparently struck, destroyed, and the location sanitized, post-strike. Near as I can tell, none of that is difficult to verify and all elements save the BDA rest on minimal technical interpretative skill. In brief, one either believes that the signature is indicative of a reactor and post-strike sanitization or one does not, but the signature itself is not terribly difficult to characterize.

Though Jeffery's tongue in cheek id as a potential Lego storage warehouse is highly amusing, frankly I think there's a real good chance he's got the short end of the argument on this one. Folks just don't build massively robust 24 metre tall structures shaped like cubes for storage - lots of warehouses are that tall, but they have a strong predisposition towards much, much larger areal footprints (in the storage biz, one tends to spread laterally of preference to spreading vertically when given the option). They also tend to integrate the storage facility into the transport net, which this structure is manifestly not. Similarly the signature seems inconsistent with what we know of the other alternatives (SCUD assembly, bioweapons research and production) elsewhere in the world, including quite specifically in Syria itself. I dunno what it was, but I danged sure know that the argument that it was consistent with a reactor ain't a bad one, and it ain't one that I've seen anyone falsify yet.

As to the build date of the structure, per Jeffrey's commentators, we know it predates 2003 - it is present on imagery shot on 8 September 2002, but not present on imagery from 26 May 2001.

"A survey data set containing imputed values should not be analyzed uncritically as if all the data were real values." ~ Graham Kalton

But the AEI is a "think tank" -

Tobacco issues
In 1980, the American Enterprise Institute for the sum of $25,000 produced a study in support of the tobacco industry titled, Cost-Benefit Analysis of Regulation: Consumer Products. The study was desgined to counteract "social cost" arguments against smoking by broadening the social cost issue to include other consumer products such as alcohol and sacchrin. The social cost arguments against smoking hold that smoking burdens society with additional costs from on-the-job absenteeism, medical costs, cleaning costs and fires.[3] The report was part of the global tobacco industry's 1980s Social Costs/Social Values Project, carried out to refute emerging social cost arguments against smoking.

[edit]

- and the Fraser Institute is a "think tank" -

There are also questions about how much the institute's work is shaped by its corporate funders.
In 1999, the Fraser Institute sponsored two conferences on the tobacco industry: "Junk Science, Junk Policy? Managing Risk and Regulation" and "Should government butt out? The pros and cons of tobacco regulation." [Ibid]
More recently, the Fraser Institute has led the campaign to deny the science behind and the dangers of climate change, with several of its fellows and authors signing letters to political leaders and writing Op Eds to that effect. ExxonMobil donates to the Fraser Institute for "climate change" work.
Professor Ross McKitrick, author of the popular book that denies climate change "Taken By Storm" and known for his opposition to the Endangered Species Act in Canada, is also a senior fellow at the Fraser Institute.

Yes, the term "think tank" is now beginning to carry a well-merited pejorative connotation, but that has less to do with what you "take it as" than it does with the reality that at least some "think tanks" today do little of what might be thought of as traditional academic "thinking", and exist more as PR agencies to bring ideology to market or intentionally undermine solid scientific research that threaten the interests that pay them for their conclusions.

The role of at least some think tanks long ago moved from "thinking about solutions" to "thinking about marketing an ideology or agenda" or "thinking about ways we can defend industry 'X' from damaging research". I'm not tarring ISIS with that brush. But the poor reputation that "think tanks" are beginning to suffer from is at least in part a direct result of the actions of some "think tanks" themselves, and can't be quite so breezily dismissed.

...impressed with dismissing someone like Albright as a "think tanker" when he offers up evidence that folks choose not to like is that it bespeaks a distinct lack of familiarity with who he is, what he believes, and what he and his institution stand for. More importantly it's indicative of not being familiar with his track record, other than via selective googling, of course. Finally and most pertinently it's the antithesis of what this forum used to be about - weighing the evidence on its merit, rather than lazily dropping the ad hom bomb.

But hey, what the fuck would I know? I'm just another think tanker.

"A survey data set containing imputed values should not be analyzed uncritically as if all the data were real values." ~ Graham Kalton

picked up a pejorative connotation as a question in the abstract; that was me answering the question in the abstract (granted it was obviously meant rhetorically, but I disagreed with the underlying assumption).

No disrespect to your own integrity, or that of your institution (which I don't even know the name of, but I seriously doubt is a pack of rent-a-scumbag I'll-argue-the-Earth-is-flat-for-ten-drachma sophists like the FI or AEI), or ISIS, was intended.

...by generalizations on this topic. Me, personally, I don't think the term should be used as a pejorative - if one wants to go after individuals (and I will accept even some institutions) with some precision, hey, have at it - but I'm very deeply concerned by the trend to broad strokes. Though it is currently fashionable to disdain places like AEI, WINEP, Hudson, and Brookings I have found they defy easy characterization. As an example, my shop is nothing like AEI or Hudson (on quite the opposite end of the ideological spectrum, in fact), yet I've had productive workings with my counterparts (to be clear, not in their foreign policy shops) in both of those organizations. We certainly don't agree and we come to radically different conclusions and policy prescriptions, but it simply isn't as simple as saying that these guys are devil spawn or know-nothings. Me, I fear the current backlash against independent institutions that sponsor folks who call it like they see it, ideologically motivated or not. I've seen the response of the internet mediated punditocracy and I find that it simply can't cope effectively with complex issues.

"A survey data set containing imputed values should not be analyzed uncritically as if all the data were real values." ~ Graham Kalton

An above ground detonation would increase global atmospheric background radiation. This would be detectable by just about any instrumentation that was more sensitive than a basic Geiger counter. I can recall doing this in the mid '60s while above ground testing was going on.

Any such increase would have been noted by too many observers to put the toothpaste back into that tube.

Yeah, and the neighbors would be pretty outraged about fallout. Hard to keep the lid on something like this.

Little trial run. Show of force for Iran.

If there was a reactor and Syria denied its existence, then they can't really come out and tell the world can they?

Just supposition.

I haven't a clue if this is true.

I did inhale.

construction date of the “Box-on-the-Euphrates” in 2001

http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/1694/acw-readers-rock-the-box

there is a growing consensus among US government and independent analysts that the suspicious target was a nuclear facility.

Whether or not the facility was nuclear,

Washington did not find the Israeli evidence altogether persuasive

Is it, is it not, is it, is it not..... someone please drop a bomb on this story, a nuclear one if possible.