This is almost off-topic, but not quite!
Donald Trump has spoken several times now about how very difficult it would be for the Iranians to have moved and hidden 500 kg of uranium. Knowing that uranium is tremendously heavy, it occurred to me it should be easy to do the math.
Indeed it was. The density of uranium is 19.1 gm/cc. 30 seconds with a calculator reveals that 500 kg of uranium would be a small cube, just under 1 foot/ 30 cm on each site.
With a hazmat suit, it'd be a handy thing to stand on to change a lightbulb. :)
(Now try finding that somewhere in a country the size of Western Europe)
Edit to add:
I then got curious about how many A-bombs that could make, as a cubic foot of uranium, apparently enriched to about 60%, doesn't seem (at first sight!) to be all that much.
But according to
Wikipedia, the 'Little Boy' bomb dropped on Hiroshima contained 64 kg of enriched uranium. Most was enriched to 89%, but some was only 50%, for an average enrichment of 80%.
What that seems to imply is that
not much more would be needed to create 7 or 8 Hiroshima-sized weapons.
Nima Alkhorshid from the Dialogue Works YouTube channel, who is a Professor of Engineering in Brazil but is also half-Iranian, let it slip to Pepe Escobar
in this interview that he had sources in Iran who had told him that
Iran could do this in a couple of weeks.
This of course explains some of the apparent contradictions and disagreements between Trump, Tulsi, and everyone else who has ever commented on this.
It's a little like saying, 100% truthfully, that you don't have a gun.
But you have all the pieces. And you could assemble them to make a working gun in 10 minutes flat.
I posted about that
here on 14 June — two weeks ago(!) — as I, like Pepe, was so surprised Nima had suddenly said that.
Every intel analyst worth their salt must already know this. But barely any of these details seem to be discussed anywhere on the net.
:focus: