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My favorite film with Johnny Depp in the case is Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man, who's Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai I'm also able to watch again and again (courtesy of IFC, the arts film theater for POAs). Gary Farmer as Arnold Joseph in Smoke Signals, now there's an eyefull of Indian actors and actresses. My likes and dislikes are mine, but a subscription to Variety yeilds this gem:

Johnny Depp has optioned the nonfiction book "The Bomb in My Garden," written by Iraq's top nuclear scientist Mahdi Obeidi and People magazine foreign correspondent Kurt Pitzer, to make into a film. "Bomb" is the story of how, after Saddam Hussein's capture, Obeidi tried to turn himself and his secrets over to the U.S., only to find the CIA and other government agencies didn't believe him. The journalist hatched a scheme to get Obeidi and his family out of the country before he was killed by insurgents who wanted to silence him. Obeidi gave over secrets that included a uranium enrichment device he buried in his yard.

Posted: Thurs., Mar. 10, 2005, 10:00pm PT

Variety categorizes Mr. Depp as "Actor, Director, Producer, Writer", and lists Infinitum Nihil as the Production Company (Film Development).

We'll have to wait and see if the treatment of centrifuges is reality-based. Recently I'd an exchange of notes with someone who asked that I write "for an intelligent 5th grader", a possibility I confront most Saturday mornings when listening to WMPG's "Chickens are People Too" show -- an hour long show produced by a few children in Elementary and Middle School, that manages to entertain me or my 8-and-unders during bannocks and bacon time.

Q: Explain why the scenario of 200 centrifuges spread around Isfahan and Natanz doing gas enrichment of the uranium produced at Bushehr is completely implausible.

A: Is that the problem statement?

Are the centrifuges "spread around" or organized in some discreet number (much smaller than N) of cascades?

How many SWU are being performed at each cascade?

As of last month, an answer to the first question was given, and I'll find out the answer, but the answer to the second question, the real question, was 0.

Q: Are all 200 being inspected by El Baradei, is that what you are saying?

All of the functional cascades, yes.

Q: How could you know if some are not.

Is that the problem statement? I don't think so.

Assuming tails of 0.25%, a plant with a capacity of 3100 kg-SWU/yr will produce 15 kg of 90% U-235 from a natural uranium feed.

A single centrifuge might produce about 30 grams of HEU per year, about the equivalent of five SWU. As as a general rule of thumb, a cascade of 850 to 1,000 centrifuges, each 1.5 meters long, operating continuously at 400 m/sec, would be able to produce about 20-25 kilograms of HEU in a year, enough for one weapon. One such bomb would require about 6,000 SWU.

A typical centrifuge facility appears to have a capacity of 10-20 SWU/meter square, and to consume in the range of 40-50 kWh per SWU. A facility capable of producing one bomb per year would thus require about 600 square meters of floor space, and consume in the range of about 100 kWe.

So how many cascades of how many centrifuges out of a set of 200 total does El Baradei (and staff) have to overlook before a significant result is possible in theory?

Besides thinking that the Iranians aren't taking the risk of lying about anything as trivially disproved as having flowed UF6 into a cascade, or having produced a product assay > 5.5% at any point in time, and that the Iranians aren't taking the risk of embarking on HEU production, which gets to another area of arcane nonsense, weaponizing issues and usage scenarios,I frankely don't care how many centrifuges el Baradi misses, so long as the number not accounted for is a small part of a thousand, since that puts any putative HEU program several years away from having a mass sufficient to form a first implosion device.

Until that point, its angels on heads of pins, or a symbolic sufficiency and necessity test for "rational" war that is actually one of religion.

I don't know how to explain SWU standard formula to 5th graders.

P = U/[V(N_p) + [(N_p-N_f)/(N_f-N_w)]V(N_w) - (1+[(N_p-N_f)/(N_f-N_w)])V(N_f)]

Buried within that are the concepts of molar concentrations as fractions, and seperative potential functions for each concentration, natural logs, at least two of which are things I don't expect 5th graders to know (fractions, percentages, and so on, which is covered in schools maths at grade 5).

As Xamichee, he who talks loud say nothing, Farmer quotes William Blake's "The Everlasting Gospel" to the Indian-hating trading post missionary, played by Alfred Molina:

The vision of Christ that thou dost see
Is my vision's greatest enemy

The final 20 minutes of the film are a gem. To be a commercial success Depp's "Bomb" will have to follow the Nukes-is-Scarry-Stuff line. As an art film the truer surrender problem -- the choice between waiting to get shot by Chalbi's goons doing "scout" for the Marine Expeditionary Forces, or sneaking past the Occupation military to the safety offered Occupation political operatives, who started the war using the "threat" buried in real life in Obeidi's garden -- as an art film "Bomb" could be a grittier film. A more important film. We'll just have to wait and see because Michael Moore didn't option the book.

Posted by EBW at May 9, 2005 04:32 AM | TrackBack