Nukular softballs and nipr.mil
Bhopal.Net is a site for and about the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal, which is an "umbrella organisation of all the groups who have joined forces to campaign for justice for the gas survivors of Bhopal."
There's an old version of their site still online that contains some interesting stuff about the US military accessing the site.
The two things that most caught my attention are:
- A debunking of the notion that a softball-sized piece of highly enriched uranium or plutonium could be turned into a briefcase-sized nuclear bomb. "[T]he plutonium ... would require a beryllium-polonium initiator and 5,300 lbs of high explosive to crush the core into a critical mass." Thirty Seconds Of Research (TM) neither confirms nor denies that claim, and even if it's true, it's not saying that that amount of uranium or plutonium can't be made into a bomb; it's just saying that it can't be made into a tiny bomb. The softball refers to the size of the core, not the size of the bomb.
- A discussion of the mysterious nipr.mil domain. nipr.mil is, according to the Bhopal.Net folks, "a hush-hush web proxy that acts as a gateway for hundreds of U.S. military domains in order to hide their identities. It was established by the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) in response to a memorandum (CM-5 1099, INFOCOM) issued in March 1999 by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, calling for 'actions to be taken to increase the readiness posture for Information Warfare.' 'Uncontrolled Internet connections,' the document says, 'pose a significant and unacceptable threat to all Department of Defense information systems and operations.'" When a non-military sysadmin emailed the nipr.mil sysadmin to ask what the domain was for, he was told: "You know all you need to know." More nipr info (and even more) can be found at carnicom, and still more at notbored.org.