Mood:  on fire

Two former Bush administration officials said they believed that the Tinners,  brothers Urs and Marco and their father Friedrich,  had provided information to the C.I.A. while the father and two sons were still working for Pakistan and that some of their information helped American and British officials intercept shipments of centrifuges en route to Libya in 2003. Several published reports have asserted that Urs Tinner became an informant for U.S. intelligence before the breakup of the smuggling ring, but that has not been officially confirmed.

The electronic design for a bomb itself among material seized from some of Dr. Khan’s top lieutenants, including the Tinners.
But this is the second weapons design found in Pakistan's smuggling network. The first was for an unwieldy but effective Chinese design from the mid-1960s that Libya acknowledged obtaining from the network before it surrendered its bomb-making equipment in 2003.

Both the new and the old designs exploit the principle of implosion, in which a blast wave from a sphere of conventional explosives squeezes inward with tremendous force to compress a ball of bomb fuel, starting the chain reaction and the atomic explosion.  The new design was powerful but miniaturized — using about half the uranium fuel of the older design to produce a greater explosive force. Pakistan fired the miniaturized version in 1998. The new design was small enough to fit atop a family of medium-range missiles that derive from North Korea’s Nodong class of missiles. Those missiles include Pakistan’s Ghauri and Iran’s Shahab. All are about four feet wide, and any warhead atop them must, by definition, be smaller.

 Tinner Family

nuclear device

Syrian nukes