Terrorists, journalists stumble over A-bomb ‘recipe’

I don’t know whether to be more worried about the terrorists in Afghanistan or the media covering them.

Remember all of those news reports from Kabul last week after the Taliban fled? As the reports went, an abandoned safe house for the al-Qaida terrorist network contained virtual recipes, downloaded from the Internet, for making nuclear weapons.

The BBC included footage of the document in a report from the building, and a reporter from the Times of London wrote about his fright at finding instructions about using TNT to create a thermo-nuclear device. Soon, CNN and the Associated Press picked up on the story, and Homeland Security director Tom Ridge event talked about “materials relative to a nuclear threat” being found at al-Qaida sites, an apparent reference to the documents.

I don’t know about you, but I find the thought of fanatical anti-American terrorists developing nuclear weapons more than a little disconcerting. This, along with the possibility of a bioterror attack, has been among the scarier issues we’ve been forced to confront since Sept. 11.

But, as a Connecticut computer professional watched the BBC report, he found that it didn’t quite pass the smell test. With a few searches and clicks he was able to locate the documents on the Internet — in an archived 1979 parody called “How to Build an Atom Bomb,” part of a series of how-to’s that also included “Let’s Make a Time Machine” and “Let’s Make an Anti-Gravity Machine.” He passed the info on to Rotten.com, which wrote about it last week.

Like any good parody, the supposed A-bomb instructions look legitimate on the surface, but silly if you look a little deeper. The instructions include such lines as “use rubber cement to hold the Plutonium dust together” and “hide the completed device from the neighbors and children.”

Apparently, the al-Qaida have been a little slow to catch on to American humor, and the fact that the main purpose we’ve found for the Internet is goofing off. I suppose you don’t have much time for that sort of thing when you’re busy focusing on your hatred for the infidels.

While it’s humorous to think that the al-Qaida are bungling around with what they scrounge up on the Internet, I do have two requests: 1) I want the instructions to that time machine so I can build one and go back to a time when people didn’t worry about terrorists acquiring nuclear weapons; and 2) I want reputable journalists such as those at the BBC and the London Times to read documents a little more closely before using them to scare the hell out of us.

But failing that, at least the Web’s humor is slowing al-Qaida down, if only a little. It’s a relief to know the Internet is still on our side.