posted
It seems like its become more and more common for public officials to make statements that are highly misleading.
For example, A few days ago, John Bolton gave an interview about the latest intelligence estimate on Iran (the one that says they stopped there weapons program 4 years ago).
As part of that interview, He said that there wasn't much difference between reactor grade enriched Uranium and weapons grade Uranium. He said that reactor grade Uranium was 2/3's of the way to weapons grade Uranium.
Naturally occuring Uranium is ~ 0.7% U235. Reactor grade uranium is 3 -4% U235. Weapons grade Uranium is 90% U235.
Now John Bolton may have been talking about something other than concentration when he said they weren't that different. He might have been referring to technological hurdles when he said 2/3s of the way to weapons grade. But that isn't what he said and it seemed to me that his words were a diliberate attempt to mislead people.
I'm curious if others have noticed this trend. I'm also wondering why, when the truth is readily available, Americans and the American media let these things slip by often without comment.
Posts: 12591 | Registered: Jan 2000
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posted
We definitely seem to live in an era where publically conveying a convincing (or at least plausible) argument is more important than an accurate one. Easier, as well.
To challenge an assertion, first one has to care. Then gather information to judge that assertion. Then state one's own case- at which point (to use your example) the challenged party may simply say something like "Of course, what I meant was that one one has acquired the facility to enrich uranium to reactor grade, it's a far less significant step to enrich to weapons-grade."
...Times being what they are, the challenging party can expect this to be accompanied by various allegations about their lack of patriotism/faith/optimism or excess of cynicism/hostility/need for self-indulgent intellectual superiority...
...Which makes it that much less attractive to "hit the books" once more in order to prove either A) that the challenged party could not possibly have meant that by way of what they actually said, B) that the second statement is also factually inaccurate, or C) both.
Rinse, lather, repeat... And with each cycle, the audience paying attention to the exchange diminishes, while a significant portion of the original audience goes away with only the original assertion. Which also makes being "first to the punch" frequently more important than strict accuracy, and encourages such tactics further. For the arguer, they've half-won just by being covered first; for the media, they risk losing their audience with prolonged and crticial coverage, making it more attractive to move on to a new story (preferably before one's competitors.) The audience itself is so deluged with "information" that gauging the accuracy of individual statements can easily become a full-time job in and of itself. And assuming one can find absolutely credible information on a given subject, how much more difficult in this age of subjectivity to get anyone else to follow the steps necessary to come to the same conclusions? Especially if they have a vested interest in believing otherwise?
So, how much interest is there in knowing the truth for the truth's sake?
...
Okay, I guess there was some steam to vent there. Yes, I've noticed that trend. Posts: 3826 | Registered: May 2005
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quote:I'm curious if others have noticed this trend.
I haven't noticed it as a trend - such misrepresentations have been common since I began following politics during the Reagan/Mondale election.
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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posted
And I think there's plenty of historical evidence that misrepresentations were common far back into at least American history.
Posts: 2409 | Registered: Sep 2003
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posted
Seems strange since I knew the differences between weapons grade uranium and reactor grade uranium from reading normal newspapers. Seems strange Bolton would think he could fudge the facts on that one.
Personally I think Bolton is an idiot, and that certainly explains his comments as well.
Posts: 14316 | Registered: Jul 2005
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posted
I think the biggest difference nowadays is that it's gotten a lot easier to fact-check such things.
Posts: 9945 | Registered: Sep 2002
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posted
i agree with Jon Boy. Lying isn't exactly new. The media never mentioned Kennedy's infidelity. Kennedy didn't mention it either.
Posts: 3354 | Registered: May 2005
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quote:Originally posted by Jon Boy: I think the biggest difference nowadays is that it's gotten a lot easier to fact-check such things.
It certainly is. Which is why I find it all the more perplexing that the mainstream media doesn't call public officials on this more often.
quote:i agree with Jon Boy. Lying isn't exactly new. The media never mentioned Kennedy's infidelity. Kennedy didn't mention it either.
Lying isn't new. But it is a relatively recent phenomenon for people to lie about facts that virtually any person can check in under a minute and never get called on it.
Posts: 12591 | Registered: Jan 2000
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quote:Personally I think Bolton is an idiot, and that certainly explains his comments as well.
I think it is more a reflection of the Bush administration thinking the American public are idiots, and I don't know that this is without cause. They got them to believe that Saddam was behind 9/11 and a host of other false things. Now that they want to be aggressive to Iran, why shouldn't they use the same sort of tactics that worked before?
Posts: 10177 | Registered: Apr 2001
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quote:Lying isn't new. But it is a relatively recent phenomenon for people to lie about facts that virtually any person can check in under a minute and never get called on it.
I agree with this part. I am amazed at how politicians can being transparently dishonest or even outright lie and peopel don't seem to care. Maybe I was too young to remember that it was like this before too.
I feel like there used to by this thing where people didn't accept and got very annoyed when you told them an obvious lie.
edit: There was a bit from the 2004 elections that really struck me. At the VP debate, Dick Cheney specifically talked about FactCheck.org and how people could go there to check the accuracy of what they wre saying...then proceded to be extremely dishonest, such that FactCheck's page on his statements was a long, long litinany of how what he was saying was not technically true.
Posts: 10177 | Registered: Apr 2001
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posted
Does the Uranium have to be 90% to make a weapon, or is that just standard for American weapons? What was the ... see, I don't even know what these numbers represent ... relative strength of our first bombs?
Posts: 11017 | Registered: Apr 2003
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posted
If the Uranium is not at about that level of purity, an explosive chain reaction won't occur, it'll just radiate a lot. Several countries have had nuclear tests we're pretty sure were fizzles possibly due to insufficient purity (since seismic detection didn't 'hear' a large enough explosion, but there was significant radiation).
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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Wikipedia, which has some of the same numbers, also said:
quote:U-233 is produced artificially by bombarding thorium-232 (Th-232) with neutrons. It can be made highly pure because it can be chemically separated from Th-232 rather than by mass, which is far easier. Therefore, there is no weapons-grade concentration for U-233.
posted
I don't see that on the current page, and I'm not sure what was meant by it. It is theoretically possible to make U233 weapons, it just isn't very easy, and would have downsides even if achieved in that the weapons would be easily detected.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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quote:Originally posted by pooka: Does the Uranium have to be 90% to make a weapon, or is that just standard for American weapons? What was the ... see, I don't even know what these numbers represent ... relative strength of our first bombs?
Well, if one wants to get technical about it, you can make a weapon- a dirty bomb- out of much lower-grade nuclear materials. Such a weapon works not through a nuclear reaction, but by dispersing particles of radioactive material with a conventional explosive.
(Hello, NSA! No, I'm not a terrorist, thanks! Move along!)
To the best of my knowledge, however, such weapons have only been hypothetical terrorist devices, not "conventional" military weapons. It's generally recognized that such a weapon would be far, far less destructive than an "actual" nuclear weapon.
Dagonee certainly has a point that public figures lying isn't something new, and one should always be careful of the "kids these days"/nostalgia effect. But it does seem like we keep discovering ugly new spins for old antisocial trends.
A majority of those eligible to vote in the U.S. don't do so; for many of those that do, there seems to be a certain trendy acceptability to believing as you choose and treating evidence to the contrary as, at best, rude.
It may be that the very excess of available information, combined with feelings of apathy and powerlessness in a large segment of the population, helps drive this phenomenon. "Sure, I can prove figure "x" wrong, but... Then what? I'm enlightened (assuming prior knowledge or presumptions therof didn't influence me to begin my search anyway), but what else does it gain me?"
ADD: Squicky's mention of Cheney bringing up Factcheck.org also brings another possibility to mind. It may be that for some, the very ability to check into the factuality of some statements leads people to believe that public figures won't bother to lie... Or that if they did, some other vigilant person would point it out. Human laziness is a powerful thing.
Posts: 3826 | Registered: May 2005
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quote:Well, if one wants to get technical about it, you can make a weapon- a dirty bomb- out of much lower-grade nuclear materials.
If you want to get really technical you can (and the US does) wake a weapon (an armor piercing missile) with Uranium that has a lower percentage U235 than found in nature (depleted Uranium).
However, the term "weapons grade" Uranium is most commonly used to mean Uranium with a high enough percent U235 to create a nuclear detonation.
Posts: 12591 | Registered: Jan 2000
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quote:I'm curious if others have noticed this trend.
I haven't noticed it as a trend - such misrepresentations have been common since I began following politics during the Reagan/Mondale election.
I guess what I mean by the "trend" is not a that politicians are lieing more, but that it seems like the mainstream media and the public seem less and less likely to call them on it.
There was a time in America when investigative journalism was prized, when interviewers were supposed to challenge politicians but that doesn't seem to happen any more.
In the John Bolton interview I mentioned above, a well prepared interviewer should have immediately challenged his statement. If she had asked "Isn't reactor grade enriched Uranium only 3 - 4% U235 while bomb grade is about 90% U235?", Bolton might have explained what he meant by 2/3rds or made some lame transparent excuse or whatever. But the misconception that reactor grade enriched Uranium and weapons grade enriched Uranium were almost the same thing would have been corrected.
If she just wasn't prepared for that direction in the interview, some other good reporter should have picked up on the misleading statement and followed up with an article or blurb pointing it out.
If politicians knew that interviewers and reporters weren't going to let their lies stand unchallenged, they might be less prone to lying. Of course they might simply learn to tell more believable lies.
Posts: 12591 | Registered: Jan 2000
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quote:I guess what I mean by the "trend" is not a that politicians are lieing more, but that it seems like the mainstream media and the public seem less and less likely to call them on it.
I'm still not sure it's that different. I wish I still had my examples from way back when. I collected a bunch about Latin America and even more about the budget. They were "corrected," if ever, only in op-eds or in the more partisan political press (The Nation, National Review, etc.). The same thing happens today, except now we have the Internet as a source of such corrections as well.
BTW, I'm not sure if your example is as terrible as it sounds. Based on your account of the interview ("He said that reactor grade Uranium was 2/3's of the way to weapons grade Uranium"), I'm guessing it's this one from NPR. If you go to about 2:45 in this interview, Bolton says:
quote:In fact, two-thirds of the work is consumed by getting to low-enriched uranium, so even if they're simply enriching to reactor grade levels, they're two thirds of the way to what they need to have weapons grade uranium.
Now, I don't know if the two-thirds is accurate, but it's clear from this quote that 2/3 applies to the work.
Of course, you might have heard a different interview or that interview might have been excerpted, so I don't know for sure this settles the question.
The lack of the actual percentages was startling - if Bolton didn't volunteer them, the reporter certainly should have stated them.
quote:Right, that's all that they're doing now. But, you know, even though you need enrichment to 90% of U-235 isotope, when you get to 3 to 5 percent, you've done two thirds of the work needed to get to highly enriched uranium.
That's not to say that your larger point that dishonesty is widespread is wrong, even if this example isn't egregious and if my recollection about the frequency and type of response that existed in the past is correct.
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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quote:In fact, two-thirds of the work is consumed by getting to low-enriched uranium, so even if they're simply enriching to reactor grade levels, they're two thirds of the way to what they need to have weapons grade uranium.
Speaking as an engineering, that is patently false. I was willing to grant him the benefit of a doubt the way I remembered the statement, but the new statement is outright wrong.
The Iranians are currently able to produce reactor grade Uranium with a 163 centrifuge cascade. To produce weapons grade uranium, would require 10 times as much work for the lowest recovery process concievable. A process with reasonably efficient recovery would require 30 to 80 times the work required to make reactor grade Uranium.
Posts: 12591 | Registered: Jan 2000
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quote:The Iranians are currently able to produce reactor grade Uranium with a 163 centrifuge cascade. To produce weapons grade uranium, would require 10 times as much work for the lowest recovery process concievable. A process with reasonably efficient recovery would require 30 to 80 times the work required to make reactor grade Uranium.
Then it is a good example of misleading statements and his statement was egregious.
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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quote:Well, if one wants to get technical about it, you can make a weapon- a dirty bomb- out of much lower-grade nuclear materials.
If you want to get really technical you can (and the US does) wake a weapon (an armor piercing missile) with Uranium that has a lower percentage U235 than found in nature (depleted Uranium).
However, the term "weapons grade" Uranium is most commonly used to mean Uranium with a high enough percent U235 to create a nuclear detonation.
Good point. Depleted uranium didn't immediately spring to mind because I think of it as more of a high-efficiency conventional weapon than one that relies on its radioactivity for its effect.
Posts: 3826 | Registered: May 2005
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quote:For example, A few days ago, John Bolton gave an interview about the latest intelligence estimate on Iran (the one that says they stopped there weapons program 4 years ago).
As part of that interview, He said that there wasn't much difference between reactor grade enriched Uranium and weapons grade Uranium. He said that reactor grade Uranium was 2/3's of the way to weapons grade Uranium.
Well, even if he really said this, Bolton is something of a hack who was appointed to positions he never should have held by people who did (do?) this stuff pretty regularly in order to float an agenda.
Remember the 'last throes' commentary? Same principle, same bunch of dudes. I'm idly hoping that the severity of the trend diminishes with the removal of the chief spoils appointee.
Or it could all stay the exact same as it was.
Posts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005
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posted
I have to wonder if the public officials are the ones we should be going after. Guys like John Bolton are puppets, you should be going after the guys pulling the strings. They'll never appoint someone with the integrity to REFUSE the party line during a public statement (I gave up that hope when Colin Powell gave his UN Address, that was a serious blow to my faith in the integrity of public officials), so you have to expect all you're ever going to hear from the public officials is what has been cooked up in a back office somewhere. Your beef is with the back office guys.
Once in awhile you get one to stand up AFTER they've left office and make a statement, and we've seen probably a dozen generals do that, and Christine Todd Whitman, former head of the EPA has done that too, in telling the press how she was pressured to publicly declare certain things (I won't get into it now unless someone expresses an interest) during her tenure that were untrue. I think she ended up resigning over it, which impressed me. But I would have been more impressed if she had refused to say it to begin with and resigned THEN, rather than going along with it.
Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004
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posted
Yes, I'm thinking that's the best way to look at it, at least as can be concerned when using Bolton as an example: he is a tool, and he imparts only that which his controlling interests desire him to with (as has been noted) little concern for objectivity over the desired stirring of support.
Posts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005
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