| Oooooh I love a good conspiracy! It really gets the brain juices going! As for the topic at hand, I don't know much about the incident (This is pretty much the first time I heard about this guy. For a moment there, I thought you were talking about Wen Ho Lee, who I know a little more about. I met his daughter once at UCLA when she was giving a speech there), but from what I've read in your post, it doesn't seem like an assassination... If it was, then I am impressed with the US government for orchestrating it so well that it stayed under the public's radar because, well, that's how assassinations should be. I don't think the US government would have prevented him from leaving the US unless they had one of two reasons to:
1. He was planning to pass secrets about nuclear weapons technology without permission.
2. His trust had been compromised. When you work at a pretty high up there lab in the US, that's not a very good thing.
I don't think they stopped him because he knew how to make a nuclear weapon or whatever. Any intuitive college grad with a degree in nuclear chemistry/physics could figure out how to make a crude nuclear device. It's getting your hands on the material that's tricky. You need super-refined U-235 to make a good nuke, and <0.8% of the Earth's crust has it. Uranium-238 does account for 99% of the uranium found in the Earth's crust but that it not weapons-grade (reactor-grade maybe). In order to refine U-238 to U-235, you need a couple thousand ultra-crazy-expensive centrifuges to be running for quite a number of months. Needless to say, U-235 is not an easy thing to get your hands on let alone a couple kilograms of it.... I think they stopped him because they had reasonable suspicion to believe that he was going to be conversing with people he was not supposed to be. |