The BBC reports that Montenegro ‘chooses independence’. This vote is the final nail in the coffin of yet another bad idea foisted upon people by the European powers after World War One. Serbia and Montenegro were the last vestiges of the European construct of Yugoslavia, and now they are “divorced”.

The independent Republika Crna Gora [Republic of the Black Mountain] has less than a million people and is slightly smaller than Connecticut at 5,333 mile², but it has a coastline.

This change makes Serbia a landlocked country.

I’ll go further than Atrios in labeling Israel: Iran ‘months’ from making nukes the basest form of jingoistic garbage. Israel does itself no favors when Olmert spreads disinformation like this.

If I had access to the enriched uranium I could build a bomb in my workshop. If it was difficult the two minimum wage workers in Japan wouldn’t have been able to start the Tokaimura Criticality Accident with a couple of milk pails and a vat. [It was stopped with boric acid, normally used down here to kill roaches.]

The hard parts are not dying while you are building the bomb, controlling the conditions required to start the reaction, and getting the bomb where you want it.

The refining process takes time, because if you do it too quickly and don’t follow all of the steps, as happened in Japan, you will get an unintended chain reaction. This is a precision manufacturing process and it can’t be rushed. You need a highly educated work force with absolutely no suicidal tendencies to build nuclear weapons. One misstep and you lose your workforce, your facility, and your weapon in an instant.

Any fool can keep adding enriched uranium until a chain reaction starts. You can’t ask the Japanese workers about it, because they died of the radiation when they added one pail too many to the vat.

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A new weekend feature of Why Now.

Everyone agreed that in normal circumstances the proper method of dealing with the dissent would be to hold a discussion with those who held the differing views and explain why they were wrong, but these weren’t normal circumstances.

Many on the losing side had refused to accept their loss and continued to oppose the march of history and the need to safeguard the people, therefore this was no time to pause for the education of the dissenters. The people were threatened and the highest purpose was to protect the people.

The high ideals they all had long declared would have to wait for peaceful times. The individuals would understand that they had to give way to the greater good.

These were extraordinary times and extraordinary measures were needed to deal with them.

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