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Archive of stories pre April 2007 | News submitted by: MIB
The man who left behind notes, drawings and technical reference books in a two-story private house in Kabul was probably someone with at most an undergraduate education in chemistry and physics who knew how to cook up crude explosives.
By JAMES GLANZ with DAVID ROHDE
The man also had a taste for designing hopelessly futuristic weaponry and little understanding of the practical difficulties that would be involved in building it.
In voluminous sketches and jottings almost resembling notes for a would-be defense contractor's brochure, the man describes his concept for an ultrafast, stealthy fighter jet he names the Aladdin Ghoul.
"Welcome to Aladdin concept," the notes say in English. "It is designed with the fundamental guidelines that might seem ridiculously exaggerated, but in fact these fundamental guidelines are easily attainable."
Unfortunately for the Taliban's out-of-the-box thinker, his favored weaponry and propulsion systems — one of which may be based on an article in the November 2000 issue of Scientific American — would either be useless anywhere but in the vacuum of space or inapplicable to jets for practical reasons.
"Some of this stuff could be done by a good high school science fair student," said Douglas Olson, a chemist who manages blast testing at Wilfred Baker Engineering in San Antonio, Tex. "It's doodling concepts on paper." But Dr. Olson added: "This guy's been exposed to a number of concepts. That means he's been around awhile."
References to nuclear weapons, probably by the same person, may suffer from similar faults. But chemical formulas written by him and by another man, a Bosnian, who left notes behind at the Taliban defense ministry in the same quarter of Kabul, show clearly that they knew how to make crude explosives.
In an apparent reference to the Oklahoma City bombing by Timothy McVeigh, one chemical formula at the defense ministry is annotated in Bosnian, "Was used in Oklahoma."
The intellectual resources available to the creator of the Aladdin Ghoul are not difficult to trace. Found in the house were pages from "Principles of Physics" by Michael Nelkon, a British physicist and educator who died in 1995.
First published in the 1950's and reprinted as recently as 1981, Dr. Nelkon's book is the equivalent of an advanced high school or beginning undergraduate text.
Photocopied pages from what is apparently a basic chemistry text covering standard topics like molecular bonding and inorganic reactions were also found.
But in a series of pages devoted to weapons, there are also detailed page-and-volume citations to a book identified only by its title, "Chemistry and Technology of Explosives."
Dr. Olson said the book was almost certainly a standard if somewhat dated reference book in his field by Tadeusz Urbanski, who is identified on the title page as having been in the department of technology at Warsaw Polytechnic. The book was first published in 1965 and is listed on Amazon.com as being out of print.
On papers at the house with notations like "how to make the bomb" and "how far you should be from the weapon," the writer includes chemical formulas for at least one World War I-era explosive related to TNT, called picric acid, which is easy to make but seldom used — except by terrorists — because it often explodes accidentally.
"If you wanted to make some in your bathtub and you were not as concerned about dying, you could make it more easily than you could make plastic explosive," said Douglas Raber, a terrorism expert and the director of the board on chemical sciences and technology at the National Research Council.
But the Aladdin Ghoul would be different. The writer calls it a "totally new unconventional fighter plane" and says it could be powered by a "hydrazine-fueled rocket" and a "simple solid state ramjet." Its "subdued heat signature" would make it almost impossible to detect, he says.
Referring to research at "University of Texas, Houston," he says it could have a devastating cannon based on electromagnetism.
The cannon may refer to research on a concept called a plasma jet by Edgar Bering, a professor of physics and electrical engineering at the University of Houston, and colleagues at the nearby Johnson Space Flight Center.
The plasma jet was described in a November 2000 article in Scientific American by the leader of the effort, Dr. Franklin R. Chang-Diaz, an astronaut and a physicist. The plasma jet, still in its research stage, was designed as a propulsion system for long space voyages.
Researchers said the Aladdin Ghoul's propulsion systems would be impractical, and the supercannon would require nearly 10 percent of the entire worldwide output of electricity to be operated inside Earth's atmosphere.
"To run a plasma jet at sea level is completely prohibitive," Dr. Bering said. "You suck up all your energy in ionizing the atmosphere."
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