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Footballer Grenddy Perozo (L), of the Venezuelan national squad, marks An Chol Myok of North Korea during a friendly match held in San Felipe-Yaracuy, some 300 km from Caracas, on March 4, 2010. The Match ended 1-1. AFP PHOTO/Juan Barreto

Because nothing involving North Korea is ever easy.

North Korea, which qualified for the World Cup in South Africa, met Venezuela in a friendly, but didn’t manage to bring along uniforms and just generally acted like North Koreans:

As part of preparations for its first World Cup appearance in 44 years, North Korea was in Venezuela on Thursday for a friendly. The match ended in a 1-1 tie. But with the North Koreans, it’s never that cut and dried. According to reports in Venezuela, the Koreans lost their uniforms at some point and had to borrow replacement kits from the Venezuelans. Because of the intense heat, the Koreans refused to start on time, a delay that resulted in the match being stopped 10 minutes early because the field in San Felipe didn’t have lights. The teams will play again Saturday in Puerto la Cruz. (A game against Chile was canceled because of the earthquake.) Why do I have a feeling we’re going to hear many more wacky tales from North Korean camp over the next few months?

As you can see from the image, the DPRK team had to play with tape over the Venezuelan crest on the borrowed kit.

Apparently the jerseys arrived for the second game, which Venezuela won 2-1.

The Missile Defense Agency released a new logo yesterday. I was contemplating some witty commentary regarding alternate logos, maybe two streaks of light just seeming to miss one another, or maybe just moaning that it would be best if they gave the dough to Raytheon for the SM-3 instead of some design firm.

I was even planning on tracking down that Bloom Country strip in which the Defense Department sends Opus $900 million, mistaking him for “Mr. Spock, chief science officer for ‘Star Trek’ defense research.” Opus designs “Net Wars”, a strategic defense concept in which the earth is covered with a “space net” comprising $500 billion in small bills, and testifies before Congress.

(The strip helped Berke Breathed win the Pulitzer Prize. If someone could scan the strips from Billy and the Boingers Bootleg, I’d love a copy.)

But no commentary on the new MDA logo could best this little wonder from Frank Gaffney (with help from another nut-job), who has taken the whole “Obama as secret Muslim” thing where no wing-nut has gone before:

Team Obama’s anti-anti-missile initiatives … seem to fit an increasingly obvious and worrying pattern of official U.S. submission to Islam and the theo-political-legal program the latter’s authorities call Shariah.

What could be code-breaking evidence of the latter explanation is to be found in the newly-disclosed redesign of the Missile Defense Agency logo (above). As Christopher Logan helpfully shows, the new MDA shield appears ominously to reflect a morphing of the Islamic crescent and star with the Obama campaign logo.

[snip]

Even as the administration has lately made a show of rushing less capable sea- and land-based short-range (theater) missile defenses into the Persian Gulf in the face of rising panic there about Iran’s actual/incipient ballistic missile and nuclear capabilities, Team Obama is behaving in a way that — as the new MDA logo suggests — is all about accommodating that “Islamic Republic” and its ever-more aggressive stance.

Watch this space as we identify and consider various, ominous and far more clear-cut acts of submission to Shariah by President Obama and his team.

Seriously, Frank Gaffney believes that Barack Obama has a secret plan to subject the United States to Shariah, which he has decoded based on the logo for the Missile Defense Agency.

This is not, as far as I can tell, Juvenalian satire. Indeed, an aspiring satirist could hardly go as far as Gaffney without inviting the criticism that his caricature was too crude.

Wow.

Update | 12:54 I just noticed that Media Matters, Al Kamen in his In the Loop column in the Post and Max Bergmann at Think Progress all beat me to it.

What is more festive that a batch of Holiday Fudge?

A recipe for Holiday Fudge on WMD stationary!

My friend Stephanie Kaplan — wonk and entrepreneur — sat down to whip up a batch (she’s a wonderful cook) when she noticed that “sometimes, I find my recipes written down on the most wonktastic of stationery.”

Indeed.

Stephanie was kind enough to share the recipe, which is jotted down on a piece of stationary from The Commission to Assess the Organization of the Federal Government to Combat the Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction.

4 1/2 c sugar
1 c (13 oz) evaporated milk
1/2 c (1 stick) butter
1/2 lb marshmallows
2 sqs (1 oz each) unsweetened chocolate
2 pkgs (12 oz ttl.) of semi-sweet chocolate chips
3 bars of sweet chocolate (4 oz each)
1 tbsp of vanilla

For those who don’t remember, the Deutch Commission, which released its final report in 1999, had a troubled history. Newt Gingrich tried to kill it off and, along with Ben Gilman, eventually forced Bob Gallucci to resign. Suzanne Spaulding, the Executive Director, summarized the Final Report in The Nonproliferation Review.

No good ever comes of Commissions, I say. Bah humbug.

Fudge on the other hand, that’s wonderful stuff.

Anyway, let me know how the fudge turns out.

Dear god.

The best part is the sanction, bomb, marry game.

In 1986, Time Magazine hosted a conference in Washington on the Strategic Defense Initiative. You know it is the 1980s because a news magazine was hosting a conference on nuclear weapons.

The images from the conference, by the way, are wonderful. They show several prominent defense figures in the full glory of the 1980s. Which brings me to to …

… you know it was the 1980s because …

Future Strategic Posture Commissioner Keith Payne has the same haircut from his high school yearbook photo.

© Diana Walker/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

Future Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Walt Slocombe has not yet begun experimenting with facial hair. Indeed, it is not even clear he could grow facial hair.

© Diana Walker/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

Future Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics Ash Carter still feels it necessary to raise his hand before making a comment.

© Diana Walker/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

I encourage you to browse the archive and make your own captions in the comments.

Posted without comment.

The two seat SR-71 never got to fulfill its primary mission, thank goodness! Or is it an A-12?

I am never so glad my phone has a camera as when I am in Los Angeles. The city has an amazing density of bizarre and interesting sights just begging to be photographed. Admittedly, most of these were in Pershing Park on my most recent trip but the California Science Center’s parking lot has to have the most unique one. On a small plaque I read that the airframe I have always associated with the SR-71 “Blackbird” is actually two different aircraft (whose airframes do differ but I hadn’t realized the importance of that before). There I learned that the CIA used the A-12 for strategic reconnaissance while the Air Force planned on using the SR-71 for battle damage assessment after a nuclear war. It would fly over the decimated corpse of a country targeted by US nuclear weapons and report back on how effective the attacks had been.

This relic of the Cold War reminded me of a Cold War fossil that I came across recently: the “Dead Hand” of the Soviet Union. This included a constellation of satellites that I believe the Soviet Union put in orbit around the Earth to record and rebroadcast nuclear launch orders after Moscow was destroyed. The “fossilized” remains of these satellites are buried in the “bump” of objects around 1450 km altitude:

The altitude of objects in low Earth orbit. The arrow indicates the orbit of the Dead Hand system

Russia has gone on to continue launching satellites into these orbits as part of a commercial “Record and Broadcast system.” I’m not sure what the business model is for such satellites and if any wonk-readers understand it, I’d be glad to know.

It would be fun to say that these two systems represent the national characters of these countries: the SR-71 represents the “optimistic” US while the Dead Hand represents the “fatalistic” Russians. But I suspect that both countries had battle damage assessment and automated launch code release systems, we just haven’t discovered those relics yet. In any case, I find both systems equally bizarre if in different ways.

I am working on a series of longer posts related to monitoring the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, but wanted to share an amusing paragraph from the March 2009 edition of Science & Technology Review, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s magazine. (I love S&T Review, by the way.)

I sometimes joke that, if the intelligence community detected North Korea preparing to fire a nuclear-armed missile at the United States, the DNI would warn the President that preemption might compromise sources and methods. Furthermore, his analysts would be totally bummed about the radionuclide and weapons effect data they didn’t get to collect.

I kid because I love the IC.

But I’ve never seen the evil-deed-as-intelligence-bonanza phenomenon quite as clearly as I do in this very good article on monitoring clandestine nuclear tests by Katie Walter:

The most recent nuclear test took place on October 9, 2006, when the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea—North Korea—detonated a nuclear device. USGS and other organizations worldwide focused on analyzing seismic data from the test. Their aim was to quickly find the location—the epicenter, as it were—of the explosion and measure its size.

Livermore seismologists also analyzed data shortly after the magnitude-4 event but with a different purpose. The last nuclear experiments had been conducted eight years earlier in India and Pakistan. The North Korea test offered a rare source of valuable new data recorded at the seismic monitoring stations nearest North Korea, which the team could use to test its regional models and various calibration algorithms.

Only a seismologist could see calibrating a regional monitoring station as the silver lining to a North Korean nuclear test.

Dan Pinkston pointed out this gem from KCNA:

Taedonggang Beer

Pyongyang, June 25 (KCNA) — The beers including black beer and rice beer made by the Taedonggang Beer Factory are these days popular with the Pyongyang citizens.

Beer houses are crowed with working people who look pleased with their successes in the current 150-day campaign.

It was Juche 91 (2002) that the just built Taedonggang Beer Factory began supplying beer to the citizens.

The cold and soft Taedonggang beer rich in gas content immediately came into great favor among the customers by catering to their tastes.

Its fermentation degree is 77.5 percent.

The beer houses distributed rationally in residential quarters regularly serve beer carried to them directly from the factory.

The refrigerator vans carrying beer have a traffic privilege on the streets of Pyongyang like cars carrying soybean milk to children.

The citizens call Taedonggang beer “cold yet warm beer” as it is associated with the warm care of General Secretary Kim Jong Il for the people.

I’ve been reading “Caging the Dragon” on the flight to London and it reminded me of a little song from Sesame Street that goes:

One of these things is not like the others

One of these things is just not the same.

What reminded me of that? These three yields:

- Fission yield

- Fusion yield

- Hydrodynamic yield

Can you spot the one that’s not like the others? (Hint: Perhaps it’s easier to try to figure out why two of these are the same.) No fair googling the answer! I didn’t have access to google on the airplane and you shouldn’t use it either.

Spoiler Alert: as I might have expected, keen wonk-readers got the answer right away, so only read the comments if you want to see what others have said.