Writing on ACW 2004–2026 · 2,079 posts
Article·
I’ve read the full text of the letter (as posted by the Wall Street Journal) and let me say that it is much, much odder than a mix tape. Reportedly your government employs extensive security, protection and intelligence systems—and even…
Article·
Ahmadenijad (A-bomb) sent Bush (G-Dub) a letter that suggesting some “new solutions” in the context of US-Iran relations: Iran’s leader has written to President Bush proposing “new solutions” to their differences in the first letter from an Iranian head of…
Article·
Somehow this news story didn’t get wider attention, but Dafna Linzer’s article in the Post last week claimed some of Iran’s centrifuges appeared to crash during the operation of the 164 centrifuge cascade. Linzer cited “several officials with knowledge of…
Article·
More than a year after we started complaining in earnest about antisatellite research scheduled at the Air Force’s Starfire Optical Range (see ACW, Starfire Optical Range, 8 April 2005), Bill Broad at the New York Times discovers the “largely secret…
Article·
We’d be fools to actually get into the kinetic energy anti-satellite business. It would be hugely disadvantageous for the U.S. to get into that game. —Deputy Undersecretary of the Air Force for Space Programs Gary Payton (no, not that Gary…
Article·
I’ve long complained the definition of “politicizing” intelligence is too narrow—“whether any analysts had been pressured to change their analysis or assessments” in the phrase of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee and “make or change any analytic judgments in response…
Article·
After reading much of Ann Finkbeiner’s The Jasons, I found myself with several people swapping stories about Dick Garwin. Matthew Bunn had the best of the bunch, which involved Garwin explaining to him how the conservation of kinetic energy might…
Article·
When NASA’s DART satellite bumped into another spacecraft during an attempted a “proximity operation”—think the docking sequence to The Blue Danube Waltz in 2001: A Space Odyssey , only clumsy—some folks were pretty embarrased. As usually happens with a high…
Article·
I’ve been reading, and enjoying, Ann Finkbeiner’s The Jasons: The Secret History of Science’s Postwar Elite, an account of the Jason scientific advisory panel. One chapter details a Jason study that led to the deployment of two extremely low frequency…
Article·
I missed The Daily Show but reliable sources tell me that was the headline. Update: A reader sends along the link. Jon Stewart is brilliant.
