Years · 2005

October 2005

29 posts

Article

Indian Space Driven By Microsat Hoax

More images of space-themed stamps from India. K.S. Jayaraman of Space News (“Indian Government Set To Create Aerospace Command”) reports that Indian Air Force (IAF) Chief Air Marshal Shashindra Pal Tyagi told reporters India would establish Aerospace Command for various…

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Steinbruner on Iraq

I usually limit my commentary about Iraq to WMD-related issues. That reflects both my own relative expertise, as well as my sense of futility about the entire endeavor. The course of this catastrophe follows a terrible, inexorable logic that I…

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NNSA Asks Congress to Drop RNEP

Senator Pete Domenici (R-NM) sent out a press release announcing that the Appropriations Conferees “have agreed to drop funding for continued research on the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator (RNEP) project…” The House had eliminated DOE funds for RNEP, while the…

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TPM: No Second Source on Niger Claims

I started this blog to be on record so I could say “I told you so.” Josh Marshall reports that—despite what the T-Bone and the FCO have claimed—Britain did not have a second source for their bogus claim the Iraq…

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Ceci n'est pas une pipe

Nick Schwellenbach, writing on the POGO blog, noticed that the “generic country” in some Air Force slides looked suspiciously like Iran: Three of the Power Point slides used in a presentation on the Air Force’s Future Total Force plan featured…

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What's the NSC Up To With North Korea?

David Sanger in the New York Times reports “a previously undisclosed incident in June” involving trade between Iran and North Korea: … American satellites tracked an Iranian cargo plane landing in North Korea. The two countries have a history of…

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PLA Procurement Website

China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has launched a procurement website to promote “integrity, fairness and openness” in military procurement. China Daily quotes a PAP officer saying the website will reduce corruption: Ma Qiang, from the Gansu Division of the Chinese…

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URRW Update

John Fleck, reporter for the Albuquerque Journal, notes that NNSA Administrator Linton Brooks clammed up when asked about the using uranium for the reliable replacement warhead: My question to Brooks: Is uranium being considered? I got the “is it classified?”…

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Chinese mixer-settlers at UCF

A few weeks ago, I noticed a slight inconsistency in a couple of otherwise outstanding articles by Mark Hibbs regarding Iran’s Uranium Conversion Facility (UCF) The question concerned the method of extracting impurities from uranium—impurities that might crash Iran’s centrifuge…

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Remote Detection of Nuclear Proliferation

Arms Control Wonk Reader Ben Mayer—a computer science PhD student at the University of Minnesota—attended a talk by William Priedhorsky, Chief Scientist in the International, Space and Response Division at Los Alamos National Laboratory on Remote Detection of Nuclear Proliferation:…