Two points on Iran…
1. I have discovered the one good argument for the US not negotiating directly with the Iranians: they would hand us our ass. I reached this conclusion after reading the Q&A after Bush’s 10 April speech at SAIS. He said:…
2006
325 posts
Science is Fun!
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…
DART Mishap Report
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…
Communicating with SSBNs
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…
Get Enriched or Die Tryin'
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.
Iran News Online
Some of you may be regular readers of Managing the Atom’s Iran News—a daily e-mail compilation of news stories related to Iran and the nuclear fuel cycle. We’ve moved the service online, supplemented by a weekly e-mail summary. http://www.managing-the-atom.org/ The…
Thank You James Nagelberg
I received the following note in the mail yesterday, from reader and friend James Nagelberg. The note accompanied a box containing a sweet Y-12 mug (shown at right) packed in crumpled paper. For those of you who don’t know: The…
More Fun With SWU
The other day, I observed that US public statements imply that Iran’s centrifuges operate closer to 2 kg SWU/year than 3. That is a little lower than previous public estimates by David Albright and Corey Hinderstein (The Centrifuge Connection, Bulletin…
Collected Thoughts On Iranian LEU
The Jedi-rejects, prancing about with lightsabers, are actually Iranian artistes holding aloft tubes of what purports to be 3.5 percent low enriched uranium (LEU), which Iranian President Ahmadinejad cites as evidence “Iran has joined the nuclear countries of the world”…
India Nuclear Deal Math
During a press conference last week, a reporter from Dawn asked Richard Boucher about the US-India nuclear deal: … we would like to have your response on Pakistani concerns on this nuclear issue, which is also supported by many critics…