Years

2008

317 posts

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Heritage's Missile Defense Infomercial

A trailer for the Heritage Foundation’s forthcoming video on “the very real threat that hostile nations and rogue dictators now pose to every one of us” is available. Heritage bills the video, scheduled to come out in February 2009, as…

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Sejil Reconsidered

Many people have written in objecting to my theory that the Sejil uses liquid propellant steering engines for thrust vector control and, I have to admit, that they have had some very good arguments. Perhaps the most persuasive arguments have…

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Estimative Language, Then and Now

Of the many reasons I have a soft spot for the intelligence community, one is this: imagine how hard it is to produce a document that is both precise and readable. That’s the same challenge I face on the blog,…

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Clustering Engines, Adding Up the Weights

In an unfortunately title article in Jane’s Intelligence Review (“Safir When Ready: Iran sets its sights on long-range capability”; sorry, its subscription only) I discussed why I interpreted pictures of the test-stand version of a Safir second stage as indicating…

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Chinese-English Nuclear Security Glossary

The National Academies is having a release party (ok, release event) for the English-Chinese, Chinese-English Nuclear Security Glossary. I saw Ben Rusek and Wu Jun give a joint talk on the subject in Qingdao. Be there or B 2 Sorry,…

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Moving ‘em Out to Move Them Up

Yesterday, I discussed the possibility that Iran was learning techniques that might help them utilize higher energy fuels such as UDMH and nitric acid. However, the evidence for such use is rather minimal. The case we examined yesterday was not…

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IAEA Reports on Iran, Syria

Implementation of the NPT Safeguards Agreement and relevant provisions of Security Council resolutions 1737 (2006), 1747 (2007), 1803 (2008) and 1835 (2008) in the Islamic Republic of Iran, GOV/2008/59 (November 19, 2008). Implementation of the NPT Safeguards Agreement in the…

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Whats with the Goop?

I thought I’d try an experiment in blogging: a five part series going into the details of Iran’s liquid-propellant missile development program; something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. (The over-all title of the series is “Scaling Up the…

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Tauscher Roundtable on Nukes

Congresswoman Ellen Tauscher (D-CA) gave an outstanding talk to a roundtable I co-hosted this morning at the Center for American Progress, my home institution, to mark the release of a study by Joe Cirincione and me, Orienting the 2009 Nuclear…

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When is a Solid-Propellant Rocket Not?

How about when half of it is liquid propellants? How about when it includes all of the deadweight—fuel tanks, turbopumps, and engines—associated with liquid propellant engines? How about when it makes no attempt to solve one of the major problems…