Years · 2009

November 2009

30 posts

Article

Lugar on START Verification

Now, that was what I was talking about. Dick Lugar, one of the old bulls of the Senate, has introduced a bill, S.2727, to extend, on a reciprocal basis, the inspections under START for another six months. (More precisely, it…

Article

Vacuum Tubes for Chu

As Kingston over at Nukes of Hazard notes, the folks at the Kansas City Plant presented Secretary of Energy Steven Chu with a little plaque showing “1960s-era vacuum tubes from the B61 radars” and “RF-IC based multi-chip module for the…

Article

Predicting Proliferation

Over the years, many experts have predicted proliferation cascades, but worst cases have yet to unfold. The current variation on this theme – reinforced by arms controllers as well as hard liners — is that, once Iran gets the Bomb…

Article

Iran Expands Gchine U Mine

This is a joint post by Jeffrey Lewis, Flynt Leverett, and Hillary Mann Leverett. This post is cross-posted at Flynt and Hillary’s blog, Race for Iran Bloomberg’s Jonathan Tirone has a story today revealing that Iran has dramatically expanded operations…

Article

North Korean Plutonium: Yawn

Lost in the hubbub over North Korea’s claim to have completed reprocessing of its remaining spent fuel rods is one small point: this isn’t news. It’s a reminder only. Here’s what the KCNA news service has just stated: In this…

Article

LEU-TRR: Dialogue of the Deaf

Secretary of State Clinton’s remarks from Morocco yesterday seemed to represent a harder line on the LEU–TRR deal than the United States had taken previously: “Acceptance fully of this proposal which we have put forth and which we are unified…

Article

Mianyang, From Space

Lots of good stuff coming in the next couple of days, so stay tuned. I noticed that that GoogleEarth now has a June 2008 image of Mianyang, home to China’s weapons design and fabrication facilities, and which I visited in…

Article

Japan Weighs in on the Sejil

click on the image for a larger version There has probably never been a discussion on ACW that has aroused as much animated technical discussion as the thrust vector control (TVC) for Sejil. This is almost entirely due to the…

Article

Qian Xuesen (1911-2009)

Update | 12:42 November 3, 2009 As if on cue, Michael Wines in the New York Times ledes Qian’s obituary with the grossly inaccurate statement that Qian “single-handedly led China’s space and military rocketry efforts.” No, he didn’t. Not single-handedly,…

Article

Name That Missile

From the 2010 wall calendar, “Scenic Missile Tests of Iran.” (Just kidding.) Confusion surrounds the names used for ballistic missiles in Iran, where designators seem to come and go unpredictably. But a just smidgen of linguistic information may clarify the…