377 posts
Greetings from Chicago, where I am about to give a talk at the AAAS Annual Meeting on open source intelligence and blogging. This is embarrassing for the Royal and French Navies: Royal Navy nuclear submarine was involved in a collision…
ACW readers love to analyze photographs and foreign missiles so I thought I would have a little contest: identifying components of the Safir second stage engine. I’ve been staring at a couple of images of the reverse side of the…
Most of you have, by now, read the stories, including good ones by Bill Broad (who had it first) and Joel Achenbach, about the catastrophic (and possibly cascading) collision between an Iridium satellite and a defunct Russian Cosmos satellite. Geoff…
Iridium Constellation. Note how the orbits cross each other near the poles Iridium and Cosmos Satellites Collide! Some of us have been warning about a catastrophic chain reaction of space collisions that could render near Earth orbits unusable for tens…
I keep meaning to write something about US nuclear posture soon, but the day-job is all consuming right now. In the meantime, I want to point out the fascinating debate begun by Geoff Forden on whether the Safir, Iran’s new…
It’s February so it’s time for the Wonk’s perennial favourite… Miss Atom: the beauty contest for workers in the Russian nuclear industry. For those of you who are new readers: check out the 2008 and 2007 posts for the backstory.
The Senate, in its attempt to slim down the stimulus bill, has apparently managed to squeeze in a little bit for nukes. A billion dollars, in fact. In various Senate version of the Bill, including on page 78 of what…
Dead weights are for the second stage plus satellite, the red line is the orbital threshold, required Isp for each dead weight is read off by looking where each blue line crosses the red line I’m sure that anyone following…
There has been a lot of technical discussion about the North Korean fuel rods, from their size to how they are stored. Now, the South Korean government has a released pictures of a rod and the rods in storage. Awesome!…
There is much talk of negotiations with Iran at the moment. But, there are negotiations and there are negotiations… Therese Delpech, Eli Levite and George Perkovich have identified six questions about how talks with Iran should be conducted. If the…
