Where to start: how bombs, missiles and missile defenses actually work, and how analysts size them up from the outside.
This is a guest post on behalf of ACW reader and occasional contributor Chris Camp. The first Atomic bombs, Trinity, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, hold an outsized place in our perceptions of what a nuclear weapon should be. Certainly they were notable…
Iran’s announcements that it is going to produce 20 percent Highly Enriched Uranium is bad news — not least because the Iranians said they would do so without respect to the presumably doomed TRR fuel swap. (Though this thing has…
Working at a think tank with lots of proliferation specialists offers certain advantages, especially the casual conversations. It turns out Ferenc Dalnoki-Veress, Miles Pomper and I all share a pet-peeve: When people incorrectly convert amounts of plutonium and especially highly…
Update | James says I misrepesented his method, which I may well have done. He is going to post a comment that explains his method in better detail than I have apparently done. Apologies that it took so long to…
UCS’s David Wright has written a nice post at All Things Nuclear that replots a graph originally produced by IISS to explain that ICBMs are hard to build because the principal trick to increasing range is adding fuel:
A couple weeks back North Korea unveiled its Hwasong-12 missile. The big hulking vehicle used for the test launch was not a transporter-erector-launcher (TEL), but rather just a Transporter-Erector (TE)!
Do you get lost in missile defense jargon? Have trouble with radar bands, layering, or interceptor types? Jeffrey and Aaron take a step back and discuss the basics of ballistic missile defense architecture and California wines.
President Trump said each of the missile defense interceptors at the Ground-based Midcourse Defense site in Alaska has a 97% chance of shooting down a North Korean missile and that two would have a 100% chance. Statistics don’t work like…
Now with a minor update. News of the initial deployment of Russia’s first hypersonic glide vehicle (HGV), called Avangard, comes just a few months after China exhibited its first such weapon, the DF-17, in a parade. This is as a…
Rob Edwards in New Scientist writes about a material called FOGBANK, which is used in US nuclear weapons such as the W76. (Ian Sample in the Guardian also picked it up.) Edwards’s article contains some speculation on the use of…
Edward Geist has created a Python library of nuclear weapons effects, including Soviet models. If there was ever a reason for this blog to exist, announcing something like this is pretty much it. Introducing GLASSTONE—a Python library for modeling nuclear…
