More than a year after we started complaining in earnest about antisatellite research scheduled at the Air Force’s Starfire Optical Range (see ACW, Starfire Optical Range, 8 April 2005), Bill Broad at the New York Times discovers the “largely secret…
We’d be fools to actually get into the kinetic energy anti-satellite business. It would be hugely disadvantageous for the U.S. to get into that game. —Deputy Undersecretary of the Air Force for Space Programs Gary Payton (no, not that Gary…
I’ve long complained the definition of “politicizing” intelligence is too narrow—“whether any analysts had been pressured to change their analysis or assessments” in the phrase of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee and “make or change any analytic judgments in response…
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:…
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…
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…
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…
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.
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…
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…
