Arms Control Wonk

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A Nuclear Doctrine That Doesn't Deter

Listen to Rep. Tauscher at the Carnegie Nonproliferation Conference in 2005. Sixteen Democratic members of Congress, including Representative Ellen Tauscher (D-CA), have released a letter to the President expressing concern that a proposed Joint Doctrine on Nuclear Operations would undermine…

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RNEP Raises Its Ugly Head, Again

No sooner did Congress hash out a compromise to terminate the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator, then Billy Mullins (below)—an Air Force official with a title too wonky for even this blogger and kind of a letdown after yesterday’s image—tells Congress…

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ANGELS

Keepin’ it work safe for the boyz and grrls with the .gov and .mil IPs … Jeremy Singer at Space News reports (Yahoo! has the full text) that the Air Force Research Laboratory is “planning a small experimental satellite that…

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Nuclear Cooperation with India

A week or so ago, Dave Ruppe at Global Security Newswire reported that … More than a dozen former senior U.S. nuclear arms control and nonproliferation officials and other experts recently expressed reservations about a potential U.S.-India nuclear energy deal,…

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How bad things happen to bad space programs

The Pentagon appears to have a loose construct of time and savings when it comes to the Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle (EELV) program. Originally intended to give the United States guaranteed access to space, it instead has done in its…

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IEER on Missing Plutonium

The Insitute for Energy and Environmental Research released a report on 29 November 2005 (written by two scientists, Brice Smith and Arjun Makhijani), detailing the amount of weapons-grade plutoinum that is in the soil or being stored as waste at…

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Is ABL going gently into that good night?

Missile defense programs generally don’t die; they fade away. They’re born of great hope and expectations, which they gradually piss away with poor performance and unbelievable cost growth until they can be quietly put out to pasture. Airborne Laser (ABL)…

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MDA's New Test Vehicle

TTV in all its infrared nerdporn glory … On 17 November 2005 the Missile Defense Agency conducted Flight Test Maritime 04-2 (FTM-2)—a test of its Aegis based missile defense system. A SM-3 interceptor did what its name implies and hit…

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Taking Ownership of Missile Defense?

Back in my salad days at UCLA, it was practically a prerequisite for us feminists to attend “Take Back the Night” rallies. Take ownership, and you could ostensibly take control. So I read with interest the comments made by the…