The launch of South Korea’s “indigenous” space launch vehicle (KSLV-1) has once again been postponed, this time to around August 19th; presumably due to weather issues. I haven’t been able learn the intended orbit (other than its going to be LEO, or low Earth orbit). So it is an interesting question of whether or not …
PCS#1: Iran’s Composites Infrastructure
by | 2009-08-11 | 15 Comments
Tehran University, one of the Iranian universities that has significant research in material sciences including advanced composite materials. My previous two posts ( part 3 and part 4 of this series on a proliferation case study examining Iran’s possible indigenous production of Safir engine parts) discussed a framework for thinking about how proliferators get WMD …
Aftergood Catches ODNI Being Lazy
by | 2009-08-10 | 5 Comments
I failed to mention that Steven Aftergood caught ODNI passing off flimsy Russian news accounts as intelligence regarding Russian counterspace capabilities: Some of the DNI’s statements are surprisingly flimsy. For example, he declares (question 17) that “In 2003, the Russian military prepared for an exercise that included attacking U.S. satellites to disrupt the NAVSTAR global …
There Are Idiots
by | 2009-08-09 | 10 Comments
Students of nuclear deterrence could learn something from the financial crisis. (So I’ve argued before.) One reason to think so appears in a review of Justin Fox’s new book, The Myth of the Rational Market. In Paul Krugman’s telling, Fox describes how the efficient markets hypothesis, which is the basis of modern financial risk assessment, …
