On Thursday and Friday, I attended a workshop sponsored by AAAS and Princeton concerning advances in Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty monitoring and verification. There was considerable discussion of “venting” — when underground nuclear tests eject radioactive material into the atmosphere — as a detection method. There were frequent, grim jokes about BANEBERRY, the worst …
DPRK: U'nha-2 Powered Trajectory
by | 2009-04-20 | 14 Comments
Jan Stupl’s contour of pixel intensity of the U’nha-2 contrail image Jan Stupl, who is a Science Fellow at Stanford’s CISAC this year and who has done an amazing experimental and theoretical analysis of the US Airborne Laser, produced a very important processed image of the DigitalGlobe/Globalsecurity.org image of the U’nha-2 launch. This has allowed …
DPRK: Back to Square One
by | 2009-04-17 | 18 Comments
Cross-posted from Verification, Implementation and Compliance. The monitors have been switched off. The cameras are being removed from their mounts, and the seals are broken. The guesthouse just off the main site no longer houses the IAEA three-person team or the four-person US experts group. By now, the equipment is probably being packed into boxes …
DPRK: Cobra Ball vs SBX
by | 2009-04-15 | 13 Comments
A number of us have been wondering why the US didn’t send the Sea-Based X-band (SBX) radar out to see (sorry, I couldn’t resist that!) the Unha-2’s launch. One of the best arguments I’ve heard comes from Victoria Samson who thinks that the real reason it didn’t put to sea was it is constantly undergoing …
