John Fleck, reporter for the Albuquerque Journal, notes that NNSA Administrator Linton Brooks clammed up when asked about the using uranium for the reliable replacement warhead: My question to Brooks: Is uranium being considered? I got the “is it classified?” pause, then “I don’t think we’re thinking of fundamental changes in the way we’ve looked …
Chinese mixer-settlers at UCF
by | 2005-10-20 | 2 Comments
A few weeks ago, I noticed a slight inconsistency in a couple of otherwise outstanding articles by Mark Hibbs regarding Iran’s Uranium Conversion Facility (UCF) The question concerned the method of extracting impurities from uranium—impurities that might crash Iran’s centrifuge cascades. The Chinese design called for mixed settlers (like the Iraqi models at left), but …
Remote Detection of Nuclear Proliferation
by | 2005-10-20 | 3 Comments
Arms Control Wonk Reader Ben Mayer—a computer science PhD student at the University of Minnesota—attended a talk by William Priedhorsky, Chief Scientist in the International, Space and Response Division at Los Alamos National Laboratory on Remote Detection of Nuclear Proliferation: an Observational Science. Here are Ben’s notes: As we have seen from the actions of …
2ND Artillery Launches PP Assault
by | 2005-10-19 | No Comments
Apparently, China’s Second Artillery uses Powerpoint, too. Paul Eckert of Reuters has a decent article on Secretary Rumsfeld’s visit to the Second Artillery HQ in Qinghe. Big events were a PP briefing on the “organization and mission” of the Deuce and a reiteration of China’s “no first use” pledge: In what senior Pentagon officials said …
