In May 2004, I blogged that the Air Force “exercised an option order for a Minotaur space launch vehicle … to launch a classified payload in 2005.” Given that the Minotaur’s other payloads include XSS-11 and NFIRE, I was pretty eager to find out some details about this classified payload. A new detail has emerged: …
Rice on North Korea: It's All Good
by | 2005-04-19 | 1 Comment
Condoleeza Rice willfully misrepresents the Agreed Framework in order to argue that the United States is safer with stalled Six Party talks and an unfrozen North Korean plutonium program than the Clinton-era Agreed Framework, which produced a verifiable freeze on North Korea’s plutonium efforts.
Yongbyon Shut Down
by | 2005-04-19 | 5 Comments
North Korea has shut down its 5 MWe reactor at Yongbyon, probably to unload spent fuel rods that will be reprocessed to recover plutonium for North Korea’s nuclear weapons program. Senior North Korean officials recently informed Selig Harrison of the impending shutdown. Unloading the 8,000 fuel rods, which contain enough plutonium for two or more …
State Dept. Terrorism Report Begone!
by | 2005-04-18 | 2 Comments
The State Department will no longer publish “Patterns of Global Terrorism.” Some officials justified the decision based on methodologocal objetions, but others suggested the statistics were suppressed because they contained bad news about the war on terror. Paul Kerr asks: Which of those explanations sounds more compelling to you?
