Working on my dissertation, I/’ve noticed a strange fascination among the nuclear warfighting crowd with the idea that 20 million casualties was low enough to risk in a crisis with the Soviets. Here is a passage from Herman Kahn in On Thermonuclear War (1961): “Feasible combinations of military and non-military measures might make the difference …
National Aerospace Initiative
by | 2004-05-04 | No Comments
The National Research Council recently released a study (April 2004) of the National Aerospace Initiative, a DDRE/NASA initiative to invest in hypersonics, space access, and space technology. A lot of this research is worthwhile, but a lot is also wasteful. The NRC study has some detailed budgetary information and a list of programs (hypersonic ABM …
Puzzling over a classified payload
by | 2004-05-04 | No Comments
Last October, Orbital Sciences Corporation announced that the U.S. Air Force ordered a Minotaur space launch vehicle to launch a classified payload in 2005. The Minotaur launch vehicle provides “low cost, reliable space launch capability in support of U.S. government small-satellite launch requirements” for programs such as the NFIRE and the XSS-11. I’ve got this …
Reporting on WMD
by | 2004-04-30 | No Comments
A colleague notes this paragraph in Susan Schmidt/’s review of The Politics of Truth: Inside the Lies that Led to War and Betrayed My Wife/’s CIA Identity by Joseph Wilson: On the heels of Wilson/’s public criticism that intelligence was exaggerated and his statement that his trip to Niger had turned up no uranium sales …
