Author Archives: J-Pollack

Kwangmyongsong: Epic Fail, or Epic BS?

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North Korean satellite launch efforts are now “0 for 2”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/1968/unha-2td-2-launch-epic-fail — not that you’d know it from their (terrestrial) broadcasts. You’ve got to wonder if there was ever a Kwangmyongsong-1 or Kwangmyongsong-2 in the first place.

(Those paying attention in August 1998 may recall that K-1 and the third stage that was supposed to boost it into orbit came as a surprise to the outside world.)

This “purported picture of K-1”:http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipehttp://www.totalwonkerr.net/textpattern/index.phpdia/en/3/3d/Kwangmyongsong.jpg sure looks awfully like China’s “Dongfanghong-1”:http://knows.jongo.com/UserFiles/Image/dongfanghong1.jpg, doesn’t it? Maybe it was a close copy. Or maybe it was just a mockup, based on some North Korean engineer’s (or propagandist’s) idea of what a first satellite should look like.

If the K-1 and K-2 were wholly fictitious, we might actually be _underestimating_ the reliability of NK missiles.

[Update: The emerging consensus says “fail”:http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/06/world/asia/06korea.html.]

US-RF CR

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Maybe the first step in Russian-American nuclear talks should be a “Continuing Resolution,” i.e., a simple renewal of START verification measures.

Pavel Podvig quite credibly “suggests”:http://www.thebulletin.org/web-edition/columnists/pavel-podvig/reaction-to-the-obama-medvedev-joint-statement-arms-control that more ambitious undertakings will be tough to achieve by December, when START expires. Perhaps it’s better to take the time to get it right.

Meanwhile, nobody needs a gap in the existing verification regime.

Unha-2: An Overlooked Angle

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Up, up, and away: North Korea has launched its “space rocket”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/1956/if-it-quacks-like-a-satellite. For real, “this time”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/1963/japan-on-n-korean-launch-our-bad. The “instant report”:http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/05/world/asia/05korea.html of the _NY Times_ — most of which was presumably written beforehand — includes this striking tidbit.

While many analysts have looked at the launching through a military lens, some say another perspective involves political rivalries on the Korean peninsula. For years, South Korea has been gearing up to fire a satellite into orbit and join the space club. Its spaceport of Oinarodo is nearly ready, but a launching scheduled for this month was delayed, giving North Korea an opening.

“They’re racing to beat the South Koreans,” said Tim Brown, a senior fellow at “GlobalSecurity.org”:http://globalsecurity.org/, a private group in Alexandria, Va.

That’s probably just gravy, but regardless, it’s an in-your-face moment for the U.S., Japan, and South Korea, all at once.

RDD-8

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From FAS Secrecy News:

“Restricted Data Declassification Decisions, 1946-2002”:http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/2009/04/rd_declass.html

The Department of Energy this week released its most recent compilation of all decisions to declassify nuclear weapons-related information.

The “new release”:http://www.fas.org/sgp/othergov/doe/rdd-8.pdf (pdf), dated 2002, is the eighth and the last in what had been an annual series of such compilations. Unlike the others, however, it was marked “Official Use Only” and was not made publicly available. But DoE released it in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from the Federation of American Scientists.

See “”Restricted Data Declassification Decisions, 1946 to the Present (RDD-8),””:http://www.fas.org/sgp/othergov/doe/rdd-8.pdf U.S. Department of Energy, January 1, 2002, 169 pages.

One of the latest declassification decisions, approved in 2001 and disclosed in the new compilation, acknowledges the previously classified “fact that gas centrifuge rotors are fabricated on mandrels.” A mandrel is a spindle or metal shaft around which other parts rotate.

It’s also full of great little snippets like this one:

bq. 9. “Palm” which was replaced by “Birch” which was replaced by “Brandy” which is the material nickname for Neptunium (Np 237). The association of any of these nicknames with either of the others is also unclassified. (96-2)

Or this one:

27. The fact that approximately 6 kgs of plutonium were involved in the Thule, Greenland accident. (68-4)

a. Best estimate of the amount of plutonium removed from the site. (68-4)

Or this one:

33. Special nuclear materials masses: That about 6 kg plutonium is enough hypothetically to make one nuclear explosive device. (93-2)

a. Hypothetically, a mass of 4 kilograms of plutonium or uranium-233 is sufficient for one nuclear explosive device. (94-1)

NOTE: The average masses of special nuclear materials in the U.S. nuclear weapons or special nuclear materials masses in any specific weapon type remain classified.

Here’s something new I didn’t know about:

bq. 48. The total forecast or actual quantity of plutonium transferred in either direction under “the loan.” (The mere fact of an arrangement under the 1958 Mutual Defense Agreement, which provided for the loan of plutonium to the United Kingdom during the period 1980-1985, and the fact that there was a plutonium loan arrangement between the United States and the United Kingdom referred to as “the loan.”) (01-1)

“The loan” is not to be confused with the “barter” agreements:

47. As part of the 1958 United States – United Kingdom Mutual Defense Agreement, there have been three barter agreements. The United States received plutonium totaling 5,366 kilograms from the United Kingdom under the Barter A, B, and C Agreements during the period 1960 – 1979. The United States gave the United Kingdom 6.7 kilograms of tritium and 7,500 kilograms of highly enriched uranium for the plutonium. (94-15)

a. During the period of 1960-1979, the following materials were exchanged: (97-3)

Barter A: 480 kg UK plutonium for 6 kg of U.S. tritium
Barter B: 4,073 kg UK plutonium for 7,500 kg of U.S. HEU
Barter C: 813 kg UK plutonium for 0.7 kg of U.S. tritium

There’s got to be a story there.

Nuclear Medicine

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By now, perhaps you’ve heard about the rather “well”:http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/03/science/03heart.html “publicized”:http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=102651580 story to appear in “Science”:http://www.sciencemag.org/ tomorrow.

[Update: Here’s the “abstract”:http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/sci;324/5923/98?maxtoshow=&HITS=10&hits=10&RESULTFORMAT=&author1=frisen%2C+j&andorexacttitle=or&andorexacttitleabs=or&andorexactfulltext=or&searchid=1&FIRSTINDEX=0&sortspec=relevance&fdate=4/1/2009&tdate=4/30/2009&resourcetype=HWCIT,HWELTR of Bergmann et al., “Evidence for Cardiomyocyte Renewal in Humans.”]

No? It involves cadavers and atmospheric nuclear testing. “For real”:http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/03/science/03heart.html:

Cell turnover rates can easily be measured in animals by making their cells radioactive and seeing how fast they are replaced. Such an experiment, called pulse-labeling, could not ethically be done in people. But Dr. Frisen realized several years ago that nuclear weapons tested in the atmosphere until 1963 had in fact labeled the cells of the entire world’s population.

The nuclear blasts generated a radioactive form of carbon known as carbon-14. The amount of carbon-14 in the atmosphere has gradually diminished since 1963, when above-ground tests were banned, as it has been incorporated into plants and animals or diffused into the oceans.

In the body, carbon-14 in the diet gets into the DNA of new cells and stays unchanged for the life of the cell. Because the level of carbon-14 in the atmosphere falls each year, the amount of carbon-14 in the DNA can serve to indicate the cell’s birth date, Dr. Frisen found.

Four years ago he used his new method to assess the turnover rate of various tissues in the body, concluding that the average age of the cells in an adult’s body might be as young as 7 to 10 years. But there is a wide range of ages — from the rapidly turning over cells of the blood and gut to the mostly permanent cells of the brain.

Long story short, they found that the heart muscle actually regenerates slightly over a human lifetime.

Usually, this sort of thing would be called a “natural experiment”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_experiment, but that label doesn’t seem quite appropriate here.

_Unnatural_ experiment?

_Accidental_ experiment?

Sure, it doesn’t make up for excess cancers from atmospheric nuclear testing, but it’s pretty neat anyhow.

Dept. of Media Criticism

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You all know that my “heart bleeds for daily newspapers”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/1948/washington-post-it, right? It actually, figuratively does. I just phoned 9-1-1 for that heart-always-bleeding thing. Again. Figuratively. So this is tough love, right here.

April 1 editions of the _Washington Post_ indicated that “the Russians are unmoved”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/31/AR2009033103873.html by American concerns about Iran:

bq. The Russians have reached an understanding with Iran over the sale of surface-to-air missiles but said they have yet to deliver on shipments. Though the United States has pressed Russia to exert more pressure on Iran to abandon nuclear-weapons research, Moscow insists there is little more it can do, saying its nuclear dialogue with Tehran is based solely on energy production.

That would be in line with President Medvedev’s op-ed in the same paper, just “the day before”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/1954/on-medvedevs-mind.

So, something must have changed since March 18, when the same paper was telling it the other way around:

bq. As President Obama seeks to recast relations with Russia and persuade it to help contain Iran’s nuclear ambitions, he must win over leaders who are deeply suspicious of U.S. intentions and who have long been reluctant to damage what they consider a strategic partnership with Iran. But the Kremlin has indicated it is willing to explore a deal with Washington, and analysts say it may be more open to new sanctions against Iran than expected.

You could probably “guess”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/1926/skepsis how that went over in these parts.

So how did the _Post_’s reporters unearth such a startling insight? This one expert guy in Washington told them.

In a meeting last week with a bipartisan commission studying U.S. policy toward Russia, President Dmitry Medvedev expressed alarm in “very graphic language” over Iran’s successful test launch of a satellite last month, linking it to Tehran’s nuclear program, said Dmitri Simes, director of the commission.

“Medvedev said it demonstrated how far-reaching Iran’s nuclear ambitions are, and that he was very concerned,” said Simes, who is also president of the Nixon Center in Washington. “He felt it was a clear challenge to both Russian and American interests and said he would like both countries to work on this challenge together.”

Nothing more heard from President Medvedev in this vein since then. Or before then.

So what do you say? Can we call this a lesson learned?

For The Record

Here’s what the “Obama-Medvedev statement”:http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iVZVQZKurqCWMUl_tMQk8_IatXKAD979LOBG4 says about Iran:

bq. While we recognize that under the NPT Iran has the right to a civilian nuclear program, Iran needs to restore confidence in its exclusively peaceful nature. We underline that Iran, as any other Non-Nuclear Weapons State-Party to the NPT, has assumed the obligation under Article II of that Treaty in relation to its non-nuclear weapon status. We call on Iran to fully implement the relevant U.N. Security Council and the IAEA Board of Governors resolutions, including provision of required cooperation with the IAEA. We reiterated their commitment to pursue a comprehensive diplomatic solution, including direct diplomacy and through P5+1 negotiations, and urged Iran to seize this opportunity to address the international communitys concerns.

There’s nothing like a “nothingburger”:http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=nothingburger.

“Musical bonus”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dO-Qi8W9Yk. Musical, literally.

Mother of All Tail Risks

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Tail risk, according to “Investopedia”:http://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/tailrisk.asp, is

bq. A form of portfolio risk that arises when the possibility that an investment will move more than three standard deviations from the mean is greater than what is shown by a normal distribution.

Got that?

There’s another, more colloquial meaning to “tail risk,” which is simply the possibility of having a freakishly bad day. There’s a “book about this”:http://www.amazon.com/Black-Swan-Impact-Highly-Improbable/dp/1400063515.

Lately, we’ve been reminded that bad events deemed vanishingly unlikely actually might not be. So unlikely, that is. The nation’s supposedly uncorrelated residential real estate markets “all started plunging at once”:http://www2.standardandpoors.com/portal/site/sp/en/us/page.topic/indices_csmahp/0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1,1,0,0,0,0,0.html. All those “credit default swaps”:http://www.financialweek.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080218/REG/794188688 suddenly came into play at the same time. Two satellites collided. Two SSBNs collided.

A continually iterated potential hazard with potentially unknown correlated features is, over time, less improbable than it might seem. “Stuff happens”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/1858/stuff-happens.

Now, per the happenstances mentioned above, you might imagine that the “financial crisis/recession/clusterf#@k to the poor house”:http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/?searchterm=clusterf#@k+to+the+poor+house is the biggest deal on the Obama administration’s plate, the issue whose management will be most consequential, for good or ill. And in the short-to-medium term, that’s awfully hard to dispute.

But In The Long Term?

Look, I know some people are into comet strikes, and the climate situation looks worrisome. But where I come from, the Mother of All Tail Risks is nuclear war.

My nightmare can beat up your nightmare, see?

From the “stuff happens” perspective, the long-term issue of greatest consequence is taking U.S. and Russian nuclear weapons off alert and keeping them that way.

Yeah, I know, STRATCOM is very clear that U.S. nuclear weapons are not on “hair-trigger alert”:http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2007_12/NuclearAlert. This seems to mean that U.S. weapons would not be launched unless A) the President ordered it or B) _[correction] someone acting in his stead ordered it after_ nuclear weapons had already detonated on U.S. soil.

I have just five or six small concerns about this. Little things.

A) How sure can we be that the President of these United States will be of “sound judgment”:http://www.amazon.com/Presidential-Leadership-Illness-Decision-Making/dp/0521709245/ref=ed_oe_p when the time comes? “Really?”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3754199.stm “You’re sure?”:http://www.doctorzebra.com/prez/g_roster.htm “Really, really sure?”:http://www.usnews.com/articles/opinion/2009/02/19/iraq-wmd-bush-and-the-mind-of-saddam-hussein-hide-and-seek-by-charles-duelfer.html

B) After a single weapon goes off that incinerates our national leadership — origin unknown — what happens, exactly?

C) Is the Russian arsenal on higher alert than the U.S. arsenal?

D) Is the Russian early-warning system adequate?

E) Assuming the Russian arsenal is at the same “day-to-day” alert as the U.S. arsenal, and its early-warning system is adequate, how sure can we be that the “President”:http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/02_27/b3790047.htm, Prime Minister, and other key officials of the Russian Federation will be of sound judgment when the time comes?

F) After a single weapon goes off that incinerates the Kremlin — origin unknown — what happens, exactly?

Global financial crisis, global schminancial crisis.

Seriously, if you think none of the things hinted at above could happen — because it hasn’t happened yet, right? — try talking to someone in the financial sector.

If You Only Read One Part, Try This Right Here

Now that U.S.-RF nuclear force reduction talks are “getting underway”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/2235/obama-medvedev-statement, I’m as pleased as anyone to see the numbers coming down, but I would vote with both hands and both feet to make the numbers _go up_ if that’s what it took to get the G-d-damned things off alert once and for all.

If It Quacks Like A Satellite

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According to “Reuters”:http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSSEO16955920090331:

U.S. officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said a commercial satellite image of the Musudan-ri missile test site showed a Taepodong-2 missile with a bulb-shaped payload cover, consistent with a satellite payload, rather than a warhead.

The image was posted on Sunday on the website of the Institute for Science and International Security, or ISIS, a Washington-based group devoted to informing the public on security issues including nuclear weapons.

The bulb shape is similar to the nose cone standard for military and commercial satellite launches, concluded officials, including analysts at the U.S. Air Force’s National Air and Space Intelligence Center in Dayton, Ohio.

“Feel better now?”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/1953/icg-be-mellow

If you missed it, the ISIS brief with the Digital Globe image of the space launcher is “here”:http://www.isisnucleariran.org/assets/pdf/MusudanRi_29March2009.pdf. Geoff’s analysis of the image is “here”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/2233/dprk-reading-between-the-blurs.

As so often happens, “NTI”:http://gsn.nti.org/gsn/nw_20090401_2247.php was here first…

Ginormous Golf Ball, Ctd.

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William Cole of the _Honolulu Advertiser_ is still on “the story”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/1941/the-pearl-harbor-golf-ball of the floating missile defense radar at Pearl Harbor. “Nathan Hodge”:http://blog.wired.com/defense/2009/03/missile-defense.html spotted “this one”:http://www.honoluluadvertiser.com/article/20090331/NEWS08/903310333/-1:

bq. The 280-foot-tall radar platform is undergoing $34 million in repairs here. Officials with the U.S. Missile Defense Agency, which oversees the SBX, yesterday said work is continuing with scheduled shipyard activities. It referred all other questions to the Pentagon.

OK, so it’s not just there for the weather.