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You'd probbably be right.. if this was a court document. This document was obtained via the Freedom Of Information Act, which has very specific circumstances in which requests can be denied, and what information can be withhelf.

You can read about all the excemptions and exclusions allowed by law for FOIA requests here.
Most of which have to deal with national security, privacy, business secrets, endangering an ongoing law enforcement investigation, etc. As far as I can tell none of these exclusions/excemptions apply to what was hidden.

The current list of countries that are believed to have the capability of manufacturing biological weapons is:

Bulgaria, China, Cuba, Egypt, India, Iran, Israel, Laos, Libya, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, South Africa, South Korea, Syria, Taiwan, Ukraine, USA.

No one accelerated their program and others didn't even undertake them. On top of being too costly, it is too dangerous.

And yes, the US and the USSR both expanded their biological weapons programmes after the British abandoned the concept. The USSR (at least) continued to develop biological weapons in contravention of international treaties.

Best wishes,
Mike.

I should have linked this in my other reply. My bad. Information on so-called "low-yield" nuclear weapons for the morbidly curious.

"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones." - Albert Einstein

(And we thought we were past all of this...)

Bzzt, false. Their goal is to kill Americans and their allies until they give in to their political ideologies. Here's a direct quote from the Febuary 23, 1998 fatwa. link

First, for over seven years the United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places, the Arabian Peninsula, plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbors, and turning its bases in the Peninsula into a spearhead through which to fight the neighboring Muslim peoples.

If some people have formerly debated the fact of the occupation, all the people of the Peninsula have now acknowledged it.

The best proof of this is the Americans' continuing aggression against the Iraqi people using the Peninsula as a staging post, even though all its rulers are against their territories being used to that end, still they are helpless. Second, despite the great devastation inflicted on the Iraqi people by the crusader-Zionist alliance, and despite the huge number of those killed, in excess of 1 million... despite all this, the Americans are once against trying to repeat the horrific massacres, as though they are not content with the protracted blockade imposed after the ferocious war or the fragmentation and devastation.

So now they come to annihilate what is left of this people and to humiliate their Muslim neighbors.

Third, if the Americans' aims behind these wars are religious and economic, the aim is also to serve the Jews' petty state and divert attention from its occupation of Jerusalem and murder of Muslims there.

The best proof of this is their eagerness to destroy Iraq, the strongest neighboring Arab state, and their endeavor to fragment all the states of the region such as Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Sudan into paper statelets and through their disunion and weakness to guarantee Israel's survival and the continuation of the brutal crusade occupation of the Peninsula.

It's interesting that their assessment of the Israeli-American alliance lines up so well with the Project for a New American Century's goals.

-l

This is simply another case where the US can do whatever in the hell it pleases, and the rest of the world can do nothing about it.

The Biological Weapons treaty allows for defensive research, so even if thats what this was, we would be within our rights. You don't know what you are talking about. By the way, unlike us, there are more than a few countries with weaponized agents, i.e. prepared for military use and loaded into weapons. This article is about what is essentially a laboratory curiousity.

We are now guilty of illegally invading a foreign country without any direct threat of war or attack or in assistance to another country, but simply based on political agenda, public ignorance, public fear mongering, and propoganda about WMD.

Iraq tried to assassinate President Bush. That is an act of war.
Iraq shot at US aircraft dozens (hundreds?) of times. Those are acts of war.
Iraq refused to comply with numerous UN resolutions backed by threats of force. The US was within its rights to enforce them.
Iraq used WMD against Iran and its own people. Hundreads of thousands were killed with them. There are large quantities of Iraqi WMD materials and weapons known to exist from their declarations which are still missing.
Is any of this getting past your blinders?

Yet, the US is still able to produce WMD as freely as it wishes and can use them to threaten foreign powers.

You are only 1/3 right, sort of.
The US doesn't produce Biological weapons and destroyed the ones it had 30 years ago, but it does conduct research for defensive purposes. This is permitted under the Biological Weapons convention.
The US doesn't product chemical weapons and is destroying the ones it does have. It does retain riot control agents, but this is permitted under the chemical weapons treaties.
The US could make nuclear weapons as long as it conformed to various treaties it has signed.

The US is not a world democracy, but a world hypocrisy.

That is a fair, balanced, and factual statement. Not. I'm sure the US pales behind such world leaders as North Korea and Syria in your mind.

We can do it, but NOBODY else can. And there is NOTHING you can do about it.

Tell us, which of these states feels constrained by treaty?

Do we need ANOTHER WMD? The answer is, we don't.

It isn't a WMD. Its not for a WMD.

I'm not sure that I can identify your problem. Is it ignorance or ideological blinders?

If it were discovered that North Korea, Iran, Syria or any country not currently "in" with the US was performing such research, they'd have been bombed, denounced and had their land divided up and sold to the highest bidder by now.

What do you mean "if it were discovered" ?

Your "cynicism" seems to be based upon appalling ignorance and a lack of understanding about the world. Here is a clue to help you along: Just because a country signs a treaty banning biological weapons doesn't mean that they aren't still making them. President Reagan had it right: trust, but verify. Oh, and FWIW, the treaties we have signed allow defensive research, which in essence this is.

Here are some links to help keep this discussion a bit closer to the facts:

Follow this link to the FAS site, then follow the individual country links to get to the listings of the individual county's programs. As you will see, there are more than a few countries with more than just research programs.

Putting "In Soviet Russia" jokes aside, here is a link to an article about a specific Soviet facility built in the 1970s which was building weapons and conducting research long after the Biological Weapons treaties went into effect.

While I agree that eventually everything comes out, the US government when they have a mind to things can stay under wraps for quite some time. Though by now we know all know the Aurora exists, but over the past 15 operational years, no one has ever seen one. And the National Reconnaissance Office existed for 3 decades while nary a journalist knew they existed.

While the parent was modded as funny, I really believe it's more likely than not that NSA really may be promoting it because they have it cracked.

The Military Analysis Network has a more complete description of the Landwarrior's various subsystems. Sounds like you would need a very stable OS to handle all the communications, geographic, thermal imaging, and directional software it must be running.

• The Memory Hole

• Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting

Here's a minor example of something those two sites didn't catch: Remember Iraq's so-called "mobile biological weapons factories"? A month after the story broke that they were for weather balloons, the CIA moved their report's URL.

An intriguing fact about this whitehouse.gov/*/iraq thing is that they do in fact cover some of the important statements which are apparently not duplicated in the press release, conference, and briefing directories. Perhaps there was a "unique urgency" to cover up some poor choices of words?

NSA gets a lot of freedom from US LAW by going across the boarder to a UKUSA signee in this case Canada vs in house or a US company. Just look at the Interception Capabilities for a sample of how the various signees co-operate to avoid each others laws.

NSA gets a lot of freedom from US LAW by going across the boarder to a UKUSA signee in this case Canada vs in house or a US company. Just look at the Interception Capabilities for a sample of how the various signees co-operate to avoid each others laws.

I don't know about torpedos, but this is the main way mines function. Link.

-

It's not only boyancy and gravity working against the ship, but also pressure. This is why a torpedo works against any side of a submarine.

You can read a thorough description, and see daigrams, here

To be fair, Bush actually improved upon Clinton's 1995 executive order on declassification. Ashcroft has encouraged challenging all FOIA requests, and Cheney is still fighting FOIA requests concerning his energy cabinet meetings.

Well, they do have WMD

China could develop anti-satellite (ASAT) weapons and use them to knock out US military and spy satellites before an attack on Taiwan, thereby leaving Taiwan in the dark, intelligence-wise. We have ASATs, why shouldn't they? And if amateur astronomers can locate US spysats, I'm sure they Chinese can too.

ASAT info

Look up the budget of NSA and tell me what it does. It spends all its time spying on its own citizens, rather than enemies....CIA spends a chunk of its resources spying on its own citizens too. It's hard to prove this so you either believe me or not. Examples include tracking civil rights activists during the civil rights era in the 60's, attempting to brainwash citizens using LSD (look up the origin of LSD), trafficking drugs to support its activities (drugs hurt citizens), etc.... more recently, Department of Homeland Security has been trying to get some programs going but haven't had much success (eg. getting utility workers to spy on citizens, establishing toll-free snitch line, Total Information Awareness, etc). I expect that they already spend a few million on such programs, which haven't been publicized. In about 10 years, expect their budget on these clandestine activities to zoom towards $1billion, just like how the CIA and DEA have. Right now (for 2004), the Department of Homeland security has a budget of around $36.2 billion. I suspect around 0.1% is spent spying on innocient citizens (36.5million) and you can expect this to increase as the department increases it size (due to bureacratization, as DEA and CIA have).

Of course, you probably don't believe any of this. Just like how you probably have no idea that the DEA spends $1.8billion on the "war" on drugs.

Sivaram Velauthapillai

Satellite seeking missiles aren't the easiest (or cheapest) weapons to build. As far as I know, the USAF is the only organization to ever construct one, namely the ALMV.

A very large missile launched from an F-15 in a ballistic climb, the project was canceled due to cost. I believe they did test some of these, and might even have some in a bunker somewhere, but I can't find a source on that.

--Ribald

We're simply incapable of getting interested in a winged taxi service which can only reach low earth orbit -- the "lost wrenches may rip through you at 30,000 miles per hour at any time" zone -- where robots could just as easily do the work. American astronauts should be preparing to play a role in the exploration, industrial exploitation and settlement of the Moon and Mars, not getting whacked by debris while en route to a useless space station in a dumb orbit.

Sex is bad, but daisy cutters are good

Sex is bad, but daisy cutters are good

They are putting all their new nukes on solids. e.g. DF-31 For nukes you need cold-launch capability and a LOX/LH2 space rocket requires a couple of minutes to fill the tanks and for the engines to heat-up. They are no good for nukes. Too slow.

They are putting all their new nukes on solids. e.g. DF-31 For nukes you need cold-launch capability and a LOX/LH2 space rocket requires a couple of minutes to fill the tanks and for the engines to heat-up. They are no good for nukes. Too slow.

duh, china already got ICBMs that can reach the states. This doesn't change a thing except to the better. i prefer them to send people into space than spending all the money on their military.

I suggest we target telemarketers with this: http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/smart/gbu-28.ht m

Every UI study I've ever read has concluded that the keyboard FELT faster, but that if you timed things, using a mouse was faster.

And where do you read these studies from?? Please cite at least one. I'd be very suspicious of them- it's not as if "mouse on/off?" is a truly independent variable that can be toggled without changing anything else in the environment.

Normally when an application is updated to the WIMP system, many other usability enhancements are bundled in at the same time.

Here's a study for you: find a professional whose job depends on extremely rapid and accurate computer operation. It could be the clerk at your grocery, it could be the navigator of a US Navy hovercraft. Inspect his computer. Is there a mouse installed?

I did read a study that concluded having one hand on the keyboard and one on the mouse was the most efficent method....

That's definately better than two-handed mousing!

That's another myth. It was bad politics, plain and simple, that allowed the Vietcong to prevail. You try fighting a war where you can't bomb their factories, not allowed to destroy their air bases, weapon depots, or radar stations.

This reminds me of that scene in "A Fish Called Wanda".... "You like winners? Like, say, North Korea?". "It was a tie!!". etc..

To my knowledge we did bomb the shit out of the North on several occasions. I think the reasons we lost the Vietnam war are complex. Certainly not as simple as what kind of weapons were used. But I also don't subscribe to the idea that we were "fighting with our hands tied". Short of nuking the North, or resorting to area bombing of their cities what would you have had us do? (oh wait, we did area bomb them).

You can not compare Rubles and dollars here. Considering that back then Russians spent about 10 times less on their multiple space programs than americans, $764M is a heck of a lot more than was economically reasonable.

On top of that it required its own huge launch pad and landing strip along with all associated equipment.

I don't disagree that canning the project was the right decision. You can't spend that sort of money on space flight while your population is starving. However the project itself made sense when it was concieved and was well excuted, one of the Russian space program's few genuine triumphs. The Russian's certainly had plans for Buran-Energia that where not possible with smaller rocket systems. Supporting MIR was not their only objective.

The Army has also been a big backer of this sort of technology for their Land Warrior program. They want the ability to dynamically update their cammo for a variety of conditions from light to dark, from desert to urban to forest.

If you don't know what that is or what its aims are then you don't know squat about the current cabinet. It's also not a secret; in this 1998 document signed by, for example, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, you can see the whole sorry plan for the current mess in Iraq: the ludicrous overstatement of Saddam's threat, the insistance that the UN need not be heeded if it gives the wrong answer, and the ever-present concern about oil. Total bullshit from start to end but it's bullshit written by the people now running your country.

Cheney is just a stooge, he has no ability or area of intrest beyond geting contracts for the people that put him in place.

Rumsfeld is slightly different in that he really is just an evil bastard. After shaking hands with Saddam he then helped arm him with various biological and chemical weapons. There is a copy of Saddam's shopping list at the end of this Congressional transcript but the original Senate Banking Committee report used to be available on line, but seems to have become buried beneath Google results to references to it. Rumsfeld lied in the above transcript when he said he had no knowledge of all this. In fact, he arranged the loans from the US to Iraq to pay for the bioweapons (which is where the Senate Banking Committee comes into it). The reason this was done was to help Saddam kill Iranian soldiers in the Iraq-Iran war, it was not even pretended that this would be a deterent: this was for actual use in the current conflict. The CIA later sent over specialists in biological warfare to help "calibrate" the weapons.

This is the real reason they were so sure Saddam had WMD: Rumsfeld had seen the receipts. The assumtion was that he would never have got rid of them, whereas the reality was that he had, probably because he knew the inspectors would one day have to be let back in and he thought that the US would have to listen to those UN inspectors even if it didn't believe what it was hearing. He was wrong!

Before you vote next time, perhaps you should find out about the people involved. Its not that hard if you are actually interested in looking.

TWW

They'd send you this baby over.

Phased array radar is hardly a new technology. I worked at a NORAD phased array radar site in the mid 80's that was built in the early/mid 60's. Perhaps this is a new application of phased array radar.

Why the need for a vertical take-off?

Any Harrier Jump Jet pilot in the Royal Navy will tell you that a heavier load can be lifted with the same amount of fuel if you take off horizintally and with a bit f help from the 'ski-jump' that was added to British Invincible-class aircraft carriers many years ago. A design for a horizontally launching/landing unmanned launcher called HOTOL was proposed to ESA by British Aerospace in the '80s but didn't get off the drawing board. There's another article here that describes the air-breathing ascent and the take-off trolley that would support it on the runway. Sounds a bit like Fireball XL5!

From the New York Times, May 19, 1998

[FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES, MAY 19, 1998]

Satellite Maker Gave Report to China Before Telling U.S.

(By Jeff Gerth)

Washington: A leading American satellite maker acknowledged for the first time Monday that a committee headed by one of its top executives provided a report in 1996 to the Chinese on a failed Chinese rocket, without first consulting federal officials, and contrary to the company's own internal policies.

But the company, Space Systems/Loral, a subsidiary of Loral Space and Communications, based in Manhattan, said it `does not believe any of its employees dealing with China acted illegally or damaged U.S. national security.' The company issued a two-page statement, which it called a `fact sheet.'

In the statement, Loral said it was cooperating with the Justice Department, which is investigating whether sensitive technological information was passed to the Chinese during industry reviews of an accidental explosion of a Chinese rocket seconds after liftoff in February 1996.

FAS

CHICAGO, June 30 (Reuters) - Loral Space & Communications Ltd., which makes and operates satellites, on Monday said it will pay rival Alcatel $13 million in a settlement that resolves all outstanding issues between them, including a contract dispute.

WebProWire

wild eyed, hardcore leftists ?

The Balfour Declaration by not means gave Israel any sort of territorial rights - it was merely a letter written by the British Foreign secretary, specifying that the British government would support the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. (link)
This would be similar to Jack Straw (the current British FS) writing a letter to some "pro-Chilean" figure, stating that the British government would support the establishment of a Chilean nation in Argentina.

The Israelis, in fact, initiated the 6-Day war. It is true that there were troop build-ups on both sides and that there was a great deal of threatening from all parties, but it was the Israelis that started the fighting. (link)
It is interesting to note that as part of the Israeli's initial attack, they assaulted a clearly marked American recon ship (USS Liberty) from the air - disabling it completely with several phases of attacks, there is also evidence that the Israelis shot down US planes that were deployed to the assitance of the Liberty. (link1 link2 link3).
Gaza, the West Bank and the Golan Heights were occupied by Israel during the 6-Day war (There were other pieces of land occupied during the war that were later returned).

The reason that it is accurately refered to as "Occupation" is that it precisely describes the situation (Similarly in concept to how the US is now occupying Iraq). The legal situation is that Israel has been mandated to return to its pre-1967 borders by a UN Security Council Resolution (242) and has ignored the international community's pressure along with several other Security Council Resolutions. Therefore, it is illegally occupying these territories .

What are these "Rules of War" that you are referring to? We've come a long way since the times when people could just take land from eachother just because they had a bigger army.

A single A-10 aircraft can fire 2100 or 4200 of these per minute (depending upon the configuration).

Given that the A-10/GAU-8 only carries ~1000 rounds of 30MM, "4200 per minute" is a bit misleading.

Ever picked up a 30mm DU bullet of the type fired by the A-10?

Why yes, I have. As a matter of fact, I used to do it for a living.

That is a lot of DU that could become airborne, and that is only from a single A-10.

How much remains airborne to blow around, and how much falls back to the ground in the immediate area?
After dispersal on the winds, how much could a person standing downwind actually inhale?

And data about DU causing very high levels of birth defects in Iraq, or people inhaling "significant amounts", are, to date, very inconclusive. It could just as easily be (if true) caused from poor safety procedures in the Iraqi manufacturing sector. Or Saddam's use of chemical weapons on his own people, which a proven fact.

Near where I live, an upscale subdivision is being evacuated. The reason? Lead contamination of the soil. The area used to be a shooting range years ago, and all the rounds ended up in the soil, to decay.

Based on this, should we ban lead?

If you're making a plutonium compression bomb (like Fat Man or all modern US weapons), yes, the shape and detonation needs to be precise on the 10^-6 scale. However, a fully working uranium bomb (like Little Boy) could be assembled by a Jr High metal shop class, given the correct pieces of enriched U235.

http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/land/du.htm

The 60's saw two interesting concepts the KIWI and the NERVA projects.

Another nuclear propulsion project was the project orion.

Yeah, no goddamn lie!

Those 13 weeks of OSUT (One Station Unit Training = Basic + AIT for tankers) were pretty dangerous.

There's no enemies in basic training, yet I found myself completely aware of what the Joe-Sixpacks were doing around me.

A short talley:

2 tanks driven off the deployable bridges.
1 grenade that only barely made it over the pit wall.
1 grenade that DIDN'T make it over the pit wall.
(although I'll say that the Beavis in me thought the live grenade toss was one of the coolest parts of basic)
1 guy fell off an obsticle
A tank with no parking break set = a rolling tank after you climb off. (he got kicked out for that bobble)
The 9mm and M16 firing ranges were one area where no one messed up.
Our rotation got the opportunity to fire live HEAT-MP-T rounds because they were due to be cycled out (ie. old), and one guy dropped one off a tank. Sure, it's got a double safety, but do you really care to test it?

That was all I remember that was particularly dangerous.

Check FAS. Quoting liberally from that document, and with minor editing for clarity:

=====

The quest for the H-bomb was based in part on a false premise: that there is an inherent limitation on the size and power of a uranium fission bomb, namely the limitation imposed by critical mass considerations. When a sphere of uranium-235 any larger than a softball is assembled, a nuclear chain reaction will start prematurely. This must, of course, be avoided until the moment of detonation. If only one critical mass (one softball) is used, the size of the explosion is limited to a few tens of kilotons. This was the supposed limitation.

[After some discussion of ways to get around the limitation...] Another technique was to use uranium-238, which has no critical mass limitation and which, by the way, is dirt cheap. The bomb can have as much uranium-238 as the designer wants, in any shape, but the neutrons for fission must come from an outside source, namely fusion.

Despite the public hype about the hydrogen bomb contest, there was a serious problem with any weapon based mostly on fusion energy. It doesn't produce a very satisfactory explosion. In uranium fission, 90% of the energy is released as the kinetic energy of highly-charged, fully-ionized fission fragments. With a high electrostatic charge, these fission fragments convert their energy to heat quickly and within inches, producing an intense point source of heat. The resulting blast and fire is the whole point of a nuclear explosion.

In fusion, on the other hand, only 20% of the energy is released as the kinetic energy of charged fusion products, and their electrostatic charge is only a plus two. Because of the lower charge, the Bremsstrahlung Effect, which produces the heat, is much less powerful with fusion products than with fission products. More importantly, the bulk of the fusion energy (80%) is carried off by neutrally-charged neutrons which can travel hundreds of yards before colliding with something and giving up their energy. By themselves, neutrons are very inefficient producers of blast and fire. But an H-bomb which is designed so that every fusion-produced neutron results in a uranium fission event is very efficient. It not only converts relatively useless neutron energy into blast and fire energy, it also multiplies the total energy release by a factor of ten or more. The neutron, with an energy value of 14 MeV, produces a fission event worth 180 MeV.

In a weapon optimized for fission-fusion symbiosis, fission actually dominates the explosion, providing 90% of the total energy and virtually all of the energy that contributes to blast and fire.

=====

Read the entire article if you have time, BTW. It's absolutely excellent.

The great circle route from Seattle to London passes over the North Pole, and need never cross land. Why didn't Concorde ever fly that route?

I'll give you a hint. What else travels supersonically and flies over the pole?

Give up?

No commercial flights went over the pole until 2000.

Or is China just too large of a trading partner, even if they have the world's largest oppressed population and a navy designed to defeat the United States.

Read this :
Excerpt from a speech delivered in 1933, by Major General Smedley Butler, USMC.

A small blurb on the system can be found here.

See, the very premise you're starting from is far from a given. You can't compile a piece of code and expect it to simply run on any Linux machine. It may run on many but nowhere near the 100% you can reach with Windows.

That, and most other counter-arguments you give, are security through obscurity. Claiming that systems are resistant to exploitation because they're nonstandardized is a weak, shortsighted defense. (And carries a pessimistic assumption that Linux will not become a dominant computing platform and acquire 'monoculture' characteristics)

(1) once you get code executed on a system you can do bad stuff (but don't think getting that code executed is such a trivial task); (2) a good security model is useless in the hands of ignorant users.

It's not a good security model. Allowing a system to contain privilege-escalation exploits is a design flaw, even if those exploits rely on watching a normal user until he says the magic word to update his priviledges. A good multiuser OS will allow only a small number of tightly-controlled and un-spoofable paths to reaching root access. One should never be allowed to "su" from an insecure environment (one that potentially has been tainted by untrusted code).

It should be possible to train users that there is just one way to change to a higher priviledge mode, so they can be certain any other prompt requesting the root password is an attack. The approved way to escalate priviledges should be protected by the OS so that no user-application is able to emulate or intercept it. Unix does not meet this criteria. The "su" command certainly isn't safe, nor are remote-root logins. Only Ctrl-Alt-F1 comes close, but even that has weaknesses.

This is what is alluded to by section 3.2.2.1.1 of the DoD Trusted Computer Criteria, which is the requirement that lead to Microsoft's use of Ctrl-Alt-Delete for a login box. (A feature they haven't always implemented correctly or even completely, but at least someone was trying. They seem to be backing away from this approach in XP, but have other, funny ideas to face this problem.)

Suggestions?