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FTO 1999

Check out the detailed analysis that the Federation of American Scientists worked up on Ramzi Yousef (the bomber who bombed the World Trade Center in 1993 and planned to blow up 11 airplanes on a single day in January 1995. It also illustrates the links between Yousef and Iraq and Saddam.

The title of the piece is
THE WORLD TRADE CENTER BOMB: Who is Ramzi Yousef? And Why It Matters

A especially relevant theory that they advance is that in February 1993, Saddam ordered his agents to try to topple New York's tallest tower onto its twin, and in January 1995, Iraq sponsored an effort to destroy eleven U.S. airplanes in the Far East"

From a link in timeline in the main story. It explains about the various levels of DEFCON and what they mean.

I agree that even a tactical nuke would cause more PHYSICAL DAMAGE than a couple of jetliners and collapse of a couple of huge 110 story skyscrapers. However, the DEATH TOLL is going to be in the high thousands if not tens of thousands. That is a death toll associated with nukes, not conventional explosives. There are very few scenarios where you can kill tens of thousands of people with conventional weapons inside of an hour. This was one of them. This level of deaths is definitely in the "weapons of mass destruction" range and US policy has been that use of a weapon of mass destruction will be retaliated in kind. During the Gulf War (Dubya's dad), that was a veiled threat of going nuclear if Sadddam used nerve gas or anthrax. I believe we may very well (fifty-fifty odds with better than 90% public suppport this time next week) use a single tactical nuke this time around just to show everybody that when this level of violence happens, the US will pull out ALL the stops. And that tactical nuke, if used, isn't going to be a B-61 which is a HELL of a lot bigger than 1 kiloton. A tactical nuke is more like a W-79 nuclear artillery shell... For info on the US nuclear arsenal, check here).

I agree that even a tactical nuke would cause more PHYSICAL DAMAGE than a couple of jetliners and collapse of a couple of huge 110 story skyscrapers. However, the DEATH TOLL is going to be in the high thousands if not tens of thousands. That is a death toll associated with nukes, not conventional explosives. There are very few scenarios where you can kill tens of thousands of people with conventional weapons inside of an hour. This was one of them. This level of deaths is definitely in the "weapons of mass destruction" range and US policy has been that use of a weapon of mass destruction will be retaliated in kind. During the Gulf War (Dubya's dad), that was a veiled threat of going nuclear if Sadddam used nerve gas or anthrax. I believe we may very well (fifty-fifty odds with better than 90% public suppport this time next week) use a single tactical nuke this time around just to show everybody that when this level of violence happens, the US will pull out ALL the stops. And that tactical nuke, if used, isn't going to be a B-61 which is a HELL of a lot bigger than 1 kiloton. A tactical nuke is more like a W-79 nuclear artillery shell... For info on the US nuclear arsenal, check here).

http://www.library.cornell.edu/colldev/mideast/fbi m.htm
http://csf.colorado.edu/pen-l/2000IV/msg03767.html
http://www.twf.org/News/Y1999/1130-SecretEvidence. html
http://www.wsws.org/articles/1999/oct1999/ins-o22. shtml
http://www.fas.org/irp/news/1999/02/990222-in.htm

There are obvious biases involved, but I leave it up to you to figure out the current state of our democratic institutions.

We are already dropping concrete bombs on Iraq's air defense installations. A water bomb should be easy.

See also these famous high-speed photos of nuclear tests (and some pictures of the 'shadow effect' from Hiroshima): http://www.fas.org/nuke/hew/Library/Effects/

What plane was that? Or are you just exaggerating and pulling numbers out of the air? If you are referring to the B-2 bomber, the costs are much less than that as is shown by this document. Also, the per plane cost includes all costs associated with the program. R&D, base construction, training, spare parts, etc. It does not cost the Air Force $2 billion to build a new B-2. In fact, several years ago I ran across an article in the Federal Computer News that in actual raw materials, fabrication, labor, & other production costs, a B-2 is only about 10-20% more expensive to build than a B1-B. However, since we spent nearly $30 billion in R&D before a plane ever rolled off the assembly line and that they need special hangers/bunkers and can't just sit outside in like the B1-Bs or B-52s do, the per unit cost of the program is very high. In fact, the fewer we build, the price per plane goes up!

As far as why do politicians vote for things that some of the military branches don't want, it can all be boiled down to jobs. If a defense contractor is in a congressman's district, he will likely vote for it.

You are also wrong that we are spending to much on defense. It's one of the few items that the Constitution explicitly grants funding for and it amounts to only about 16% of the Federal Budget and 3% of the GDP. The only time we spent less on the military in the last century was during the Great Depression and the pre-WWI isolationism period. Just a few highlights from here and here

• Procurement is funded at $40 billion/year when it should be at $65-70 billion.
• US forces and spending has been cut 40% since the end of the Cold War. The much smaller force is constantly being deployed overseas, making it harder for recruitment and retention.
• Military pay as fallen 13% compared to civilian pay. Most of the military's budget is spent on people and it's not uncommon for military families to be on public assistance.
• Special deployments like Bosnia, Iraq, Haiti, etc. aren't budgeted for and are taken out of the readiness and training budgets. Replacements for weapons expended during those deployements have not been budgeted either.
• Readiness and maintenance is only funded at 60-70% of what it should be.

IMHO, we spend far too much money on useless activities such as high school, college, and professional sports. Municipalities seem to have no problem coming up with the tax dollars for a sports facility for the benefit of a private corporation, but balk at improving educational facilities. Intramural sports and/or physical education classes to insure that the entire student body gets some form of exercise is fine. Spending a ton of money on facilities, coaches, equipment, etc. so a few individuals can play a game while also letting their education slide is a hideous waste [even given minimum grade requirements, we all _know_ this still happens]. It seems are priorities are on entertainment and entitlements rather than strategic things like education, infrastructure, and defense.

Fucked up priorities.

The US Air Force has been working on the Interactive Datawall (http://www.rl.af.mil/tech/programs/ADII/adii_dw.h tml), which includes laser pointer tracking and voice recognition among other things.

Eventually they hope to have a portable version so various mil units can just cart them around to whatever theater they're needed in.

We've come a long way from LeMay's old "Big Board"...

At the risk of flogging this horse... I could see this being a reasonable thing to try, since historically a number of air-to-air missiles have been converted into surface-to-air ones (the MIM-72 Chaparral, an adaptation of the AIM-9 Sidewinder; and the RIM-7 Sea Sparrow, an adaptation of the AIM-7 Sparrow). Also, there is a version of the humvee called the Avenger that ships with a radar and a small turret with four Stinger surface-to-air missiles on it. This is a good page on the Avenger system.

The only thing is, an AIM-120 AMRAAM is 12 feet long and weighs about 350 lbs, while the humvee is about 15.4 feet long, and with all the required acquisition gear, motorized rotating/elevating mounts, etc, etc, the humvee would get a little top-heavy. By comparison a Stinger missile is 5 feet long and weighs 22 lbs.

So, I guess it could have happened, but I don't see why anyone would want to try that.

Sorry, that's classified.

2. What is the production model going to use to get an initial trajectory?

Sorry, that's classified.

What? You say it isn't classified? Ok, now it is.

The article didn't say this, but along with the launch codes, they released the rest of the contents of the Gamecube Football, including the Gamecube 'playbook', to be used by Nintendo's CEO in case of a decision to deploy the 'Cube and a secure SATCOM radio handset.

In releasing the launch codes, Nintendo has given mankind a powerful and terrifying weapon in the war against boredom. Let us pray these launch numbers are never needed.

I'd imagine they'd use something similar to the Fulton "Skyhook" nose recovery system. Film from the first US spy satellites, the Corona series, returned to Earth in capsules that were retrieved by C-130s as they parachuted down.

Specially designated JC-130s were used to test the concept in the 1960s. The system was also used to pick people up from the ground in-flight. The Air Force retired the system on its MC-130 Combat Talons in 1996.

There are some pretty good photos of Fulton equipped C-130s on this page.

Here's an interesting site:
http://www.fas.org/bwc/agr/main.htm It details some of the effects of a agrobio attack. If you're a terrorist, your goal is to destabalize, right?

Now consider:
The effects of hoof'n'mouth disease has done in the UK - especially to their agri-economy in the short term. Also consider what it may mean in the long term - higher demand on calves, etc.
How easily hoof'n'mouth can be transported.
How easily hoof'n'mouth spreads among sheep/cattle
The relative lack-of effects on humans (not so much worry about the feedback property)
The common american practice of factory/intensive farming. (better spreading conditions)
The population difference between America and Britain - and hence the food requirement difference.

So far an agrobio attack sounds pretty good for a willing terrorist. Wipe out the midwestern states cattle industry just by taking a nice tour of the countryside and some farms for a few days. Watch New York and LA go into riot mode as the price of food triples.

Now consider that as far as cattle diseases go, hoof'n'mouth is pretty benign. Imagine some sort of combination between mad cow and hoof'n'mouth - easily spread, humans get it from eating the animal, and brutalizes the food production industry.

And hey, this still even leaves the option of using the TNT while the country is dealing with the food shortages.. double whammy.

Take a look at http://www.fas.org/irp/threat/mctl98-2/p2sec03.pdf if you are interested in some scary - not ment to be fiction - reading.

We think folks might have displaced a little radioactive fuel / warhead- it is way to easy to "lose" this type of payload.

I'm from Israel. We have here both the first operational missile defence system (AWS) in the world and suicide terrorists.

Just because a defence mechanism is not 100% effective, or just because there is an alternative way you can get kicked in the balls does not mean you should give up on that front.

Giving up on a front means you are a destiny-oriented loser.

-Omer

You can never know when or where you'll get screwed next. Have some protection for any occasion.

Hmmm, let's see. There's the Russian Federation (lots of missiles, obviously). There's China (DF-5/CSS-4, range 13,000 km). There's India (Surya, range of 12,000 km). The other declared nuclear powers (Pakistan, France, UK, and Israel) have IRBM's only at the very most, according to publicly available information, and with one exception these are all allies of the United States. The three other powers which do have ICBM systems are unlikely to use them against the United States. The expense involved in an elaborate ICBM defense system is thus difficult to justify in this case. See the FAS Nuclear Forces Guide for more facts and figures regarding nuclear forces. They got informative pages on other weapons of mass destruction as well.

Another one with a half-baked grasp of history 8-(

the plutonium bombs (Little Boy and Trinity) were implosion devices

I assume "Little Boy" was just a typo, and to nit-pick, "Trinity" was the name of a test of a device called "Gadget".

because they were initially afraid they couldn't scare up enough plutonium

Your logic escapes me. They were worried about Pu shortage, so chose implosion ?

There was no shortage of Pu, and there was no real concern over this past the very early days. Once a production reactor was on-line (i.e. not just the early Chicago pile), Pu was more readily available than HEU. After all, Pu extraction is relatively simple. Under war conditions, where operator safety goes out of the window, it's almost easy. There was continued concern over HEU production, and this led to the implosion designs being continued with

explain Project Urchin?

I can't. I've never heard of "Project Urchin". "Urchins" were developed in the Manhattan project, but not under a project of that name. Is Urchin something else ?

Why is an Urchin significant to a Pu shortage anyway ? You need an initiator as a neutron source, but they're not a specific component that's only required by one particular configuration. The Urchin concept isn't revolutionary (although making a workable one is hard). It's even too obvious to be patentable (although not by the USPTO's standards). India used them (called "Flower") in their early '70s tests. If you believe the kooks (I don't), even the German bomb design (sic) used a Po/Be urchin.

Weapons-grade fissionable materials in themselves are relatively easy to make. Any nation that has the know-how to build a nuclear reactor can build a breeder reactor to make weapons-grade uranium. The technology required to make the actual bomb, though, is pretty difficult to figure out.

This is exactly backwards. Bomb design is, though not exactly kindergarden stuff, actually fairly simple and easy if you know where to look to find the right info to work with. It's manufacturing the special materials in quantity which is hard and expensive.

Around 1970, the Department of Energy (and specificaly Edward Teller) did a threat analysis program called variously The Third-Country Experiment or The n-th Country Experiment. They took three brand new physics PhDs with no specific course work or training in nuclear physics and told them to design a bomb using only open source materials. This they did, designing a compact (1-ton), reliable (was analyzed by professionals and determined to have essentially full reliability / functionality, though one was not manufactured to test) weaponized plutonium implosion device, in 18 months time. So there's been a demonstration that it can take as little as less than 5 man-years effort.

See: The Nuclear Weapons FAQ by Carey Sublette and the newsgroup alt.war.nuclear

Any nation [...] can build a breeder reactor to make weapons-grade uranium.

If you don't have the first clue what you're blathering about, kindly shut the hell up.

"Trusted" is just marketing language and has no official definition. The official definitions, at least for the US government, can be found in the NSA/NCSC rainbow books.

One large gun lawsuit was thrown out not too long ago, and I think that's a Good Sign. This society does not need more laws, or lawsuits. We need people to (a) mind their own fucking business, and (b) take responsibility for their own fucking actions. At least as important, we need intelligent and ethical leaders who'll do the same.

Parenthetically, let's not start praising the U.S. arms industry, mmmkay? The United States supplied arms or military technology to more than 92% of the conflicts under way in 1999 [source]. When the U.S. government gives "aid" to another country, that aid is usually not cash, but some sort of voucher for U.S.-made products, often arms. So the U.S. government is using U.S. taxpayer dollars to fund the arms industry to give weapons to foreign governments. Nice deal if you can get it, huh?

"We all say so, so it must be true!"

NASA's air-breathing design is new, but Timberwind, established by SDI, has been around since the mid eighties.

As I recall one of the primary difficulties with Timberwind was keeping your payload from being reduce to rubble during launch. It is very powerful.

Note that test engines were built, and fired.

NASA tried this before from 1955-1972 or so. The project was called "NERVA" (Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Applications). Here's a link. Follow the Rover/NERVA link for the project I'm thinking of. The rest of the page covers other nuclear propulsion projects.

What do I owe Africa?

Really?

"Fruits of the 21st Century?"

How about if Africa gets itself out of the 6th century by producing something the world wants?

And this time, try not to make it slaves, terrorists, virus es, endangered species, or diamonds to raise money to hack people to death.

--Blair
"You are only as free, happy, smart, and rich as you think you are."

Last time Christmas Island dealt with big Western hardware, the British were nuking them. USA did it to Bikini and Eniwetok, UK chose Christmas.

Nowadays there's a casino on Christmas, which means foreign tourists, prostitution and wiping out the local population with HIV.

Being a launch site isn't such a bad option.

Don't you think that makes sense? The military does. That's why staff are supposed to use separate computers for SIPRnet and NIPRnet
--
"Weapons should be hardy rather than decorative" - Musashi

http://www.fas.org/irp/program/collect/sr-71.htm

For details, check this out.

If you're going to seriously think about nuclear powered cars, I suggest looking up some of the historical data on the nuclear powered airplane project:

• The Decay of the Atomic Powered Aircraft Program (12 Nov 1992)
• NUCLEAR POWERED AIRCRAFT - Nuclear Thermal Propulsion
• INEL News, March 19, 1996 - nuclear aircraft engines on display at INEL - (google cache)

The satellites which are equipped with bhangmeters [sic] do detect these blasts. You might remember the Israeli test which was detected in 1979.

Every once in awhile, someone (usually an amurikan) gets the idea that Churchill's latitude would make it excellent for launches... then a little later, they find out it's hard to get rocket scientists to live where it's freakishly cold. :)

Yeah, Baikonur Cosmodrome @ 45.9 N 63.3 E,
Plesetsk Cosmodrome @ 62.8 N 40.7 E,
Kapustin Yar @ 48.4 N 45.8 E,
Svobodny @ 5121'N 12808'E have all been total total party zones, kinda the Club-Meds of astronautics.

Names & coordinates from FAS

Don't forget, this could be used as a weapon. I actually like the idea of being able to attack with _almost_ total impunity.

I think this sort of space-based weapontry is banned under The ABM Treaty.
As this Website demonstrates.

Our missile defense program is also banned by That same Treaty.

Also, I think one day a men will all but destroy the world. It's in our nature.

You may be right about who they claim as an employer, but this makes me think they are at least partially under the DoD. This makes me think that State has some control, but the whole thing looks like a civilian/military compromise over who gets the goodies.

Ahh, I see the point of concern. No, she hasn't told me the capabilities of our newest subs, but she has let NFD (Not for Foreign Distribution, used for unclassified, but less-than-public info) slip through. Nothing illegal, http://www.fas.org has a HUGE amount of NFD posted.

And no, I don't know who tells their employees to claim DoD.... Well, ONI does, and CIA uses 'OGA', 'Other Governmental Agency'... enlighten me.

It's been a while, but a couple decades ago the Progressive magazine printed instructions on how to make a nuclear bomb. I don't believe it was found to be at all illegal (there's some reference to the article here).

The Anarchist Cookbook still seems to be easily available -- though maybe that's just because it's a right-wing conspiracy to get dumb anarchists to blow themselves up :)

And, several years ago when I knew someone who was into that sort of thing, books on converting weapons seemed easily available.

To me it seems like DeCSS (and the DMCA) is a radical departure from normal law. (Though I wonder if similar censorship has occurred for manufacturing LSD, etc.?)

Most of the power in an H-bomb IS due to fusion

Wrong. Check out the Federation of American Scientists, who have a remarkably accurate FAQ on the matter. Check out this link for details.

Or, for those who are goatse.cx averse, I'll just reprint a snippet of the FAQ here: The 5 Mt Redwing Tewa test (20 July 1956 GMT, Bikini Atoll) had a fission fraction of 85%.

The next claim of yours--namely, "It is naive of anyone to believe that nuclear weapons design is common knowledge"--is just as absurd. The principles behind nuclear-weapons design are straightforward and are taught in college classrooms to undergraduates. In the height of the cold war, nuclear-weapons design was published in the open literature. One physicist might write a paper detailing the particular physical properties of compounds exposed to extremely high radiation flux and whatnot, comparable to those found in the heart of a star--a perfectly acceptable scientific article, but when you say "heart of a star" I hear "in a nuclear weapon undergoing supercriticality".

The Manhattan Project was chaired by General Leslie Groves of the Army Air Corps/USAF, but all the principals involved were scientists. Have you ever tried to get a scientist to keep something a secret? They can't. They're genetically incapable of secrecy. It's right there in their DNA sequence, somewhere in that giant double-helix, that says, "if it's cool and it furthers our understanding of the cosmos, I've GOT to tell people about it!"

As far back as the early 1980s, the magazine The Progressive was sued by the United States Government to prevent them from publishing extremely detailed specifications and schematics of nuclear weapons. The DOE only withdrew the lawsuit after it became clear that to get an injunction against The Progressive, they'd have to declassify even more documents and put even more weapons-design material into the public record.

In the Manhattan Project days, it was VERY difficult to obtain large amount (mere pounds) of weapons grade U-235 and plutonium.

No it wasn't. Uranium is a very common element. You can refine it out of granite, for crying out loud. The difficulty has never been in getting fast-fissile material; the difficulty has been in separating it out. Yes, centrifuging it all out is tremendously power-intensive, but if you want the bang, you gotta pay the buck.

The main reason most nations cannot produce nuclear weapons (specifically hydrogen-based nuclear weapons) is because they don't know how to arrange the materials

Nope. The engineering behind it is well-known. The difficulty comes in getting refined fissile material--world governments keep an excruciatingly close eye on stockpiles of refined fissile material (save in the former USSR, which is why it's a source of such concern to arms-proliferation wonks), and building facilities to refine raw material into enriched fissile material is considered extremely destabilizing to regional peace, and as such, is strongly discouraged.

I've always wondered what is stopping us from building a scaled-down version of a nuclear bomb.

As a matter of fact, they have been made pretty darn small. Check this link.

Highlight:

"The W54 warhead used in the Davy Crockett had a minimum mass of about 23 kg, and had yields ranging from 10 tons up to 1 kt in various mods (probably achieved by varying the fissile content). The warhead was basically egg-shaped with the minor axis of 27.3 cm and a major axis of 40 cm. The W-54 probably represents a near minimum diameter for a spherical implosion device (the U.S. has conducted tests of a 25.4 cm implosion system however)."

10 tons of yield is pretty small for a nuke. And I can't find the link now, but I have read other reports that state the theoretical minimum diameter for a "linear compression" nuke is about 4". Those atomic rocket launchers in Starship Troopers? Not so crazy, apparently.

As a follow-up to my own post (ok, roast me if you will :) I just found this in my bookmarks: http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/land/land-warri or.htm seems a much more informative page about Land Warrior.

Lots of misconceptions on the topic of nukes here. Lets see if we can start debunking them.

Firstly, depending on the size of the rock in question a fairly substantial blast could be generated. A 60 mile radius of total desctuction is quite substantial, probably well in excess the most sophisticated "city buster" weapons still deployed today.

As to the concept of radiation, yes and no. Most of the "fall out" you hear about when nukes are involved is dirt and debree kicked up by the blast that small bits of fissile material have attached themselves to. This is why air burst explosions are typicaly cleaner than ground burst explosions. A space based blast would have very little in the way of fallout simply because of the very low escape velocity of such an asteroid. Most of the dust would just go casualy wizzing about space. The rock itself would have radioactivity not significantly in excess of background radioactivity

It's a piddling point, but your average 1 megaton nuke is probably a plutonium implosion device with a tritium fusion booster core. The "small" atomic bombs droped on Japan in 1945 were very fission inefficient, thus accounting for their yeilds (both less than 20 kilotons).

A FAQ on Nukes and other such toys is available HERE
Normaly I'd direct you to the NUKEOTRON to play with burst effects, but that's down, so wander around WOMD (Weapons of Mass Destruction) for a more interactive tour


This has been another useless post from....

Reinventing the wheel is yet another fine use of our 39% tax bracket that the Clintons invented.

Yeah, after all, it wasn't Ronald Reagan who spent $3.3 billion (just the part not in the "black" budget) on the X-30 National Space Plane scramjet project that never reached a prototype flight. No, it was the Evil Doppelganger Democrat who was really running the White House back then! In fact, while Bill Clinton was Governor of Arkansas, he was secretly controlling President Reagan with his mental emanation telepathy superpowers! Powers Clinton must still be using on Dubya, in an evil plot to make him spend the People's Money (tm), even after January 20, 2001!

The only solution? Aluminum foil wrap around the White House, and tinfoil hats for all Republicans.

By the way, you forgot to include the Clinton Death List (tm). It's not too late to prosecute him for the Lindbergh kidnapping!
----
lake effect weblog

All major countries spy on one another. The Chinese fly the Harbin HZ-5 , a plane whose use is nearly identical to the EP-3 aside from its inferior technology, along the coast of Hawaii.

They're all doing it, they all know they're all doing it. If the Chinese are demanding that the US apologize for spying, they're not only being aggressive but also hypocritical.

China would do the same if it had the technical capabilities to do so. Some corrections are in order, I think.

• The Great Wall was built mainly because China had a history of being invaded by nomadic people from the north, such as the Xiongnu, the Xianbi, the Mongols and finally the Manchus. It had little to do with xenophobia, rather with territorial defense.
• China hasn't always shunned the outside world. They started to shun it on a large scale after 1368 when the (foreign) Yuan dynasty was overthrown and the Ming dynasty embraced an ideology of nationalism.
• It's not exactly true that they cannot learn from the outside world. If I remember correctly. the fighter that was wrecked during the incident was a J-5, which is a clone of the Russian MiG-17 (and dispensable). :-)
• A nation that has a space programme is probably able to send a reengineered transport plane close to another country. It'd be really revealing to see how the US would react :-)

Whether or not you agree with either side in this situation, with regards to boundaries, spying, emergency mayday landings, or whatever, it's hard to simply look at China and say "so what."

The rhetoric that comes out of their country is largely overlooked in the US. Many of their leaders (political, social, military) have spoken openly of their expectations that the US will become a "has been" in the coming century. That China will, essentially, become the dominant force in the world -- economically, politically, socially, and militarily. They see it as their "Manifest Destiny," somewhat like we Americans saw the West as our destiny just over a hundred years ago.

Add to this mindset the fact that the political leadership took a lot of heat after their response to our accidental bombing of the Chinese embassy in the Kosovo conflict, and the fact that Bush took a lot of heat during the Florida election mess, and you've got two very powerful leaders who, honestly, can't afford to look weak.

Now I can be just a knee-jerk as anyone. I'm amazed that we haven't recalled our ambassadors, declared the crew hostages or prisoners, or tried to push a resolution through the Security Council (which, if I'm not mistaken, would be quickly vetoed by China anyway -- *there* is a useful body). Hell, I'm amazed that we haven't even scaled up our presence in the waters nearby the island. It'd be great, both from a nationalistic and idealistic standpoint, to see a team of marines airdrop on the island, rescue the crew, and airlift the plane out (just try dogging MiGs when you're hanging a spy plane from a heavy-lift helicopter). But what would that really accomplish? We could probably win a War with China. But is it worth trying?

Bottom line: As much as I want to see these guys released, yesterday, and as much as this posturing seems crazy, remember that we're dealing with a BIG powder-keg here (after all, where was gunpowder even invented?), and the Chinese are more than ready to fight back for what they believe, most likely sincerely, is unfounded US aggression.

Real bottom line: This scares me. It should scare everyone. The really scary part is that it isn't scaring people as much as it should be.

(a good reference: China Debates the Future Security Environment - US GPO (out of print) -- 600 quotations from various Chinese authors since 1994 -- Defense Dept, National Defense University)

Your recollection is wrong.

The shuttle uses five IBM AP-101S computers. They are not microprocessors. Architecturally, they belong to the IBM 360/370 family of computers. See http://www.fas.org/spp/civil/sts/newsref/sts-av.ht ml.

-Rob Swenson, SGT, US Army

If nothing was moving, you'd just see a static pattern. However, if you turn the spool around its center axis the photons going one way through the fiber have to travel a bit longer to get to the end than the photons going the other way. The diffraction pattern shifts, and you can measure this shift.

Look up "laser ring gyro" for more information. Here's a link.
--
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No one expects the Spammish Repetition!