SwiftVets.com

[GenrXr]

As Iran and North Korea Rattle their Sabers, do we have anyone in the Pentagon who actually reads?

We are using the Aegis class warships as sensors says Gertz, yet the Heritage Foundation which was formed in the 90’s by a group of missile defense experts argues we should be placing our Aegis Cruisers on the west coast armed with SM-3 missiles.

Heritage notes in ‘War Footing’ that the SM-3 was successful in 5 out of 6 tests in 2005, yet at time of the books publication we only had a reserve of 3 SM-3’s.1 We have a proven missile intercept technology, yet the Pentagon continues to retire our cruisers while not adding SM-3’s to our arsenal.

We need to produce SM-3’s and place our retiring Aegis Cruisers on the west coast as missile defense platforms.

I have no problem with land based systems, yet until they are proven we must have our offshore Aegis system in place as an interceptor, not a sensor.

Anything else is pure incompetence.

Frank J. Gaffney and Colleagues, ‘War Footing’ Naval Institute Press 2006 pp. 282-284
_________________
"An activist is the person who cleans up the water, not the one claiming its dirty."
"All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to stand by and do nothing." Edmund Burke (1729-1797), Founder of Conservative Philosophy

[dusty]

Well, I'm not in a position to know but I'd say that the SM-3 is probably not our first line of missle defense. We should probably look skyward.
Just a guess of course.
Dusty
_________________
Left and Wrong are the opposite of Right!

[GenrXr]

[BuffaloJack]

Now that North Korea has supposedly detonated a nuke, what is next?
Iran doesn't need to continue their nuke program. That nutbar in North Korea will just sell Iran a fully functional nuke. For that matter, Iran will probably have to get in line behind Osama at the N. Korean "Quickie-Nuke" checkout counter.

According the the USGS seismic readings, the NK blast was equivalent to 550 tons of TNT. For comparison, the Nagasaki blast had a 20-kiloton yield.

If you really think about it, NK could have just trucked 550 tons of conventional TNT into that abandoned coal mine and set it off. Who'd know the difference? The world would see them as joining the Nuke Club and nobody'd be the wiser.
_________________
Swift Boats - Qui Nhon (12/69-4/70), Cat Lo (4/70-5/70), Vung Tau (5/70-12/71)

[Schadow]

[BuffaloJack]

[Schadow]

[BuffaloJack]

Schadow,
You're a scoundrel after my own heart.
Jack
_________________
Swift Boats - Qui Nhon (12/69-4/70), Cat Lo (4/70-5/70), Vung Tau (5/70-12/71)

[baldeagle]

Could "Dear Leader" have just dumped 500 tons or so of Ammonium Nitrate and fuel oil into a hole and set it off?
In April of 2004, they had a train explosion killing 100 people or so and injuring thousands, could that trainload have been intended for the same hole in the ground and just set off sooner than intended?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/3649655.stm
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,117872,00.html
http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2004/s1131470.htm
_________________
"In a word, I want an American character, that the powers of Europe may be convinced we act for ourselves and not for others; this, in my judgment, is the only way to be respected abroad and happy at home." --George Washington

[BuffaloJack]

[GenrXr]

[GenrXr]

[NortonPete]

Perhaps the bogus story could be enhanced a little.
North Korea working on an Anti-Gravity bomb.
The NYTimes would buy that. Oh the humanity, imagine people and
building suddenly flying out into space when hit with one.

But on a more serious note. I agree with the above analysis of the NK test.
And I'm not sure about the timing of the recent report of radiation being found right before the UN vote.
There is some small amount to be found everywhere.

What if the little Kim doesn't know it wasn't a real Nuke? What if those who
set it off just told him it worked? Now he hears another story in the foreign press that it was a dud?
This guy is capable of anything including insisting his
people set one off above ground. Perhaps for his birthday.

I remember that Sadam's Generals were telling him they had all kinds
of weapons, some of which may have been hoaxes.

[Schadow]

I've been thinking some more about this NK nuke test (always a dangerous thing to do, I know). A recent article by Michael Goldfarb in The Weekly Standard posited the idea that the test could have been a research test of a primary, or "trigger", device for a two-stage fission/fusion, or three-stage fission/fusion/fission assembly (or "H-bomb").

A schematic for a three-stage, Teller-Ulam design, weapon is shown here:



The primary is a standard fission device whose principal purpose is to release an intense X-ray flux and doesn't add much, in itself, to the eventual yield of the whole assembly. The X-rays are reflected off the inner surface of the bomb casing and provide extreme compression to the mass of lithium hydride/lithium deuteride, encased in clunky old U238, which fuses into heavier atoms with a huge release of energy. In the case of a three-stage weapon, the fusion reaction then exerts great pressure on a core rod of plutonium which then fissions, augmenting the fusion process. And the whole enchilada then has a yield in the megaton range.

(Don't worry, no classified info revealed here. Details of all this is to be found in this Wikipedia article.) The article includes photos of many weapons including the Soviet's "Tsar Bomba" behemoth which, in a test, yielded 50 MT (that's 50 million tons TNT equivalent, the largest man-made explosion ever). Significantly, pictures of "physics packages", which contain all the stuff needed, are shown and are in the size range suitable for weapons as small as cruise missiles.

So, the NK could possibly have been testing a small first stage and measuring primarily the X-ray flux. (X-rays are instantaneous and would have no residue for later sampling.)

I'm not suggesting that the DPRK has the talent to work out all the geometries and other tech requirements to get to a biggie weapon but there's a lot of talent out there to help, including those nations who insisted on watering down the recently passed UN "sanctions". China itself once tested a 3.3 MT weapon (also pictured in the article).

Schadow
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Capt, 8th U.S. Army, Korea '53 - '54

[SBD]

From a post I made on 12/15/05 at Free Republic.