Category Archives: military

The UK and Pakistan to be nuclear equals in a decade or less?


Just in case you need to be frightened almost to death, I offer this piece on the state of Pakistan’s nuclear forces from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, where I ply the editing trade. Here’s the nub of the matter:

The US raid that killed Osama bin Laden has raised concerns about the security of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. In the process of building two new plutonium production reactors and a new reprocessing facility to fabricate more nuclear weapons fuel, Pakistan is also developing new delivery systems. The authors estimate that if the country’s expansion continues, Pakistan’s nuclear weapons stockpile could reach 150–200 warheads in a decade … [along with] nuclear command and control, nuclear-capable aircraft, ballistic missiles, and cruise missiles.

But you’ll have to read the whole piece — with its deadpan descriptions of Islamabad’s various new nuclear-capable missiles — to acquire the full, bug-eyed, oh-my-God response.

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Area 51 Revisited


I’ve always been a sucker for stories about and images of spy planes. The U-2 and more particularly the SR-71 Blackbird  had a Jetsons, the-future-as-seen-from-the-1950s look that seems, somehow, classic to me. And National Geographic has an exclusive set of pictures of the 1963 crash of  a prototype of a successor to the U-2 known as the A-12. It’s an early attempt at stealth technology that looks like it was designed in Hollywood for a sci-fi movie. Here’s the run-down:

Nearly undetectable to radar, the A-12 could fly at 2,200 miles an hour (3,540 kilometers an hour)—fast enough to cross the continental U.S. in 70 minutes. From 90,000 feet (27,400 meters), the plane’s cameras could capture foot-long (0.3-meter-long) objects on the ground below.

But there’s another reason I’m linking to this annotated slideshow.  I’ll let National Geographic explain: “During the 1950s and ’60s, Area 51’s top-secret OXCART program developed the A-12 as the successor to the U-2 spy plane.” Area 51. Top-secret spy plane. How could I resist? Particularly when I know the search engines are going to feed hordes of UFO-niks to this blog, where they will doubtless find yet more evidence of the government’s fiendishly clever attempts to cover up what really happened at Area 51.

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Filed under absurdity, aliens, Area 51, aviation, military, spy plane, U-2, UFO