The contiguous paths of building rockets to launch satellites into space and/or carry nuclear warheads as ICBMs were blazed after World War II by the United States and the Soviet Union. For the first few years after the war, both superpowers exploited V-2 technology pioneered by Nazi Germany. By the mid-1950’s there was no technical […]
Fox News, National Review, the American Council on Science and Health–at long last, have you left no sense of decency? Their latest hue and cry is to bring back DDT, the most infamous environmental pollutant of the 20th century. As though there is no other way to control the mosquitoes that carry Zika virus. Nothing […]
“There appears to be no threshold below which exposure [to ionizing radiation] can be viewed as harmless.” This statement by Herbert Abrams, renowned radiologist and longtime professor at Harvard and Stanford who died last week, can be fairly characterized as fundamental bedrock beneath principled arguments against nuclear power, nuclear weapons, and the full panoply of […]
The Washington Post is developing a serious born-yesterday syndrome in its reporting, perhaps understandable after years of veteran staff losses, a radical ownership change, and move to a new office building. How quickly the factual past is being replaced by entertainment. In its coverage today of the 30th anniversary of the space shuttle Challenger disaster, […]
Sam Roberts continues his string of weird New York Times obits of far-right academic luminaries with a doozy about Forrest McDonald, a longtime outlier historian at the University of Alabama. Prof. McDonald made a prosperous career by worshipping the Founding Fathers and excusing American slavery as “heaven compared to the Russian serf.” This kind of […]
The 2,000-mile flight from Guam to the Korean peninsula takes at least 4 hours. B-52’s made lots of similar trips to Vietnam and back two generations ago during Operation Rolling Thunder. There was no need to perform carpet bombing (a war crime under the Geneva Conventions since 1977) in a hurry. Since a military air […]
The chart below from a new Congressional Research Service fact sheet on NASA funding shows in a glance why nobody is going to Mars anytime soon. viagra sans prescription http://robertrobb.com/how-much-difference-would-a-1-billion-rainy-day-fund-make/ In this manner this treatment activates the normal mode in existence of ED health condition. The principle dynamic part of Kamagra Oral Jelly and I […]
The bazillion-dollar American plutonium manufacturing complex that is a legacy of Cold War nuclear weapons mania has found its silver lining in production of Pu-238 for fueling spacecraft electricity generators. Like Bulova’s plutonium-powered wristwatch, Monsanto’s atomic coffee machine, and Medtronic’s nuclear pacemaker, NASA’s RTG units were plausible technology only because they were backed up by […]
It’s been four years since the Japanese government declared the Fukushima disaster to be “under control,” though that was clearly a politician’s wishful thinking, not an engineer’s assessment. Now the man in charge of decontaminating the site admits that no one knows how long the cleanup and decommissioning will take. The most optimistic projections are […]
Kalashnikovs and TATP: still the same cheap, reliable, low-tech weaponry from last century. As the most lavishly supported intelligence services in the world continue to be foiled spectacularly by terrorists on the lowest rung of the ladder, old lessons remain valid:
Terrorists don’t work to overcome particular anti-terrorist technologies. They choose softer targets. Instead of […]
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