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With the Air Force’s announcement today that Northrop Grumman will build yet another new generation of nuclear-war-fighting bombers, General Curtis LeMay can continue to rest in peace six feet under the turf at Colorado Springs, assured that his 1950’s-vintage Armageddon mission of flying over distant cities to erase them with thermonuclear bombs will remain doable […] History-minded readers with strong stomachs are invited to consider the 50-year saga of the U.S. Air Force/Lockheed/Boeing AC-130 gunship–a descendant of the Vietnam War’s infamous “Puff the Magic Dragon” aircraft–which perpetually draws the furor of human rights groups around the world. Designed primarily to rake saturated fire with cannons and Gatling guns across massed battlefield […] Automotive industry engineers and the niche journalists who write about auto technology must all be scratching their heads about the furor over Volkswagen’s “Deiselgate.” It has been no secret for years that official testing of car engines to see if they meet exhaust pollution standards has precious littleObserved Indications The below mentioned indicants are effortlessly […] David Willman survives at the Los Angeles Times as one of a minuscule number of mainstream American newspaper reporters who know how to dissect a sick Pentagon program. (Actually, I can’t think of any others.) His exposé about the Army/Raytheon JLENS radar balloon system reveals a textbook case of waste, fraud, and abuse in military-industrial […] Why are Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos renting old launch pads at Cape Canaveral? Because they can. Florida politicians will always roll out the red carpet for them or anyone else with money to burn along the down-at-the-heels Space Coast, just to get the dollars flowing again into Cocoa Beach motels. When Bezos says “the […] What is it about missile defense that charms journalists and pumps the military-industrial complex into ecstasy? Devastating technical critiques of myriad Star Wars iterations and the ageless Patriot missile never seem to alter either the dumbfounded attention of the news media or the billions upon billions of dollars that pour into these congenitally flawed weapon […] Technology is a forward-looking engine of change that pays scant attention to the past. It defines progress. American culture, which has scant interest in history, has embraced technology like no other. Japanese culture, which pays enormous attention to the past through Buddhist traditions, has also been a progenitor of high technology, but straddles an uneasy […] Seventy years after Japan’s first experience with nuclear energy, the nation resumed its affair with the atom after a four-year breakup. Kyushu Electric Power, the utility that restarted the Sendai plant, presumably waited for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki commemorations to pass before letting the core go critical. Volcanic activity poses a threat to the region […] “Hiroshima was a city of considerable military importance.”–Washington Post, August 6, 2015 On the 70th anniversary of the American atomic attack on Hiroshima, one of the most indelible aspects to commemorate may be the mythology that has survived despite three generations of historical scholarship. Today Richard Johnson and Bonnie Berkowitz repeat one of the most […] Hoover Institution and Heritage Foundation fellow, Thatcher flack, Reagan sycophant, repentant Oxford undergraduate communist (rather like having joined a campus Gilbert and Sullivan troupe–he was simultaneously a member of the Tory-bastion Carlton Club), proto-Formalist poet, advocate of a zenophobic “Anglosphere” of nations–Robert Conquest’s affiliations comprise a panoply of right wing encomia. His lifework was delineating […] |