Arms Control Wonk

As a fellow Dan Carlin fan I’d also recommend this podcast (not by Dan Carlin): https://www.armscontrolwonk.com/

I listen to the Arms Control Wonk Podcast and they often go into open source analysis of North Korean or Saudi or whoever's current projects based on finding test sites with pictures from this sort of commercial satellite imagery. Recommend if you think that sounds interesting. https://www.armscontrolwonk.com/

This is impressive journalistic work. If you are a fan of such type of open-source intelligence, I highly recommend the Arms Control Wonk podcast and blog, who have done amazing investigations into North Korean missile development (https://www.armscontrolwonk.com/). Yet, with so many obvious giveaways, I find it hard to believe Russia ever wanted to get away with the Skripal poisoning. From using a very exotic Russian-made poison to the absurd Salisbury Cathedral story, it looks like a provocation or trolling. Of course, the Russian government will officially deny any involvement, but they are doing it with an obvious wink.

If you're interested in the latest nuclear weapons developments, I highly recommend reading the blog https://armscontrolwonk.com . There's lots of detailed political and technical analysis of the world's nuclear weapons systems there with an effort to track and limit their proliferation. If you've never investigated this type of thing before, you might be surprised at just how much knowledge there is to be had in unclassified "open source" material like this.

For those who want more of this "analysts' insight", I can heartily recommend the blog and podcast, Arms Control Wonk [0]. The researchers and experts there work to perform analysis into most new missile launches in the interest of non-proliferation. Since the recent ramp-up of NK missile tests, I've found their writing and (largely less formal) podcasting extremely interesting and valuable both as an expert opinion on the capabilities of NK (and other proto-nuclear states), and as a look into the research that feeds journalism like this piece. [0] http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/

If you're into this kind of thing, then I cannot recommend the group blog, "Arms Control Wonk" enough! http://armscontrolwonk.com/ It contains some seriously in-depth analysis of both current and historic nuclear weapons development, with a strong bend toward the diplomatic and political side of things.

This episode of Arms Control Wonk is worth a listen if you think this true: https://www.armscontrolwonk.com/archive/1215097/deterrence-in-ukraine/…

> suffering from the same insanity It isn't exactly clear what this means, but when I read it I thought, "we all seem to be suddenly hysterical about nuclear war." I listened to the most recent episode of the Arms Control Wonk podcast[1] last night. In this episode, Dr. Jeffrey Lewis observed that yes, paid media and social media is hysterical about nuclear war right now, but also, that the underlying emotional anxiety that fuels this sort of coverage/discussion is the natural result of nuclear deterrence. It's supposed to feel tremendously frightening. He noted that the word itself, "deter," comes from a latin word that also gave us "terror." The tremendous anxiety that we all feel is totally appropriate given the threat. It feels like insanity, yes, but it actually shows that the system of deterrence, as terrible as it is, is still working. 1. https://www.armscontrolwonk.com/

It's often framed as that, but Ukraine didn't really have nuclear weapons at the dissolution of USSR. There were nuclear weapons located on its territory, but they were all controlled by military units that regarded themselves as answerable to Moscow, not Kyiv. What Ukraine really agreed to was to agree that they didn't own them, and allow them to be physically removed, in exchange for the security guarantee. This podcast is well worth a listen: https://www.armscontrolwonk.com/archive/1215097/deterrence-in-ukraine/

> Ukraine had them and gave them up That is a mistatement of facts. There were Russian troops controlling Russian nukes under Russian control on Ukrainan soil. Even if Ukraine somehow seized them they couldn’t have maintained them in the long run. Saying that “Ukraine had nukes” is equivalent with saying that Belgium has nukes just because the US keeps some nuclear warheads in an airbase physically located in Belgium. If you are interested in more I recommend this Arms Control Wonk podcast episode: https://www.armscontrolwonk.com/archive/1215097/deterrence-in-ukraine/

The open source arms control people over at arms control wonk[1] regularly talk about using Russian social media as a place to learn about base layout, details, etc. It's very hard to check that every person within vision range isn't going to snap a photo. [1] https://www.armscontrolwonk.com/

Your link is broken - I think it's because their TLS configuration doesn't support the non-www hostname. This link works though: https://www.armscontrolwonk.com/

Here is a great podcast about the nuclear-powered cruise missile (the one that spews radiation as its exhaust, is >180dB loud from the ground, and has unlimited range) - and a public analysis of its testing in the arctic. https://www.armscontrolwonk.com/archive/1205364/russias-crashing-cruis… It comes with some strong shout-outs to Planet (satellite startup), and goes into some technical detail about how they've gone about geo-locating where the tests occurred. Very scary/crazy weapons here...

For people wanting really great analysis of nuclear issues, check out Jeff Lewis's Arms Control Wonk podcast. There's three episodes analyzing the Convention on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons treaty amongst many other fascinating topics like missile defense. http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/podcast/

Jeffrey Lewis says that its a megaton, that would make them part of the club. https://twitter.com/ArmsControlWonk/status/904197086815543296 (the guy from http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/ says so) Interesting if India and Pakistan will decide that they now need to acquire and test thermonuclear weapons of their own. (unexpected side effects?)

This is why we should all become more knowledgeable about nuclear weapons. Right now there is no political pressure to make things more safe because the electorate is largely uneducated. I recommend this podcast: http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/podcast/ Which has really pulled back the curtain on nuclear thinking. There's also a private members slack if you support them on Patreon, which is endlessly useful. And really, if you're going to support a podcast on Patreon, I can't think of a better case than the ACW Podcast: https://www.patreon.com/acwpodcast

It's a hobby. I read a lot and I have enough formal education to digest primary sources (mostly; my highest qualification is auditing a neutronics course while in grad school). If you too would like to know way more about nuclear weapons than is useful in civilian life, I'd recommend reading: Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb The nuclear weapons FAQ, authored by Carey Sublette, a hobbyist researcher who is extraordinarily dedicated to understanding nuclear weapons from declassified documents and physical principles: https://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Nwfaq/Nfaq0.html Anne C. Fitzpatrick's dissertation Igniting the Light Elements: The Los Alamos Thermonuclear Weapon Project, 1942-1952: https://www.osti.gov/biblio/10596 The Arms Control Wonk blog/podcast: https://www.armscontrolwonk.com/ Nuclear historian Alex Wellerstein's blog Restricted Data: https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/ The nuclear weapons subreddit, particularly posts on it authored by Alex Wellerstein, Carey Sublette, and a few others whose names currently escape me: https://old.reddit.com/r/nuclearweapons/ Chuck Hansen's book "U.S Nuclear Weapons: The Secret History" (out of print, sadly; will have to pay $$$ or find a scanned pirate copy) and his massive book/PDF "The Swords of Armageddon" available for purchase here: http://www.uscoldwar.com/

There are a variety of different approaches to counter the ABM and ragged second strike scenario, China is investing in several. * Just build more nukes. Adding more warheads, especially ground-launched ones, is cheaper than adding more interceptors to the ABM shield, so it's always a losing game. Thankfully, no one seems to be pursuing this route, since that is massively destabilizing. * Make it harder to take out all of your missiles in a first strike. Your link is an excellent example of this. Building additional silos is even cheaper than building additional missiles, and then you can play a shell game where you don't know which silo houses a missile and which does not so you have to strike at them all. There are other basing options available, like road-mobile launchers, which China and Russia have both invested in, though this is easier with shorter range ballistic missiles. And of course there are ballistic missile submarines, which give most survivable second-strike capability, but are much more expensive to operate. * Use a delivery system that is harder to intercept, which I mentioned before. China has tested using both hypersonic glide vehicles and fractional orbital bombardment, in fact both at the same time (https://www.armscontrolwonk.com/archive/1213655/a-fractional-orbital-b… ).

There's been good discussion on some episodes of the Arms Control Wonk podcast[1] about how bad the South Koreans are at this, although I unfortunately can't remember on which episodes. Things like military installations being obvious from aerial imagery because it's the only areas where someone incompetent at using the Photoshop clone tool has copied a bunch of trees around. Other examples are "secret" missile silos being discovered because a bunch of buildings are seen in the exact size / configuration as other known military sites. The South Koreans having re-used the plans and architectural drawings. They said that in some cases the most plausible explanation for some sites still being secret is to save face. Nobody wants to own up to how much of an open secret they are due to opsec failures over the years, even though everyone, and certainly the North Koreans, know exactly where they are and what they're for. 1. https://www.armscontrolwonk.com

I don't know what to tell you. You clearly haven't studied International Affairs, or at least read the scholarly literature. Even some cursory research through Wikipedia citations will bring this up. But in any case, here are some freebies: https://armscontrolcenter.org/why-tactical-nuclear-weapons-are-anythin… https://www.armscontrolwonk.com/archive/403540/brodies-weakest-book/ If you have a real interest in this area, a subscription to Foreign Affairs would be useful. Especially during the 20th century that's where all these arguments were hashed out. Tactical nukes were already being publicly debated in the 1950s. You may be able to access many older articles, from Foreign Affairs and others, through a free JSTOR account.

The existing ground-station ionosphere data mentioned has been used to detect missile launches: https://www.armscontrolwonk.com/archive/1216884/detecting-missile-laun… I imagine you could do the same thing with much better coverage using this distributed ionosphere monitoring method.

A rebuttal https://www.armscontrolwonk.com/archive/1218663/errors-in-postols-anal…

So, not this data exactly but broadly similar data (Japanese publications of differential GPS corrections) have been used to spot North Korean missile launches in the open source world. https://www.armscontrolwonk.com/archive/1216884/detecting-missile-laun… has more info on that. Essentially the corrections for each satellite can give you a map of what the ionosphere looks like, and so having more satellites is better. If there were publicly available dGPS- or dGLONASS/dBeiDou etc. archives available in other countries it would make this even more useful. If China or Russia published these it would be very useful indeed for triangulating the flight path through the ionosphere.

If you like mysteries, The Strait Times did a mini-series on "The Unsolved Mysteries of South East Asia" [0] which were (other than MH 370) totally new to me. "Arms Control Wonk" [1] has episodes on North Korea missile tests, open source intel methods, etc. which often get simplified by regular press. [0] - https://omny.fm/shows/the-unsolved-mysteries-of-south-east-asia [1] - https://www.armscontrolwonk.com/archive/author/podcast/

This would have been a good time for Xi to reiterate that if he meant it. But this article suggests that it's a mistranslation: https://www.armscontrolwonk.com/archive/207019/a-chinese-nuclear-umbre… It does seem unlikely that China would be making such pledges. "Corresponding security guarantees" does sound rife with opportunities to misunderstand.

What we have recently seen from China is actually just a missile sponge of large silo fields of ICBMs being built so that even if America does strike first, China still has a nuclear deterrent in the form of the missiles not wiped out. It's hard to take out a lot of targets even if they are relatively soft. https://www.armscontrolwonk.com/archive/1212970/a-second-silo-field/

> Specifically, Ukraine had nuclear weapons when it split from the Soviet Union and gave them up in exchange for security guarantees. Yes: They had them, but.... No: They did not really control them or had the ability to maintain them. Link: https://www.armscontrolwonk.com/archive/1215097/deterrence-in-ukraine/

The US nuclear weapons program had to do something similar in the 2000's with a material known as Fogbank. This is used in the W76 warhead as an interstage material, and they needed more of it to keep the weapons in operational state. Unfortunately, they'd forgotten the manufacturing process, decommissioned the plant that made it, and the people that knew how to do it weren't around any more. They figured it out, but it doesn't necessarily look easy to do (nor does the material seem easy at all to make in the first place). https://www.armscontrolwonk.com/archive/201814/fogbank/ p20 here says more: https://www.lanl.gov/science/weapons_journal/wj_pubs/17nwj2_09.pdf Edit: I somehow missed this other thread in this story, despite a search: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26334367

Wikipedia calls it an "aerogel", but rumors have it originally being closer to ordinary "closed-cell extruded polystyrene foam", which is often sold under the brand name Styrofoam. It might be something else entirely now. It's role is said to be absorbing the x-rays generated by the fission stage and turning into a plasma to help ignite the fusion stage. Edit: https://www.armscontrolwonk.com/archive/201814/fogbank/

The intel haul Mossad released was interesting in that it fills out the details of the background to the treaty itself, but as the data is about activities up to 2003 it just doesn't impact verification of current activities. Most of appears to have been known in the intelligence community, this was just publication of it. Here is a podcast with some experts discussing the release and having a general good time with all the nerdy details: https://www.armscontrolwonk.com/archive/1205128/netanyahu-and-the-atom…