September 20, 2005

Slate: No Nukes Is Good Nukes - Today’s North Korea breakthrough is great. Now comes the real work. By Fred Kaplan: “It’s a significant breakthrough. But it could easily have been accomplished two and a half years ago, had President George W. Bush been willing. It is also nothing like an actual agreement, just a preliminary step before the real negotiations—where, if history holds, North Korea will frustrate us with tricks and backtracking, and we just have to hang on tight.”

Hang on tight until what? Until the wishful thinking ends.

Exeter News-Letter Local News: Author Dan Brown to speak Oct. 11: “MANCHESTER - Author and New Hampshire native Dan Brown will make a rare public appearance as the keynote speaker at the New Hampshire Humanities Council�s (NHHC) 16th annual dinner, celebrating the council�s mission to provide programs that foster reflection, discussion and civil debate.

The 16th annual dinner is slated for Tuesday, Oct. 11, at 5 p.m., with dinner and keynote beginning at 6:30, at the Center of New Hampshire - Radisson in Manchester. In addition to Brown�s keynote address, the Treat Award for Excellence in the Teaching of the Humanities will be presented to Manchester Central High School English teacher Patricia G. Hicks.

Expected to draw a large crowd, Brown, the author of the best-selling novel, ‘The Da Vinci Code,’ will discuss the intersections of science and religion during his address.”

This is unusual. Brown has been virtually incommunicado for many months. Maybe we’ll have some SOLOMON KEY news come out of this event.

spiked-politics | Article | Iran: “The truth is, the NPT is a bigger threat to world peace than Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, however loud and aggressive his speech at the UN may have been.”

Aha! i knew there was a proliferation problem somewhere. Why, it’s in the very existence of the NPT!

NOLA.com: Times-Picayune Breaking News Weblog

More than $1 billion has been approved for temporary housing assistance to residents whose homes were damaged in the storm since Hurricane Katrina struck Louisiana three weeks ago, according to the Department of Homeland Security’s Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the State of Louisiana. Assistance is in the form of grants for temporary housing for minor repairs to make a home safe and habitable.

To date, 818,253 Louisianans have applied for state and federal disaster assistance by calling the toll-free registration line…

Let’s see, at $200,000 each, $1 billion should be able to buy 5 x 10^4 or 50,000 permanent houses. And for our $1 billion spent so far we have received exactly how many permanent houses? Let’s say we are boing to wind up needing 500,000 new houses … that’s a sparkly $10 billion tab.

Or, turning it around, call it an even million persons in the gulf area in need of temporary housing assistance .. $1 billion is enough to buy one million people $1000 in rent for one month. Ouch.

It’s cheaper to build than to rent …

spiked-politics | Article | Iran: “The truth is, the NPT is a bigger threat to world peace than Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, however loud and aggressive his speech at the UN may have been.”

Aha! i knew there was a proliferation problem somewhere. Why, it’s in the very existence of the NPT!

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Posted by W. Frederick to Proliferated at 9/20/2005 12:01:30 PM

Pentagon May Have Doubts on Preemptive Nuclear Moves: “One former senior combatant commander said that planning for preemptive use of nuclear and conventional weapons was included in past doctrinal statements, but never in unclassified versions. ‘This is just a draft, but represents the lack of expertise on the part of some Pentagon staff members’ for including it in an unclassified document, he said.”

So the new news here isn’t the doctrine, it’s that the doctrine was mistakenly unclassified.

When the wishful thinking ends.

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Posted by W. Frederick to Proliferated at 9/19/2005 05:48:32 AM

Global Stocks of Nuclear Explosive Materials - Table of Contents: “Global Stocks of Nuclear Explosive Materials”

Essential background material.

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Posted by W. Frederick to Proliferated at 9/16/2005 12:34:34 PM