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Geopolitics

The Missiles of Spring: 2012 Edition

north-korea-rocket-nose-cone-unha-3

Stick around any job long enough and pretty soon you’ll find a pattern of repetition or cycles will emerge.  When on active duty, it was inexorably tied to the CVW turnaround training cycle.  This year we are now on the threshold of the 3rd North Korean space launch vehicle (SLV) attempt since 2006 and the [...] [...]

Flightdeck Friday

Flightdeck Friday - On Atlas' Mighty Shoulders (Part I)

109D 2-20-1962 ETR14 MA-6 GD-A SDAM ART LeBRUN

Earlier this week we celebrated the 50th anniversary of John Glenn’s orbital flight, marking our full entry into the space race with the Soviets.  Signatory of the mission was our first use of an ICBM to launch Glenn into orbit — the previous missions had been suborbital and used the Redstone missile, itself an SRBM [...] [...]

Nuclear weapons

Iran’s Long-Range Missile Program: New Launch Facility Revealed

Last month Iran unveiled a new long-range missile, the Simorgh, as a follow-on to the Safir SLV.  Putatively identified as a space launch vehicle, it bears strong familial ties to the TD-2 prototype SLV/ICBM launched last April (2009).  Since then, some analysts have noted that while the airframe has made an appearance sooner than the [...] [...]

Nuclear weapons

“Доверяй, но проверяй” (“Trust But Verify”)

Votkinsk Machine Building Plant. Located about 8.5 km to the east of the birthplace of Pytor Illyich Tchaikovsky, in the Russian Federation Republic of  Udmurtia, is an industrial facility whose name, in typical Soviet fashion, obscures the products made there.  It is a name unfamiliar to most outside of the arms control, intelligence or strategic [...] [...]

Missile Defense

Iran Announces New Space Launch Vehicle (SLV)

  We are about one-third of the way through Iran’s annual “Ten Days of Dawn” observation which celebrates the victory of the Islamic revolution in Iran and the return of the Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979.  The occasion serves as a platform for Iran to boast about progress under the Islamic Republic and demonstrate military, scientific [...] [...]