Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

We’ve had enough carrots to last a lifetime. break out the sticks.

You can’t love your country only when you win.

Presidents are not kings, and Plaintiff is not President.

Not all heroes wear capes.

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

Conservatism: there are some people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

Historically it was a little unusual for the president to be an incoherent babbling moron.

No offense, but this thread hasn’t been about you for quite a while.

Republicans don’t want a speaker to lead them; they want a hostage.

And now I have baud making fun of me. this day can’t get worse.

You can’t attract Republican voters. You can only out organize them.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

Being the leader of the world means to be the leader of peace.

“But what about the lurkers?”

We still have time to mess this up!

Nancy smash is sick of your bullshit.

I’m pretty sure there’s only one Jack Smith.

If you’re pissed about Biden’s speech, he was talking about you.

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

The GOP couldn’t organize an orgy in a whorehouse with a fist full of 50s.

Why is it so hard for them to condemn hate?

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.

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The Moon-Kim Summit

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South Korea’s President Moon Jae In met yesterday with North Korea’s President Kim Jong Un in Pyongyang, North Korea’s capital. They participated in a parade and discussed the future of the Korean Peninsula.

It’s best to rely on the official English translation of their joint statement, rather than statements for the news media or by third parties. The Korean version is more reliable, but I don’t understand Korean. Here’s the part about North Korea’s nuclear program.

  1. The two sides shared the view that the Korean Peninsula must be turned into a land of peace free from nuclear weapons and nuclear threats, and that substantial progress toward this end must be made in a prompt manner.
  • First, the North will permanently dismantle the Dongchang-ri missile engine test site and launch platform under the observation of experts from relevant countries.
  • The North expressed its willingness to continue to take additional measures, such as the permanent dismantlement of the nuclear facilities in Yeongbyeon, as the United States takes corresponding measures in accordance with the spirit of the June 12 US-DPRK Joint Statement.
  • The two sides agreed to cooperate closely in the process of pursuing complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.

The bottom line is that much more negotiation that includes the United States is necessary. Specifically,

the North will permanently dismantle the Dongchang-ri missile engine test site and launch platform – This is a positive step, but North Korea has developed mobile launchers for its missiles, including the intercontinental missiles that can reach the United States. Building a new test site would not be difficult.

under the observation of experts from relevant countries – Again, a positive step to include experts. North Korea explicitly excluded experts from observing the tunnel closures at its nuclear test site. But “experts” and “relevant countries” remain undefined. Defining them will require more negotiation.

The North expressed its willingness to continue to take additional measures – Willingness is not action, which is fine as long as we understand that.

as the United States takes corresponding measures – The North has insisted on an action-for-action program in which they take a step, and then the United States takes a step. This is not unusual in building confidence between adversarial nations. So far, the United States has insisted on large measures from the North with no promise of specific action from the United States. Look for statements from Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on this subject. If he insists on complete denuclearization or a list of North Korea’s nuclear facilities, things are going nowhere. What constitute “corresponding measures” will require more negotiation.

the permanent dismantlement of the nuclear facilities in Yeongbyeon – North Korea has promised this before. Since it depends on the United States taking “corresponding measures,” it’s unlikely to happen any time soon. The common spelling in the United States is Yongbyon. It’s the obvious central nuclear facility for North Korea. Are there others? We don’t know.

in accordance with the spirit of the June 12 US-DPRK Joint Statement – Donald Trump talks about a handshake and personal understandings. North Korea talks about the Joint Statement. The DPRK is doing what is normally done in diplomacy. Secret personal agreements are no part of it.

The two sides agreed to cooperate closely in the process of pursuing complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula – “Complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula” is a standard formula describing an ideal situation in the far future. It’s good to have this kind of long-term goal stated. So far, the United States has taken that phrase to mean unlateral disarmament by North Korea. Again, look for Secretary Pompeo’s statement on this.

Trump’s statements so far have been relatively moderate. Moon is playing a skillful game to try to involve Trump, which will be necessary as talks proceed. Kim is playing a skillful game to keep his nuclear weapons and his power.

 

Photo credit

 

Cross-posted to Nuclear Diner.

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A Bit Of Chemistry

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Many of you may be familiar with the bellingcat organization. Eliot Higgins started looking at and identifying munitions in Syria on a blog called Brown Moses, which he used as a pseudonym for a while. He was profiled in the New Yorker in 2013.

I have been interested in open-source intelligence for a long time. I started with an unclassified problem: how to find trash burial sites at the Los Alamos National Laboratory for potential cleanup. We did a bunch of work with overhead photos and other data, data fusion as it was called at the time. We hired some folks to do infrared photography – the burial pits would collect water and be a lower temperature than surrounding areas.

That was back in the 1990s. My team did some pioneering things.

Earlier, I had a project on a destruction method (supercritical water oxidation) for hazardous wastes. The chemical weapons people, who were just beginning to face the enormous problem of destroying their very hazardous chemicals, asked if that method might be suitable. They eventually decided not to use it, but I had to study chemical agents for a year or so.

Higgins was particularly looking at chemical weapons in Syria and where they were coming from. It’s generally accepted now that the Syrian government has been responsible for the chemical attacks. The information was developed early by the bellingcat consortium (which I’ve contributed to for some time in small ways) and confirmed by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the international organization responsible for such things.

That’s a long preface to say that today bellingcat published an article of mine. There are still people who do not believe that the chemical attacks in Syria were carried out by the government. That’s been an argument all along. One of those people is Ted Postol, an emeritus professor at MIT. He and Higgins plan to debate in October. So I went back to Postol’s early arguments and worked through the chemistry. It’s pretty bad.

 

Cross-posted at Nuclear Diner.

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Hostage North Korean Nukes?

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The report keeps coming up that North Korea will be asked to (or will consider) giving up some of its nuclear weapons as a goodwill gesture. The source of these reports is not clear.

It’s not going to happen.

North Korea sees its nuclear weapons as its lifeline, a way to deter the United States from attempting to change its regime. More personally, Kim Jong Un sees them as his way to stay in power. That’s strong motivation. The statements from North Korea for the past week indicate that only with an ironclad assurance of regime continuance will North Korea even consider giving up its nuclear arsenal. That ironclad assurance will not come in a summit on June 12. Kim will not be easy to convince.

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Saturday Night Techno-Smut Interesting Read: “Are We Ready for Robot Sex?” [NSFW, Obviously]

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Everyone who’s witnessed (or been) a toddler with a security toy, or a middle-aged man with his dream vehicle (bike, car, boat) already knows: When there are people-shaped robots, people will anthromophocize / individualize them. And when there are people involved, of course sometimes there will be sex, but also there will romanticization. From NYMag:

… Henry is six feet tall, with six-pack abs and the customer’s choice of penis. He’s just a prototype at the moment — you can’t buy him — but the two female models Realbotix developed alongside Henry will ship this summer. So far, there have been 50 preorders at $12,000 apiece. Henry, Harmony, and Solana have sturdy silicone bodies, and once they’re synced up to a corresponding app, they can give compliments, recite poetry, tell jokes, and seduce.

Or at least, this is the general idea. The easy fantasy of what a sex robot might be — indistinguishable from an actual human, except hotter and prepared to fulfill any desire — is far from the current reality. Henry, if we’re being cruel, is essentially a high-quality dildo attached to a fancy mannequin with a Bluetooth speaker in his head. But the gulf between what we imagine and what’s possible makes sex robots the perfect vehicle for pondering our sexual and technological future. We might not wake up with sex robots in our beds tomorrow, but right now they’re an irresistible thought experiment. Since making my date with Henry, he’s become my favorite dinner-party topic…

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What Might We Learn From North Korea’s Test Site?

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Kim Jong Un announced that he would close North Korea’s nuclear test site. The Trump administration has greeted this announcement as part of its success in dealing with North Korea.

But North Korea may be doing less than Trump thinks.

The nuclear test site consists of a number of tunnels for underground nuclear explosions and support facilities for that testing. KCNA, the North Korean news agency, has released a list of activities to close the site.

First, explosives will be used to collapse the tunnels, KCNA said. Then, entries to the site will be blocked and all observation facilities, research institutes and guard structures will be removed. Guards and researchers will be withdrawn, and the area surrounding the test site will be closed.

Journalists from China, Russia, South Korea, the United States and the United Kingdom will be invited “in the interests of transparency” to view the site and a dismantlement ceremony scheduled for late May.

Nothing has been said about inviting specialists from the International Atomic Energy Agency or the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization, who might be able to evaluate how the test site has been used and to what extent it is being deactivated.

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The Opposition To The Iran Deal Is Intellectually and Morally Bankrupt

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Reuel Marc Gerecht has an article titled “The Iran Deal Is Strategically and Morally Absurd” at the Atlantic website. It is a good example of the repetitive and tendentious tripe that the opponents consistently offer up.

I am not fond of the bloggy format of dissecting a piece of writing sentence by sentence by sentence, although Gerecht’s piece could easily provoke such a response. Each sentence presents a misrepresenation or other ugliness that it seems wrong to allow to pass. But I’d like to make my response more succinct.

Since the title begins with “The Iran Deal,” one might expect that that would be the subject of the article. But few words are expended on the substance of the deal compared to, for example vituperation against Barack Obama. The personalization of Gerecht’s argument is typical of criticism by opponents on Twitter and elsewhere.

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The North Korean Nuclear Test Site

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South Korea reports that Kim Jong Un has offered to close North Korea’s nuclear test site at Punggye-Ri in May. He says he will invite US and South Korean experts to examine the site before its demolition to see that it is still usable.

There have been very definite statements from experts outside North Korea that the site may or may not be usable. We don’t have access to the site, so we must surmise the situation from overhead photos, seismic traces, and experience at other test sites.

The yield of the most recent test was very large, perhaps 250 kilotons. It’s hard to estimate the yields of North Korean nuclear tests because we don’t know enough about the geology of the test site. It was followed by three seismic events of 4.6, 3.5, and 2.9 magnitude, which were not tests.

An underground nuclear test forms  a cavity; the larger the yield, the larger the cavity. As the cavity cools, the ceiling collapses and forms a chimney filled with loose rock. A crater may form at the surface (diagram) and video.

The aftershocks could be the cavity collapsing in stages, or they could be the cavity and tunnels collapsing. Or it could be things happening in the rest of the mountain, as the jolt of the blast destabilizes things. It could be that the blast also fractured rock throughout the mountain. Landslides can be seen around the mountain, and its surface contours have been altered.

None of this is extraordinary for nuclear test sites. To say that it represents the mountain’s collapse is an exaggeration, as is the phrase “Tired Mountain Syndrome.”

A few articles have indulged in scare talk about radioactive material escaping from future tests. That would be a mostly local concern, if indeed the mountain is so fractured. There would be no point to another test where the chimney has formed, and North Korea has additional tunnels in other places in the mountain.

It’s likely that the North Koreans would find such an escape undesirable for other reasons. They have been extremely careful to contain their tests; escape of material would allow other countries insight into the design of their nuclear weapons.

US intelligence officials have said that the test site remains operational.

Closing the site would probably involve dynamiting the tunnel entrances. The tunnels could be opened in the future. North Korea destroyed the cooling tower for their plutonium reactor in 2008, in a similarly symbolic gesture. They built it back later.

Even if the test site were damaged, that is likely a small part of Kim’s calculation in offering a pause in testing, and even a closing of the test site. The larger factor is that he feels that he now has a deterrent against American and South Korean attack.

 

Cross-posted at Nuclear Diner.

 

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