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American Chronicle, 20 May ’09: U.S. Sen. Dick Lugar praised the cooperation between the United States and Kazakhstan that has led to the removal of more than 160 pounds of bomb-grade nuclear material from Kazakhstan through the National Nuclear Security Administration´s Global Threat Reduction Initiative. [...] When the Soviet Union collapsed, Kazakhstan emerged as the [...]

Johann Hari in The Independent (“You are being lied to about pirates,” 5 Jan ’09): As soon as the government [of Somalia] was gone, mysterious European ships started appearing off the coast of Somalia, dumping vast barrels into the ocean. The coastal population began to sicken. At first they suffered strange rashes, nausea and malformed [...]

…and here it is, at least according to Getty Images: WASHINGTON—FEBRUARY 24: A military aide carries the nuclear football, with the nation’s nuclear launch codes, through Statuary Hall as President Barack Obama arrives at the U.S. Capitol for his address to a joint session of Congress on February 24, 2009 in Washington, DC. U.S. President [...]

Dr. A. Q. Khan has a website? (Demoing a nuclear “football.”) See also: “Protecting sources and methods” and “Rollup,” “Markets in everything.” (SC@NYer)

Phallocentric/heteronormative assumptions get in the way of amateur attempts to reconstruct the first atomic bombs (Samuels, “Atomic John,” New Yorker, 15 Dec ’08): The source of the error, Coster-Mullen recognized, was an assumption that every (male) researcher who studied the subject had made about the relation between projectile and target. These scholars had apparently been [...]

Two groups of armed attackers simultaneously penetrate and disable multiple security systems protecting the South African facility where highly enriched Uranium is stored, during a holiday party (while the paraplegic who’s supposed to be on duty is drunk), and officials’ explanations include: “This is the first time that this has ever happened on site.” “You [...]

Including fake markets for fake nukes: I [“A-”-list blogger] immediately turned to the chapter [of Will Terrorists Go Nuclear?] on black markets, where [Brian] Jenkins [Wikipedia] quite sensibly argues that we should flood the zone with fake purveyors of nuclear weapons, materials, and technology to make it harder for terrorists to connect with actual merchants [...]

Mark Schapiro, “Nuclear [Intelligence] Fallout,” Muckraker blog, 29 Aug ’08): When we were conducting our final reporting back in March, I researched Urs Friedrich Tinner—the one of the three considered most deeply involved in [A. Q.] Khan’s illicit enterprise—through the electronic database Accurint. I was astounded at the time to see that his U.S. address [...]

Dr. Irwin Redlener, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness, in Newsweek (Skipp, “The Holdouts,” 12 Sep ’08): We just did a study on evacuations under scenarios of disasters without warnings. We are very concerned about disasters that occur without warning when we have to do evacuations in real-time—in essence, immediate—for example, an earthquake [...]

Courtesy of FAS: Lazarus, Voorhees, Wells, and Worlton, “Computing at LASL [Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory] in the 1940s and 1950s,” LASL/USDoE, ’78 (2.1MB PDF). The report is part of FAS’s Los Alamos Technical Reports and Publications collection: In 2002, the Los Alamos National Laboratory terminated public access to thousands of unclassified reports on nuclear science [...]

Obits: NYT, Adweek. So who’s left? Stone? Ailes? Twerps compared to Schwartz.

Stephen J. Hadley, Assistant to the President For National Security Affairs reads too much Le Carré: That was a concern. That’s one of the reasons we rolled up the network here three years or so ago, and fairly successfully. And part of that rolling up was to roll up the network and part of it [...]