Focused crawls are collections of frequently-updated webcrawl data from narrow (as opposed to broad or wide) web crawls, often focused on a single domain or subdomain.
Elon Musk is well along in his project to destroy Twitter. Recent developments are removing headlines from links and publishing only a graphic that can be clicked on, and his recommendation of two antisemitic disinformation accounts as the ones to follow for news of events in Israel. He deleted the latter tweet after it reached over a million views and considerable numbers of people had pointed out the nature of the accounts. Reports are that it is no longer possible to follow news on Twitter in the sea of disinformation. Margaret Sullivan gives a number of specific examples.
I am now using Twitter only for direct messages. I don’t want to even see in passing the horror videos playing on it.
At the Valdai Discussion Club – once a place where an international group gathered for discussions – Vladimir Putin laid out his six principles for the civilization of the Russian World.
1. We want to live in an open, interconnected world.
2. We want the diversity of the world to be the foundation for universal development.
3. No one has the right to rule the world for or behalf of others.
4. We are for universal security and lasting peace, build on respect for the interests of all.
5. The era of exploitation of anyone by anyone else is in the past.
6. We are for equality that allows for recognition of differences in the potential of different countries.
This was a week or so ago.
A few observations:
1, 2, and 6 are unexceptionable, until one adds in whatever qualifications live in Putin’s mind.
3 is his usual complaint about the United States, which, in his telling, wants to boss everyone around.
4 and 5 apply only to “real” states. Ukraine is, in his view, not a “real” state., nor is it showing proper respect for Russia’s interests.
I do not understand why anyone thinks that a war against Iran is a good idea.
Part of the thinking, if you’re Israel or Saudi Arabia, is that the war would be carried out by the United States, which makes it more attractive to them.
Another part is probably the wishful belief that air wars solve everything. We have plenty of evidence that they can be an effective part of a war, but none that they replace boots on the ground. In the case of Iran, it’s a big country, and the part that the warmongers want to believe can be “surgically” removed is Iran’s nuclear program, which Iran has distributed in many cities around the country.
It’s harder to see why this is an attractive picture to Americans. Many of those who want a war on Iran are closely associated with Israel or Saudi Arabia, but not all.
A quick update on possible preparations for nuclear testing and suspicions of preparations for nuclear testing. Previous post here.
Jeffrey Lewis and the folks at CNS supplied CNN with interpretations of overhead photos showing activity at Russian, Chinese, and US test sites. Given that much of the activity at the US test site in Nevada has to do with an enormous expansion of subcritical underground tests, one might expect similar things are happening at the other two. Lewis notes some of the differences in activity supporting the two kinds of tests.
The Secretary of Energy, in a tweet I can’t find, was quoted as saying that the US has no plans for a nuclear explosive test. Update: It was NNSA Administrator Jill Hruby. Thanks to Chris Casilli!
Now a statement from Mikhail Kovalchuk, President of Kurchatov Institute National Research Center, says that Russia also is not planning for a nuclear explosive test, but if the US tests, Russia will test too, to preserve deterrence.
If the US were to test, the rationale would likely be that a test is needed to validate the substitutions of updated components into stockpile weapons or that a slight reconfiguration to meet military needs, not a new weapon, needs to be tested. The deterrence part would go unspoken. Russia has gone in the opposite direction.
It certainly looks like everyone is daring everyone else to go first. Back in 1958 through 1961, there was a moratorium between the US and Russia (starting around 4:00) and then a resumption of tests around 4:30 in Isao Hashimoto’s graphic depiction of all the world’s nuclear explosions.
If one country breaks the moratorium, it’s likely to look like that this time around, with China joining in.
In line with my other recent writing, would anyone like to venture a gendered interpretation?
Carol Cohn wrote an article in 1987 after spending a year with defense analysts. She is a social scientist who was introduced to that world in 1984 and decided that this community needed more study. The article describes the highly gendered nature of much of the discussion of nuclear weapons and analyzes some of what that is likely to mean about discourse about them and decisions on nuclear weapons policy.
Cohn later wrote other pieces on the topic, which are worth reading. Here’s one. They were chapters in books, I suspect because journal editors would not accept them.
The 1987 article is often cited, but it has produced little of the analysis that it might have. What it says – and does, in some very careful analysis – requires too much self-examination for the defense analyst community.
Using gender as an analytical tool could provide so many insights that we need now, with the conventional ideas about deterrence breaking up with a third nuclear power, China, rising, and Russia’s war of imperialism. We are beyond the simplistic image of teenage boys playing chicken.
I published some thoughts in Inkstick. Many thanks to the editors there for welcoming the piece.
US talks continue with Saudi Arabia on a deal that involves their relationship with Israel and the nuclear power/ weapons capabilities that the Saudis want thrown into the deal. Saudi Arabia has long sought a nuclear fuel cycle capability, although it has little of the infrastructure or resources to support the technology. The obvious reason for their desire is to match Iran’s nuclear program and the possibility that Iran could build a nuclear weapon.
Time out for a disclaimer: Whatever Iran’s rhetoric or recent actions on the subject, I think it unlikely, for reasons I’ve listed before, that Iran will build nuclear weapons any time soon, unless they perceive a new and serious threat from other nations.
The Saudis would like to be prepared to counter Iran. If things were to happen quickly, they might be able to buy nuclear weapons from Pakistan, but, for any nation, the surer route is to be able to control the supply chain within their country.
Warning: Very wonky post, link, and subject matter
Since the United States signed, but did not ratify, the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) in 1996, it has held to a moratorium on nuclear explosive tests. The alternative to making sure nuclear weapons work and doing research to extend the understanding of their processes is a massive program called Stockpile Stewardship.
One of the activities under Stockpile Stewardship is investigate the properties of plutonium under the conditions just preceding a nuclear explosion. Plutonium is rapidly compressed by shaped explosives into a critical mass. What happens during that compression? Atoms are rearranged and smushed closer together. But plutonium has several solid phases that may affect that rearrangement.
The explanations in this interview are pretty good, but they dance around a lot of classification.
The facility is located far underground for physical and classification safety, but all that earth above provides shielding in case any of the subcritical experiments (no nuclear yield) transition to a hydronuclear experiment (with nuclear yield). We’re talking about amounts of energy that add only a tiny increment to the explosive or impact energy involved, not mushroom clouds. The CTBT specifies no nuclear yield, which is unverifiable, but a cudgel with which Republicans like to try to beat Russia with, as they did in the Trump administration.
Here’s the Pollux subcritical experiment, from 2012, to give you an idea of how innocuous an actual experiment can be. Setting one up, however, takes much more time.
I am a bit baffled by the size of what they’re building (football field), along with the need for two of something. The size might be explained by something like the Dual-Axis Radiographic Hydrodynamic Test Facility (DARHT) at Los Alamos, accompanied by perhaps other capabilities. The interview implies that something like this is being built.
Photo: August 30, 2006 – The Department’s Los Alamos National Laboratory successfully conducts a subcritical experiment, Unicorn, at 11:00 a.m. at the Nevada Test Site.
Oppenheimer and other scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project recognized that atomic bombs would change warfighting. Many of them worked toward world government in response. Lewis Strauss and Edward Teller saw a future of more and bigger weapons. The film dramatizes this conflict.
But a third group wanted to work out how wars might be fought with theoe weapons. The dust jacket of my copy of Wizards of Armageddon says “For thirty years [publication date 1983] a small group inside the U.S. strategic community has devised the plans and shaped the policies on how to use the bomb.”
Some who would join that community began to think about strategy as soon as they heard of the dropping of the bombs on Japan. The principles of warfighting strategy with nuclear weapons are incredibly simple. Bernard Brodie enunciated them by 1946:
Wars would be too brief to allow adaptation
Defenses are useless
The most valuable targets are cities
A nation must be constantly prepared for war
A second strike could be as devastating as the first
Surprise becomes an unimportant element of warfare
Deterrence is the only use
Two more points that aged poorly but were influential early on:
Strategies would depend on how many atomic bombs a country held
Fissile materials were inherently in short supply
This was similar to Oppenheimer’s analysis, but the scientists focused on ways to control the fissile materials and agreements among nations. Brodie and others went in a different direction.
It’s always dangerous scientifically to decide on a conclusion and then look for supporting data. Tempting, certainly, and it’s not a bad way to start off an investigation. But you can’t get too attached to that conclusion. Chances are that you’ll find that someone else disproved it or that the data just don’t support it.
Avi Loeb, a theoretical physicist at Harvard, believes that ‘Oumuamua, an object that quickly transited the solar system from somewhere else in 2017, was an alien spacecraft. It’s generally agreed that ‘Oumuamua came from outside the solar system. Alien spacecraft, not so much.
But let’s look for data! Aha, in 2014, a meteor that had an orbit that could have come from outside the solar system fell in the ocean near Papua New Guinea! If fragments could be found, they might be analyzed.
There was no need for a special strategy for using nuclear weapons in the spring and early summer of 1945. There was more thought than usual about choosing targets, but only a little more than for choosing the targets of firebombing. That was why the military machine ground on until President Harry S Truman halted the nuclear pipeline on August 10.
That changed almost exactly four years later, on August 29, 1949, when the Soviet Union tested its first nuclear device, a close duplicate of the device tested at Trinity Site. The scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project knew that that day would come, although it came faster than they expected, having been goosed along by stolen Manhattan Project documents. As the scientists expected, the Soviets reproduced much of their work, but having the plans for a device that had already been tested removed the fears of Stalin’s retribution for a failure.
With that explosion came the possibility of nuclear war. People were already preparing to develop nuclear strategy, having cut their strategic teeth on developing bombing plans for the Army Air Corps, which would become the Air Force in 1947. I plan to write about that history in the next posts.
Nuclear Diner 
