Skilled immigrants often constitute an espionage risk

Wednesday, August 13th, 2025

Given the reality of mixed loyalties, Arctotherium notes, it shouldn’t be surprising that skilled immigrants often constitute an espionage risk:

Take the infamous Pakistani nuclear physicist AQ Khan. In 1961, he moved to West Berlin as a foreign student, then to the Netherlands and finally Belgium to finish his education, graduating with a Doctorate in Engineering in 1972. Khan was undoubtedly among the best and brightest of Pakistan, the sort of high-agency STEM genius that brain drain advocates hold up as America’s greatest strength. Was allowing A.Q. Khan into the West a good decision? No.

Khan got a position at the Physics Dynamics Research Laboratory, a Dutch firm specializing in uranium enrichment via centrifuge. He stole centrifuge designs and blueprints, and after returning to Pakistan set up an international network of illicit suppliers for centrifuge parts using his contacts, leading to the 1998 Pakistani nuclear bomb. From there, he diffused nuclear technology further. The North Korean, Iranian and Libyan nuclear programs all trace back to A.Q. Khan. Pakistan has had multiple serious nuclear war scares with India in the last five years. North Korea, which has a history of doing things like axe-murder Americans, can act with relative impunity thanks to its nuclear arsenal, and Israel and the US recently bombed Iran over their nuclear program.

There are many examples from the US. For instance, Noshir Gowadia, an Indian Parsi designer of the B-2 Spirit stealth bomber, and Chi Mak, who worked on nuclear submarines, both sold secrets to China.

Posted in Policy, Science, Technology, War, Weapons | No Comments »

Groves was too aggressive and might have difficulty with the scientific people

Saturday, August 9th, 2025

Now It Can Be Told by Leslie M. GrovesVannevar Bush headed the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) during World War 2, and General Groves admits that Dr. Bush was quite disturbed at Groves’ appointment as head of the Manhattan Project, as he explains in Now It Can Be Told: The Story of the Manhattan Project, because he felt Groves was too aggressive and might have difficulty with the scientific people. After their first inauspicious meeting, Groves went back to his office:

Finding my secretary, Mrs. O’Leary, there, I told her I was being reassigned and that if she wanted to come along, I would be glad to have her. I added, in what proved to be a great understatement, that this would be a very quiet and easy job for her and she should be sure to bring along some knitting to keep herself occupied. This prediction proved valid for about two days.

When I returned home that evening I told my wife and daughter and wrote to my son, a cadet at West Point, that I had a new job, that it involved secret matters and for that reason was never to be mentioned. The answer to be given if they were asked what I was doing was, “I don’t know, I never know what he’s doing.” To my son, I added, “If it is an officer who knows me well, and he is persistent, you can add, ‘I think it’s something secret.’”

[…]

Unlikely as it may seem to many people, they first learned of the nature of my assignment at the same moment, three years later, that the bombing of Hiroshima was announced to the rest of the world.

Posted in Crime, Policy, Technology | No Comments »

It was much less than our total over-all spending in a normal week

Saturday, August 2nd, 2025

Now It Can Be Told by Leslie M. GrovesIn September, 1942, Leslie Groves was serving as Deputy Chief of Construction of the Army Corps of Engineers, overseeing all Army construction, at home and abroad, but he wanted to get in on the real action. Instead, as he explains in Now It Can Be Told: The Story of the Manhattan Project, he was offered a role in Washington:

“I don’t want to stay in Washington.”

“If you do the job right,” Somervell said, “it will win the war.”

My spirits fell as I realized what he had in mind. “Oh, that thing,” I said.

[…]

Though a big project, it was not expected to involve as much as $100 million altogether. While this was more than the cost of almost any single job under my jurisdiction, it was much less than our total over-all spending in a normal week.

[…]

“The basic research and development are done. You just have to take the rough designs, put them into final shape, build some plants and organize an operating force and your job will be finished and the war will be over.”

[…]

In the course of our discussion, we agreed that, because the Pentagon was so nearly finished and because I had had so much to do with it, I would continue to control its construction, despite my new assignment. There were two reasons for this. First, my sudden disappearance from the work on the Pentagon would attract much more notice than would my absence from my other Army construction activities. Second, because of the natural interest in the Pentagon displayed by a number of Congressmen, it would be better for me to continue to carry the responsibility for that job than to pass it on to someone else who was unfamiliar with its past problems and their many political ramifications.

[…]

I thought that there might be some problems in dealing with the many academic scientists involved in the project, and I felt that my position would be stronger if they thought of me from the first as a general instead of as a promoted colonel. My later experiences convinced me that this was a wise move; strangely enough, it often seemed to me that the prerogatives of rank were more important in the academic world than they are among soldiers.

At the time I was brought into the picture, research on the uses of atomic energy had been going on at a gradually accelerating pace since January, 1939, when Lise Meitner explained that the uranium atom could be split.

[…]

Virtually all laboratory research until this time had been aimed at achieving a controlled chain reaction, using U-235, a rare isotope of uranium which comprises less than one percent of the metal in its natural state. This isotope has the property of fissioning readily—a property which the far more abundant form of uranium, U-238, does not display. But it soon became apparent that unless unprecedented quantities of this material could be produced in a much purer state, a U-235 chain reaction would be impossible. The basic problem was to arrive at an industrial process that would produce kilograms of a substance that had never been isolated before in greater than sub-microscopic quantities.

[…]

The way for a major breakthrough was open as a result of studies that suggested the theoretical feasibility of transmuting U-238 into a highly fissionable new element, plutonium, which might then be separated from the parent uranium by chemical means. The hope was that this would be easier to do than to isolate or concentrate the rare U-235 by physical means. The group headed by Dr. Glenn T. Seaborg at the University of California undertook to prepare extremely small amounts of plutonium, and in March of 1941 succeeded in creating the first submicroscopic amounts of Plutonium-239. Later that month the California group confirmed the theory that under neutron bombardment plutonium atoms fissioned as readily as atoms of U-235.

[…]

The entry of the United States into World War II caused the abandonment of all projects aimed at developing atomic energy as a source of power and gave added impetus to the efforts to build an atomic bomb.

[…]

It is to their everlasting credit that Bush and his colleagues had the discernment to recognize the limitations of their own organization as well as the moral fortitude to admit them in the national interest. Very few men, confronted with a similar situation, would have done so.

Consequently, when the Top Policy Group met on December 16, 1941, Bush recommended that the Army Corps of Engineers carry out the construction work, and asked that a competent Army officer become thoroughly familiar with the project.

[…]

When the Corps of Engineers started its work, its job was simply to build and operate the production plants. The problems involved in the development of the bomb and its delivery were for the time being largely ignored.

Nor was the full magnitude of the project generally appreciated. No one thought of it as entailing expenditures running into the billions of dollars.

Posted in Policy, Technology, War, Weapons | 1 Comment »

His own advice about self-reliance was actually worth taking in his own case

Tuesday, July 22nd, 2025

Diamond Age by Neal StephensonThe most relevant aspect of Neal Stephenson‘s work to an audience of AI researchers was the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer from his 30-year-old novel The Diamond Age:

At the beginning of this book we see a conversation between Lord Finkle-McGraw, who is an Equity Lord in a futuristic neo-Victorian society, and John Hackworth, an engineer who works in one of his companies.

Finkle-McGraw is a classic founder. He didn’t come from a privileged background, except insofar as having a stable family and a decent basic education confers privilege. But when he was young he was brilliant, ambitious, hard-working, and had a vision. He built that into something valuable and as a result became rich and powerful. As so often happens, he used his money to make life good for his children by sending them to the right schools, connecting them to the right people, and so on.

He wasn’t entirely happy with the results. His kids didn’t end up having the traits that had made him successful. He suspects it’s because they didn’t have to work hard and overcome obstacles. Now he has a granddaughter. He knows that the parents are going to raise this girl in the same way, with the same results. He can’t interfere in a heavy-handed way. But the parents can’t possibly object if he gives his granddaughter an educational book. So he commissions Hackworth to make the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer, an interactive book that will adapt as the user grows and learns. This book is powered by molecular nanotechnology, but any present-day reader will immediately recognize it as an AI system.

As the plot unfolds, three copies of the Primer are made and bestowed on girls from very different backgrounds. In two cases the result is a sort of fizzle. The Primer works as it’s supposed to for a while, but these girls lose interest and set it aside. The third copy falls into the hands of a girl from an abusive and underprivileged background, and it ends up giving her close to superhuman abilities.

Thirty years on, I think I have enough distance on this to grade my performance. I’m happy with the fact that the Primer, as described in the novel, doesn’t invariably produce great results. That seems like a measured and realistic outcome. Nevertheless it’s clear that when I wrote this thing I was influenced by a strain of techno-utopian thinking that was widespread in the mid-1990s, when the Internet was first becoming available to a mass audience. In those days, a lot of people, myself included, assumed that making all the world’s knowledge available to everyone would unlock vast stores of pent-up human potential.

That promise actually did come true to some degree. It’s unquestionably the case that anyone with an Internet connection can now learn things that they could not have had access to before. But as we now know, many people would rather watch TikTok videos eight hours a day.

[…]

The gist of it is that the system we’ve traditionally used for evaluating students’ performance — homework and tests — just happens to be exquisitely vulnerable to being hacked by students who simply use conversational AI systems to do all the work for them. And they are doing so on a massive scale, to the point where conventional education has essentially stopped functioning. The only way to fairly evaluate how much a student has learned now is by marching them into a classroom with no electronics, handing them a pencil and a blank blue book, and assigning them an essay to write or a math problem to solve. Even this is impractical given that many students never really learned to write by hand.

[…]

This question sent me down a rabbit hole on the topic of self-reliance. After all, if AI-driven education does nothing more than make students even more reliant on AI, then it’s not education at all. It’s just a vocational education program teaching them how to be of service to AIs. The euphemism for this role is “prompt engineer” which seems to be a way of suggesting that people who feed inputs to AIs are achieving something that should be valorized to the same degree as designing airplanes and building bridges.

If such a system actually did its job it would have the paradoxical effect of making students less, rather than more, reliant on the use of AI technology.

[…]

My thought last week was that Self-Reliance might contain some wisdom applicable to the challenge of how to educate people in the modern world to rely upon their own knowledge and skill set rather than using AI all the time.

Reader, I did not find anything like that upon re-reading this essay. More the opposite. The overall drift of what Emerson is saying here — and he says it over and over — is that each mind is uniquely positioned to see certain insights. The self-reliant person shouldn’t ignore those merely because they don’t match the conventional wisdom. “The eye was placed where one ray should fall, that it might testify of that particular ray…God will not have his work made manifest by cowards….He who would gather immortal palms (i.e. be honored for great achievements) must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.”

That is all intoxicating stuff for a smart young man who styles himself as a free thinker and nonconformist, which is why, when I was in my early twenties, I inhaled it like fentanyl fumes off hot foil. But during the same years as I was poring over this essay and jotting down quotes in my notebook, I was writing by far the worst novel I have ever written—a book that has never been published and never should be.

Emerson grew up in Boston, attended Boston Latin and Harvard, then traveled around Europe and visited England where he hung out with Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Thomas Carlyle. His brain was preloaded with the best knowledge base that could possibly have been given a young person of that era. He’d been trained to think systematically and rigorously and to express himself with great fluency in English and probably Latin and other languages as well.

So, yes, when an idea popped into Emerson’s head, chances are it was a pretty damned good one. His own advice about self-reliance was actually worth taking in his own case. And I’d guess that the audience for this essay was similarly well educated. By the time any young person happened upon Self-Reliance, they were probably 99% of the way to being an intellectually mature, highly capable person, and just wanted a bit of self confidence to follow through on good ideas that were coming into their heads—as a result of being that well educated and trained.

When the same advice falls on the ears of people who are not as well informed and not as good at thinking systematically, though, it’s rubbish.

When I first read Self-Reliance, only a few years had passed since the premier of the first Star Wars movie. There’s a pivotal moment in that film when Luke Skywalker is piloting his fighter through the trench on the Death Star, making his bombing run against impossible odds, and he hears Obi-Wan Kenobi’s voice in his head telling him to use the Force. Luke switches off his targeting computer to the consternation of the brass in the ops center. We all know the outcome. It’s a great moment in cinema, and it perfectly encapsulates a certain way of thinking emblematic of the 1970s late hippie scene: the seductive proposition that no one needs a targeting computer, that all we need to do is trust our feelings. Who doesn’t love to hear that? I loved hearing it from Ralph Waldo Emerson, and spent a couple of years of my life building a terrible novel on that foundation.

I have discussed The Diamond Age before.

Posted in Education, Technology | 1 Comment »

A 2- or 3-year machinist or mechanic apprenticeship was mandatory for admission to any German engineering academy

Sunday, July 20th, 2025

Herman the German by Gerhard NeumannDavid Foster reviewed Gerhard Neumann‘s Herman the German ages ago, but I was recently reminded of it:

This is the autobiography of a man who was born to a Jewish family in Germany, apprenticed as an auto mechanic, attended engineering school, moved to China in 1938, was interned by the British as an enemy alien in 1939, transferred to the American forces, joined Claire Chennault’s Flying Tigers, repaired the first Japanese Zero fighter to be captured in potentially flyable condition, became a U.S. citizen by special act of Congress, and went on to run GE’s entire jet engine business, which he played a major role in creating. (The preceding may be the longest single sentence I’ve ever written in a blog post.) The book should be of interest to those interested in aviation, technology, management, social history, the WWII era, and/or China.

Gerhard Neumann was born in Frankfurt/Oder in 1917, where his father was owner of a factory that processed feathers and down. Gerhard’s parents were Jewish but nonpracticing–a Christmas tree was traditional in the Neumann home–and their approach to child-raising was closer to stereotypically Prussian than to stereotypically Jewish: “You did exactly as you were told by your parents. There was no such thing as saying no to them!…You were not to have a hand in your pocket while talking to grown-ups…Showing any emotion in Prussia was considered sissyish. There was no kissing between parents and children–only a peck on the cheek before going upstairs punctually at nine o’clock; and there was absolutely no crying.”

On the other hand, Neumann could do pretty much what he wanted with his spare time. In 1927, at the age of 10, he rode his bike out to a grass strip where someone was giving airplane rides for 5 marks, which he paid with money from his piggy bank. His parents weren’t angry at him for taking this flight without permission; indeed, they were so entranced with his description of the way the town looked from the air that they soon took an airplane ride themselves! At the age of 13, Neumann bought a folding kayak and, with some camping gear and a 12-year-old friend, took long journeys on the Oder River, all the way to the Baltic Sea. Few parents in America today–or in Germany either, I’d bet–would now allow this level of independence to a 12- or 13-year old.

Neumann had no interest in the family feather business; he wanted to be an engineer. A 2- or 3-year machinist or mechanic apprenticeship was mandatory for admission to any German engineering academy: Neumann’s father asked the 10 cab drivers of Frankfurt/Oder to recommend the garage where they thought the boy would learn the most, and the answers were unanimous: Albert Schroth’s. So began Gerhard Neumann’s apprenticeship, which, other than the technologies involved, could have been something out of the Middle Ages. “In winter my hands were frozen purple. Wear work gloves? ‘What’s the matter, boy, are you a girl?’ When my hands were bleeding, Herr Schroth pointed to the large bottle of iodine in the backroom and mumbled something about faules Fleisch (lazy flesh.) No Band-Aids, no pitying, no time out.”

At first, Neumann had second thoughts about the path he had chosen. “My friends were still continuing at the Gymnasium, spending their days in comfortable and clean surroundings; here I was, accustomed to a fine home and the luxury of two maids and a chauffeur, becoming a grease monkey for three long years.” But Neumann found the work interesting, and took pride in the high reputation of the shop.

At the conclusion of the three-year apprenticeship, Herr Schroth said “Thank you, Neumann”…the only time that he had ever said “thank you” to his apprentice, or called him anything other than “boy”…and sent a bouquet of flowers to Neumann’s mother. “I felt sincerely grateful when I, in turn, thanked Herr Schroth–the man whom I had always addressed as Meister and who had given me a solid groundwork for what I hoped would be a rewarding engineering future.”

Neumann says that up to the time he left Frankfurt to attend engineering college in the mid-1930s, he encountered no open anti-Semitism at all. Even at the Mittweide engineering college, where he was one of three Jewish students (each of their fathers had been soldiers in the First World War, which made them eligible for a college education), he says that he was never insulted by Nazi fellow students. Even allowing for the fact that attitudes toward Jews did differ considerably in different parts of Germany, these statements are hard to believe given that the Hitler regime had been in place since 1933.

About 15% of the Mittweide students were foreign, and they were exempt from the requirement, binding on German students, to have previously undergone an apprenticeship. “Because they had never dirtied their hands or bloodied their knuckles in apprentice-type training, they did not benefit from the Mittweida-type education anywhere as much as did a German student.” The Mittweida approach to engineering education included drawings in which errors had been deliberately inserted–“We were taught to ‘get a feel’ for drawings laid before us. The question constantly posed was, Would it really do the job if it were built just as shown on this drawing?”

Engineering students were exempt from the draft while in school, but not after graduation. A few weeks before the end of 1938, Neumann noticed an item on the college bulletin board: the Chinese government was looking for German mechanical engineers. And the Chinese Nationalist government had arranged with the German Nazi government that these engineers would have their German military service requirement deferred.

“The notice was vague about the jobs, which apparently were somewhere in the interior of the Chinese mainland and were connected with defense. A job in faraway China sounded incredibly exciting…”

Incredibly exciting it turned out to be, and most of the book is concerned with Neumann’s remarkable adventures in China. It was also, surely, lifesaving–had Neumann remained in Germany, it is most unlikely he would have survived the Holocaust.

Read the whole review.

Posted in Education, Technology | 2 Comments »

He very often managed to ignore complexity

Saturday, July 19th, 2025

Now It Can Be Told by Leslie M. GrovesIn the introduction to Leslie Groves’ Now It Can Be Told: The Story of the Manhattan Project, Edward Teller paints a picture of the general:

The readers of General Groves’s own account are to be complimented for choosing to learn directly from one of the major participants. History in some ways resembles the relativity principle in science. What is observed depends on the observer. Only when the perspective of the observer is known can proper corrections be made.

[…]

Vannevar Bush, the head of all scientific wartime projects, interviewed General Groves prior to his appointment to the Los Alamos project. Bush suggested to the office of the Secretary of State that Groves might lack sufficient tact for such a sensitive role.

[…]

He very often managed to ignore complexity and arrive at a result which, if not ideal, at least worked.

[…]

He had to worry both about the diffusion of uranium hexafluoride molecules and about the problems faced by the wives in Los Alamos. (As Groves mentions, contrary to local gossip, Los Alamos was not an establishment for the care of pregnant WACs).

[…]

For Groves, the Manhattan Project seemed a minor assignment, less significant than the construction of the Pentagon.

[…]

He started with, and partially retained, thorough doubts about the feasibility of the project. Yet in convincing the leaders at DuPont that they should participate, he appeared totally confident in order to overcome the incredulity of those overly sane chemical engineers.

[…]

I know of no one whose work begins to compare in excellence with that of Oppenheimer’s.

Oppie knew in detail the research going on in every part of the laboratory, and was as excellent at analyzing human problems as the countless technical ones. Of the more than 10,000 people who eventually came to work at Los Alamos, Oppie knew several hundred intimately, by which I mean that he understood their relationships with one another, and what made them tick. He knew how to lead without seeming to do so. His charismatic dedication had a profound effect on the successful and rapid completion of the atomic bomb.

[…]

One of my jobs at Los Alamos was to assure the safety conditions in the gas diffusion plant. The main hazard was that in advanced stages of separating U235 and U238, contamination with water or some other substance might cause the diffusing gases to solidify, at which point an unwanted chain reaction might result. This part of my job took me from time to time to New York, and one morning (at 4:00 a.m. Los Alamos time) I woke to hear the General’s voice at the other end of my telephone, instructing me to go to his Washington office immediately.

The emergency, I discovered, was a chemical explosion at a gas diffusion plant on the East Coast; Groves wanted to question me about the possibility of serious malfunction in our separation process. After a preliminary discussion, Groves assembled a group of his staff at a long table. I sat on his right and was kept wide awake by a barrage of hypothetical questions while the General slouched, with eyes closed, seemingly half asleep. Periodically, he would open both eyes, look me square in the face and state, “But after all, Professor, this is only theory.”

Toward the beginning of the third hour of this inquisition, a colonel at the end of the table asked if it were not possible that all the U235 atoms might assemble at one end of the apparatus by pure chance, and thereby cause a nuclear explosion. “Of course,” I answered, “this is a possibility, but it is as probable as that all the air molecules in the room will assemble under the table, causing us all to suffocate.”

Groves immediately sat up and said, “But Doctor, you did say this is possible.” Conant intervened with, “What Dr. Teller intends to say is that such an assembly is really quite impossible.” From this moment on, General Groves treated me with exquisite politeness. Apparently, I had passed his test as to whether or not I could be trusted.

Neither through contact nor through rumor did I ever learn of Grove’s sense of humor. Yet in reading his book, I discovered not only that he was quite sufficiently endowed with one but that he could laugh at himself.

[…]

About 1943, General Groves, visiting the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory which was separating U235 by electromagnetic means, attempted to spur Lawrence on by saying to him, “Your reputation is at stake here.” Later over a nice rum drink, Lawrence said to him, “You know, General, my reputation has been made, but yours is at stake here.” Groves did not respond. However, a couple of years later, Groves in addressing a group at Los Alamos commented: “When all of this is over, you will go back to your universities, regardless of the outcome, but my reputation is at stake here.”

[…]

Toward the end of my visit, Sir James Chadwick, who had headed the wartime British scientific delegation to Los Alamos, invited me to dinner at his home in Caius College. Sir James was well-known in the scientific community for his taciturn nature, but his wife was a charming conversationalist. She drew me out about our mutual friends and acquaintances from Los Alamos, and eventually inquired about General Groves. My response, I am afraid, reflected an unflattering opinion of him.

At that point, a miracle occurred. Sir James, who had spoken perhaps twenty words that evening, became talkative to the point of being almost uninterruptible. He told me most emphatically and repeatedly that the atomic bomb project would never have succeeded without General Groves. I pointed out how often Groves had made plain his dislike of the British. Sir James brushed aside my comment. That made no difference. What was important, Sir James went on, was that Groves understood the overriding importance of the project better than some of the leading American scientists. Without Groves, he said, the scientists could never have built the bomb.

I have rarely seen anyone—even an ordinarily effusive talker—so insistent on making his point. However, Sir James’s tirade carried no trace of reproach for my inappropriate remark about General Groves. At the end of the evening, my host walked me back to my inn. On parting, he told me to remember what he had said as I might “have need of it.”

Shortly after this evening, I was back in the United States and gained some new information. It then dawned on me that during our conversation Chadwick probably had known what I had just learned: the Soviets had exploded an atomic bomb. Chadwick knew that American scientists, who had less direct an experience with World War II than their British colleagues, many of whose homes and families were in peril, had not realized the urgency and importance of the atomic bomb project. General Groves, on the other hand, having considered military matters throughout his career, knew exactly what it meant to be inadequately defended.

[…]

Today, national security and technology have become inseparable. Yet the gulf between the military establishment and the scientific community is as great as ever. General Groves was one of the pioneers who, with difficulty but ultimate success, managed to throw a bridge across the abyss.

I do not see much hope for the survival of our democratic form of government if we cannot rebuild that bridge made by General Groves and J. Robert Oppenheimer. We must find ways to encourage mutual understanding and significant collaboration between those who defend their nation with their lives and those who can contribute the ideas to make that defense successful. Only by such cooperation can we hope that freedom will survive, that peace will be preserved.

Posted in Policy, Technology, War, Weapons | 4 Comments »

Sinaloa cartel used phone data and surveillance cameras to find FBI informants

Sunday, July 6th, 2025

A Sinaloa drug cartel hacker was able to obtain an FBI official’s phone records and use Mexico City’s surveillance cameras to help track and kill the agency’s informants in 2018, the U.S. Justice Department said in a report issued on Thursday:

The report said the hacker identified an FBI assistant legal attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City and was able to use the attaché’s phone number “to obtain calls made and received, as well as geolocation data.” The report said the hacker also “used Mexico City’s camera system to follow the (FBI official) through the city and identify people the (official) met with.”

The report said “the cartel used that information to intimidate and, in some instances, kill potential sources or cooperating witnesses.”

Posted in Crime, Technology, War | 3 Comments »

Despite its name, the rotating detonation rocket engine has no moving parts

Friday, June 13th, 2025

Venus Aerospace has successfully launched a rocket from the ground using its air-breathing rotating detonation rocket engine (RDRE):

Venus Aerospace’s goal is to develop the Stargazer M4, a commercial aircraft capable of cruising at Mach 4 and reaching Mach 9 at its peak speed.

[…]

The test took place at Spaceport America near the White Sands missile range in New Mexico. The rocket, which looked more like a missile or small rocket than a conventional plane, was launched vertically from a ramp.

[…]

At its core, this engine is a ramjet, which is essentially a tube without any moving parts. Normally, because there’s no turbine to compress incoming air, the ramjet needs to reach a high speed in order to build enough air pressure for combustion to begin and propulsion to occur.

Typically, ramjets are not effective at subsonic speeds. To get them started, they either need to be dropped from a high-speed aircraft or use a rocket motor to achieve the required speed. This makes it impossible to take off from the ground using just a ramjet.

Venus Aerospace overcame this challenge by adding a key element that generates the necessary air pressure to start the combustion process right from the ground. This element is the rotating detonation rocket engine (RDRE). Despite its name, the RDRE has no moving parts. It’s essentially a tube inside another tube, and the “rotation” comes from the detonation produced by the combustion of fuel and oxidizer. This creates a supersonic wave that spins around the axis, generating massive pressure to power the ramjet.

Once the speed reaches Mach 3.5, the RDRE shuts off, and the ramjet takes over propulsion, enabling hypersonic speeds. This system also improves fuel efficiency, reducing consumption by 20% compared to conventional engines.

[…]

The company has confirmed that the system works and plans to integrate the VDR2 into a drone demonstrator later this year.

Posted in Technology | 2 Comments »

How do you manage genius?

Sunday, June 8th, 2025

The Idea Factory by Jon GertnerAreoform explains why Bell Labs worked:

Alexander Graham Bell was prolific. His interests spanned hydrofoils (see footage above), metal detectors, optical data transmission, aviation, genetics, acoustics and early electrification. Bell used his first big liquidity event to start Volta Laboratory and Bureau, a lab that Bell led with an enlightened management style that would become Bell Labs’ signature. “[Bell] suggested the basic lines of research, furnished the financial resources, and then allowed his associates to receive the credit for many of the inventions that resulted.”

Mervin Kelly, the man who built Bell Labs, shared this attitude. Starting in the late 1920s and accelerating in the 1930s, Kelly went about scouting and (indiscriminately) assimilating every talented person he could find. From The Idea Factory:

It was curious, in a way, who they were, these men coming to Bell Labs in New York. Most [...had been flagged by professors...] and their names had been quietly passed along to Kelly or someone else at the Labs. [Typically, these recruits grew up] with a peculiar desire to know more about the stars or the telephone lines or (most often) the radio, and especially their makeshift home wireless sets. Almost all of them had put one together themselves, and in turn had discovered how sound could be pulled from the air.

Bell Labs’ antecedent was founded by a prolific maker and researcher, and it was led from the very start by makers and researchers. As a working scientist, Mervin Kelly understood the golden rule, “How do you manage genius? You don’t.” And it worked.

During WW2, Bell Labs reversed engineered and improved on the British Magnetron within 2 months. Helped create the “Bazooka.” Built an electronic computer that semi-autonomously controlled anti-aircraft guns, invented an acoustic homing torpedo, proximity fuzes, echo-ranging SONAR, pulse code modulation, the first anti-aircraft missile (the Nike) and the klystron.

By all accounts, Kelly stayed true to his philosophy. None of these projects were micro-managed by Kelly. People did things because they wanted to do them. And they kept doing them after the war.

Bell Labs is the furnace wherein the American century was forged.

[…]

The reason why we don’t have Bell Labs is because we’re unwilling to do what it takes to create Bell Labs — giving smart people radical freedom and autonomy.

The freedom to waste time. The freedom to waste resources. And the autonomy to decide how.

[…]

The Bell Labs formula can be briefly described as,

  • Use good taste to find great, ambitious people.
  • Surround them with other great, ambitious people.
  • Hire smart, technical makers to be around them.
  • Cross-pollinate between the two groups as necessary.
  • Make sure people talk to each other every day.
  • Create a school so they teach one another.
  • Encourage everyone to study and improve.

Posted in Business, Technology | 5 Comments »

The VR game was designed to give the eye muscles a workout

Monday, June 2nd, 2025

Researchers at Kwansei Gakuin University in Japan developed a VR game that aims to improve players’ eyesight:

It’s a relatively simple target shooting game developed in Unity for Meta Quest 2. The game features three lanes, each with a circular target on a stick. Pressing down the trigger button on the controller activates a virtual laser beam. Pointing this laser towards a lane highlights the lane and target and puts the player into “aim” mode. But to successfully hit the target, players have to move the controller’s stick in the direction indicated by the small Landolt C (a black ring shape with a gap used in Japanese eye tests) in the middle of the target.

VR Vision Training Game

The VR game was designed to give the eye muscles a workout, as players alternate between switching their gaze between targets at different distances and focusing on the Landolt C to see where the gap is. At the end of the game, players were treated to an arcade-style results screen, showing how many hits, misses and combos they got, as well as whether they broke a new record (apparently, some participants got very competitive about high scores).

The results showed that the game was effective in improving the vision of all the participants over the six week study period. For the severely myopic participants in particular, it was found that the more often they played the game, the more their sight improved.

The Landolt C was developed by the Swiss-born ophthalmologist Edmund Landolt:

The Landolt C consists of a ring that has a gap, thus looking similar to the letter C. The gap can be at various positions (usually left, right, bottom, top and the 45° positions in between) and the task of the tested person is to decide on which side the gap is. The size of the C and its gap are reduced until the subject makes a specified rate of errors. The minimum perceivable angle of the gap is taken as measure of the visual acuity. It is generally practised in the laboratory.

The stroke width is 1?5 of the diameter, and the gap width is the same. This is identical to the letter C from a Snellen chart. The Landolt C is the standard optotype for acuity measurement in most European countries. It was standardized, together with measurement procedures, by the German DIN, as DIN 58220 (now EN ISO 8596).

Posted in Games, Science, Technology | 1 Comment »

Anything insatiable is dangerous

Sunday, May 25th, 2025

Anything insatiable is dangerous, and thus AI fears usually center around runaway maximizers:

But there are reasons to be optimistic.

For starters, the main reason to expect that artificial intelligence is possible is the existence of natural intelligence. If you can build a human-level intelligence out of carbon, it seems reasonably likely that you could build something similar out of silicon.

But humans and all other biological intelligences are cybernetic minimizers, not reward maximizers. We track multiple error signals and try to reduce them to zero. If all our errors are at zero — if you’re on the beach in Tahiti, a drink in your hand, air and water both the perfect temperature — we are mostly comfortable to lounge around on our chaise.

As a result, it’s not actually clear if it’s possible to build a maximizing intelligence. The only intelligences that exist are minimizing. There has never been a truly intelligent reward maximizer (if there had, we would likely all be dead), so there is no proof of concept. The main reason to suspect AI is possible is that natural intelligence already exists — us.

[…]

Reward maximizers are always unstable. Even very simple reinforcement learning agents show very crazy specification behaviors. But control systems can be made very stable. They have their own problems, but we use them all the time, in thermostats, cruise control, satellites, and nuclear engineering. These systems work just fine. When control systems do fail, they usually fail by overreacting, underreacting, oscillating wildly, freaking out in an endless loop, giving up and doing nothing, and/or exploding. This is bad for the system, and bad when the system controls something important, like a nuclear power plant. But it doesn’t destroy the universe.

Posted in Economics, Technology | 3 Comments »

The drone uses real-time views from a downward-facing optical camera, comparing them against stored satellite images, to determine its position

Sunday, May 11th, 2025

Now in its third generation, KrattWorks’ Ghost Dragon ISR quadcopter has come a long way since 2022:

Its original command-and-control-band radio was quickly replaced with a smart frequency-hopping system that constantly scans the available spectrum, looking for bands that aren’t jammed. It allows operators to switch among six radio-frequency bands to maintain control and also send back video even in the face of hostile jamming.

The drone’s dual-band satellite-navigation receiver can switch among the four main satellite positioning services: GPS, Galileo, China’s BeiDou, and Russia’s GLONASS. It’s been augmented with a spoof-proof algorithm that compares the satellite-navigation input with data from onboard sensors. The system provides protection against sophisticated spoofing attacks that attempt to trick drones into self-destruction by persuading them they’re flying at a much higher altitude than they actually are.

At the heart of the quadcopter’s matte grey body is a machine-vision-enabled computer running a 1-gigahertz Arm processor that provides the Ghost Dragon with its latest superpower: the ability to navigate autonomously, without access to any global navigation satellite system (GNSS). To do that, the computer runs a neural network that, like an old-fashioned traveler, compares views of landmarks with positions on a map to determine its position. More precisely, the drone uses real-time views from a downward-facing optical camera, comparing them against stored satellite images, to determine its position.

[…]

Russia took an unexpected step starting in early 2024, deploying hard-wired drones fitted with spools of optical fiber. Like a twisted variation on a child’s kite, the lethal UAVs can venture 20 or more kilometers away from the controller, the hair-thin fiber floating behind them, providing an unjammable connection.

“Right now, there is no protection against fiber-optic drones,” Vadym Burukin, cofounder of the Ukrainian drone startup Huless, tells IEEE Spectrum. “The Russians scaled this solution pretty fast, and now they are saturating the battle front with these drones. It’s a huge problem for Ukraine.”

[…]

This past July, kamikaze drones equipped with an autonomous navigation system from U.S. supplier Auterion destroyed a column of Russian tanks fitted with jamming devices.

[…]

But purchasing Western equipment is, in the long term, not affordable for Ukraine, a country with a per capita GDP of US $5,760—much lower than the European average of $38,270. Fortunately, Ukraine can tap its engineering workforce, which is among the largest in Europe. Before the war, Ukraine was a go-to place for Western companies looking to set up IT- and software-development centers. Many of these workers have since joined Ukraine’s DIY military-technician (“miltech”) development movement.

Posted in Technology, War, Weapons | 1 Comment »

Almost any above ground facility is vulnerable to attack and destruction by precision guided weapons

Friday, May 9th, 2025

Area 51 by Annie JacobsenIn the 1980s, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Area 51) the military worked to develop the bunker buster, a nuclear weapon designed to fire deep into Earth’s surface, hit underground targets, and detonate belowground:

Weapons designer Sandia was brought on board. It was called the W61 Earth Penetrator, and testing took place at Area 52 in 1988. The idea was to launch the earth-penetrator weapon from forty thousand feet above but after many tests (minus the nuclear warhead), it became clear that a nuclear bomb would have little or no impact on granite, which is the rock of choice in which to build sensitive sites underground. After President Clinton ended all U.S. nuclear testing in 1993 (the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1996 and signed by five of the then seven or eight nuclear-capable countries), the idea of developing an earth-penetrating nuclear weapon lost its steam. But the building of underground facilities by foreign governments continued to plague war planners, so along came a nonnuclear space-based weapons project called Rods from God. That weapons project involved slender metal rods, twenty to thirty feet long and one foot in diameter, that could be launched from a satellite in space, enter the atmosphere travelling at 36,000 feet per second, and hit a precise target on Earth. T. D. Barnes says “that’s enough force to take out Iran’s nuclear facility, or anything like it, in one or two strikes.” The Federation of American Scientists reported that a number of similar “long-rod penetration” programs are believed to currently exist.

After the Gulf War, DARPA hired a secretive group called the JASON scholars (a favored target in conspiracy-theorist circles) and its parent company, MITRE Corporation, to report on the status of underground facilities, which in government nomenclature are referred to as UGFs.

[…]

What this means is that the F-117 stealth bomber showed foreign governments “that almost any above ground facility is vulnerable to attack and destruction by precision guided weapons.” For DARPA, this meant it was time to develop a new nuclear bunker buster—Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban-Treaty or not.

[…]

In 2002, with America again at war, the administration of George W. Bush revived the development of the nuclear bunker-buster weapon, now calling it the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator. In April of the same year, the Department of Defense entered into discussions with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to begin preliminary design work on the new nuclear weapon. By fiscal year 2003, the Stockpile Services Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator line item received $ 14.5 million; in 2004 another $ 7.5 million; and in 2005 yet another $ 27.5 million. In 2006, the Senate dropped the line item. Either the program was canceled or it got a new name and entered into the black world—perhaps at Area 51 and Area 52.

Posted in Technology, War, Weapons | No Comments »

The pilot and the sensor operators rely on a team of fifty-five airmen for operational support

Friday, May 2nd, 2025

Area 51 by Annie JacobsenTo operate a Predator-style drone requires ownership in space, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Area 51):

All unmanned aerial vehicles require satellites to relay information to and from the pilots who operate the drones via remote control. As the Predator flies over the war theater in the Middle East, it is being operated by a pilot sitting in a chair thirty miles south of Area 51, at Indian Springs. The pilot is seated in front of a computer screen that provides a visual representation of what the Predator is looking at on the ground in the battlefield halfway across the world. Two sensor operators sit beside the pilot, each working like a copilot might have in another age. The pilot and the sensor operators rely on a team of fifty-five airmen for operational support. The Predator Primary Satellite Link is the name of the system that allows communication between the drone and the team. The drone needs only to be in line of sight with its ground-control station when it lands. Everything else the drone can do, from capture images to fire missiles, it does thanks to its satellite link.

[…]

For the Department of Defense, the vulnerability of space satellites to sabotage has created a new and unprecedented threat. According to a 2008 study on “Wicked Problems” prepared by the Defense Science Board, in a chapter significantly entitled “Surprise in Space,” the board outlines the vulnerability of space satellites in today’s world.

[…]

By relying on satellites to fight the war on terror as well as many of the foreseeable conflicts in the immediate future, the single greatest wicked problem facing the Pentagon in the twenty-first century is the looming threat of the militarization of space. To weaponize space, historical thinking in the Pentagon goes, would be to safeguard space in a preemptive manner. A war in space over satellite control is not a war the United States necessarily wants to fight, but it is a war the United States is most assuredly unwilling to lose.

“Over eighty percent of the satellite communications used in U.S. Central Command’s area of responsibility is provided by commercial vendors,” reads the Pentagon’s “Surprise in Space” report. And when, in 2007, the Chinese—unannounced and unexpectedly—shot down one of their own satellites with one of their own weapons, the incident opened the Pentagon’s eyes to a whole host of potential wicked-problem scenarios in space.

[…]

Seven months later, in February of 2008, an SM-3 Raytheon missile was launched off the deck of the USS Lake Erie in the North Pacific. It traveled approximately 153 miles up into space where it hit a five-thousand-pound U.S. satellite described as being about the size of a school bus and belonging to the National Reconnaissance Office. The official Pentagon story was that the satellite had gone awry and the United States didn’t want the satellite’s hazardous fuel source, stated to be the toxin hydrazine, to crash on foreign soil. “Our objective was to intercept the satellite, reduce the mass that might survive re-entry [and] vector that mass into unpopulated areas ideally the ocean,” General James Cartwright, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the press. International leaders cried foul, saying the test was designed to show the world that the United States has the technology to take out other nations’ satellites. “China is continuously following closely the possible harm caused by the U.S. action to outer space security and relevant countries,” declared Liu Jianchao, China’s foreign ministry spokesman—certainly an example of the pot calling the kettle black.

In the 1950s, the United States and the Soviet Union actually considered using space as a launching pad for war. President Eisenhower’s science adviser James Killian—a man with so much power that he was not required to tell the truth to Congress—fielded regular suggestions from the Pentagon to develop, in his own words, “satellite bombers, military bases on the moon, and so on.” Killian was the man who spearheaded the first nuclear weapon explosions in space, first in the upper atmosphere (Orange), then near the ozone layer (Teak), and finally in outer space (Argus). But Killian shied away from the idea of weaponizing space not because he saw putting weapons in space as an inherently reckless or existentially bad idea but because Killian believed nuclear weapons would not work well from space.

“A satellite cannot simply drop a bomb,” Killian declared in a public service announcement released from the White House on March 26, 1958, a report written for “nontechnical” people at the behest of the president. “An object released from a satellite doesn’t fall. So there is no special advantage in being over the target,” Killian declared. Here was James Killian, who, by his own admission, was not a scientist, explaining to Americans why dropping bombs from space wouldn’t work. “Indeed the only way to ‘drop’ a bomb directly down from a satellite is to carry out aboard the satellite a rocket launching of the magnitude required for an intercontinental missile.” In other words, Killian was saying that to get an ICBM up to a launchpad in space was simply too cumbersome a process. Killian believed that the better way to put a missile on a target was to launch it from the ground. That the extra effort to get missiles in space wasn’t worth the task. This may have been true in the 1950s, but decades later James Killian would be proven wrong.

Flash forward to 2011. Analysts with the United States Space Surveillance Network, which is located in an Area 51–like facility on the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, spend all day, every day, 365 days a year, tracking more than eight thousand man-made objects orbiting the Earth. The USSS Network is responsible for detecting, tracking, cataloging, and identifying artificial objects orbiting Earth, including active and inactive satellites, spent rocket bodies, and space debris. After the Chinese shot down their own satellite in 2007, the network’s job got considerably more complicated. The Chinese satellite kill produced an estimated thirty-five thousand pieces of one-centimeter-wide debris and another fifteen hundred pieces that were ten centimeters or more. “A one-centimeter object is very hard to track but can do considerable damage if it collides with any spacecraft at a high rate of speed,” said Laura Grego, a scientist with the Global Security Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. The United States said the NRO satellite it shot down did not create space debris because, being close to Earth when it was shot down, its pieces burned up as they reentered Earth’s atmosphere.

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But targeted assassination by a U.S. intelligence agency was illegal

Friday, April 25th, 2025

Area 51 by Annie JacobsenIt was January of 2001, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Area 51), and the director of the CIA’s Counter­terrorism Center, Cofer Black, had a serious problem:

The CIA had been considering assass­inating Osama bin Laden with the Predator, but until that point, the unmanned aerial vehicle had been used for reconnaissance only, not targeted assassination. Because two technologies needed to be merged—the flying drone and the laser-guided precision missile—engineers and aerodynamicists had concerns. Specifically, they worried that the propulsion from the missile might send the drone astray or the missile off course. And the CIA needed a highly precise weapon with little possibility of collateral damage. The public would perceive killing a terrorist one way, but they would likely perceive killing that terrorist’s neighbors in an altogether different light. This new weaponized drone technology was tested at Area 51; the development program remains classified. After getting decent results, both the CIA and the Air Force were confident that the missiles unleashed from the drone could reach their targets.

[…]

But targeted assassination by a U.S. intelligence agency was illegal, per President Ronald Reagan’s Executive Order 12333, and since the situation required serious examination, State Department lawyers got involved.

There was one avenue to consider in support of the targeted-killing operation, and that was the fact that the FBI had a bounty on the man’s head. By February of 2001, the State Department gave the go-ahead for the assassination.

[…]

Bin Laden’s compound was called Tarnak Farm, and a number of high-profile Middle Eastern royal family members were known to visit there.

To determine collateral damage, the CIA and the Air Force teamed up for an unusual building project on the outer reaches of Area 51. They engineered a full-scale mock-up of Osama bin Laden’s compound in Afghanistan on which to test the results of a drone strike. But while engineers were at work, CIA director George Tenet decided that taking out Osama bin Laden with a Hellfire missile–equipped Predator drone would be a mistake. This was a decision the CIA would come to regret.

[…]

The CIA had sent drones on more than six hundred reconnaissance missions in the Bosnian conflict, beginning in 1995. CIA drones had provided intelligence for NATO forces in the 1999 Kosovo air campaign, collecting intelligence, searching for targets, and keeping an eye on Kosovar-Albanian refuge camps. The CIA Predator had helped war planners interpret the chaos of the battlefield there. Now, the Air Force needed the CIA’s help going into Afghanistan with drones.

The first reconnaissance drone mission in the war on terror was flown over Kabul, Afghanistan, just one week after 9/ 11, on September 18, 2001. Three weeks later, the first Hellfire-equipped Predator drone was flown over Kandahar. The rules of aerial warfare had changed overnight. America’s stealth bombers were never going to locate Osama bin Laden and his top commanders hiding out in mountain compounds. Now pilotless drones would be required to seek out and assassinate the most wanted men in the world.

Although drones had been developed and tested at Area 51, Area 52, and Indian Springs for nearly fifty years, the world at large would come to learn about them only in November of 2002, when a drone strike in Yemen made headlines around the world. Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi was a wanted man. A citizen of Yemen and a senior al-Qaeda operative, al-Harethi had also been behind the planning and bombing of the USS Cole two years before. On the morning of November 2, 2002, al-Harethi and five colleagues drove through the vast desert expanse of Yemen’s northwest province Marib oblivious to the fact that they were being watched by eyes in the skies in the form of a Predator drone flying several miles above them.

The Predator launched its missile at the target and landed a direct hit. The al-Qaeda operatives and the vehicle were instantly reduced to a black heap of burning metal. It was an assassination plot straight out of a Tom Clancy novel, except that it was so real and so dramatic—the first visual proof that al-Qaeda leaders could be targeted and killed—that Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz began bragging about the Hellfire strike to CNN. The drone attack in Yemen was “a very successful tactical operation,” Wolfowitz said. Except it was supposed to be a quiet, unconfirmed assassination. Wolfowitz’s bravado made Yemen upset. Brigadier General Yahya M. Al Mutawakel, the deputy secretary general for the People’s Congress Party in Yemen, gave an exclusive interview to the Christian Science Monitor explaining that the Pentagon had broken a secrecy agreement between the two nations. “This is why it is so difficult to make deals with the United States,” Al Mutawakel explained. “They don’t consider the internal circumstances in Yemen. In security matters, you don’t want to alert the enemy.”

Yemen pushed back against the United States by outing the secret inner workings of the operation. It was the U.S. ambassador to Yemen, Edmund Hull, an employee of the State Department, who had masterminded the plot, officials in Yemen explained. Hull had spearheaded the intelligence-gathering efforts, a job more traditionally reserved for the CIA. Hull spoke Arabic. He had roots in the country and knew people who knew local tribesmen in the desert region of Marib. The State Department, Yemen claimed, was the agency that had bribed local tribesmen into handing over information on al-Harethi, which allowed the CIA to know exactly where the terrorist would be driving and when. Revealing Ambassador Hull to be the central organizing player in the drone strike exposed the Department of State as having a hand in not just the espionage game but targeted assassination as well. Surprisingly, little fuss was made about any of this, despite the fact that diplomats are supposed to avoid assassination plots.

In political circles, Ambassador Hull was greatly embarrassed. He refused to comment on his role in what signaled a sea change in U.S. military assets with wings. The 2002 drone strike in Yemen was the first of its kind in the war on terror, but little did the public know that hundreds more drone strikes would soon follow. The next one went down the very next week, when a Predator targeted and killed al-Qaeda’s number-three, Mohammed Atef, in Jalabad, Afghanistan. As the war on terror progressed, some drone strikes would be official while others would go unmentioned. But never again would the CIA or the State Department admit to having a hand in any of them. When Mohammed Atef was killed, initial reports said a traditional bomber aircraft had targeted and destroyed Atef’s home. Only later was the strike revealed as being the work of a Predator drone and a targeted assassination spearheaded by the CIA.

[…]

No longer used only for espionage, the Predator got a new designation. Previously it had been the RQ-1 Predator: R for reconnaissance and Q indicating unmanned. Immediately after the Yemen strike, the Predator became the MQ-1 Predator, with the M now indicating its multirole use.

[…]

A second Predator, originally called the Predator B, was also coming online. Described by Air Force officials as “the Predator’s younger, yet larger and stronger brother,” it too needed a new name. The Reaper fit perfectly: the personification of death. “One of the big differences between the Reaper and the Predator is the Predator can only carry about 200 pounds [of weapons]. The Reaper, however, can carry one and a half tons, and on top of carrying Hellfire missiles, can carry multiple GBU-12 laser-guided bombs,” said Captain Michael Lewis of the Forty-second Wing at Creech Air Force Base. The General Atomics drones were single-handedly changing the relationship between the CIA and the Air Force. The war on terror had the two services working together again, exactly as had happened with the advent of the U-2.

[…]

From 2003 to 2007 the number of drone strikes rose incrementally, little by little, each year. Only in 2008 did the drones really come online. During that year, which included the last three weeks of the Bush administration, there were thirty-six drone strikes in Pakistan, which the Air Force said killed 268 al-Qaeda and Taliban. By 2009 the number of drone strikes would rise to fifty-three.

Posted in Technology, War, Weapons | No Comments »

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