Category Archives: Musings

Over at Instapundit, Glenn points to this story and wonders if it’s true. I couldn’t find anything recent, but a little Googling turned up some interesting tidbits.
My layman’s understanding of the Non-Proliferation Treaty is that command-and-control assistance (e.g. systems for surveilling, communicating with, or controlling nuclear forces or weapons) would be prohibited, but surety assistance (e.g. making sure that weapons can’t be detonated accidentally or without proper authorization) wouldn’t necessarily be banned. In fact, it would seem like a good thing to give surety assistance to countries, like Pakistan, where the political conditions may make it more likely that someone will attempt to detonate a weapon without authorization. It’s not clear if the Pakistanis want help with C-and-C or surety, and what (if any) help the US is offering.
So, on with the links. First, this NBC story from 2/8 is cited in the Telegraph story. NBC quotes unnamed sources as saying that the Pakistani warheads are more secure than India’s and that India has almost a 2-1 warhead advantage (interesting, if true, since conventional wisdom says the opposite). However, the story goes on to claim that Pakistani weapons are insecure because of political instability (probably true) and that the US has “contingency teams” ready to secure the weapons; neither claim is attributed.
Another related report I can find (citing Sy Hersh in the New York Times) is dated 12/7/01 in the Asia Times. Hersh’s original story claimed that an elite US military unit was training to sneak into Pakistan and steal or disable their weapons, if necessary, to prevent them from being used. (Of course, this report also says “Pakistan has kept its promise to the international community not to export, share, transfer or assist any country in nuclear technology”, so take it with a grain of salt.) More interestingly, the article claims that the US turned down Pakistan’s 2001 request for command-and-control upgrades, but it doesn’t cite a source.
Sean Gregory has a February 2001 report here that points out the challenge of building reliable command-and-control in countries where communications and power infrastructures are unreliable.
The Center for Nonproliferation Studies has a report that assesses Pakistani surety as good, outlining some specific scenarios and explaining what measures Pakistan has taken (or is assumed to have taken) to prevent them. The biggest measure they appear to have taken is to separate the fissile warhead cores from the warheads and delivery systems. This would be like taking the buckshot out of your shotgun shells and storing shells, shot, and shotgun in three separate locations; it makes it much more difficult for unauthorized parties to assemble the weapon components, since they have to compromise more than one site; however, it also increases the amount of time required to generate a complete weapon for strategic response.
There’s an interesting undated paper here that ends by saying “the safety and security measures are likely to remain primitive by Western standards”. Yikes. The safety measures built into the weapons themselves can be quite complex; this draft USAF document outlines some of the standards that apply. Steve Bellovin has a fascinating document here that describes some of these safety measures in more detail.

I am now officially a tool of the state. Why? A few months ago, various places reported that the Selective Service System (y’know, the draft people) were looking for volunteers to staff up local draft boards, just in case. Their original appeal seems to have been deleted, but not before I filled out the application. Lo and behold, last week I got a big manila envelope from the regional office with my application. No guarantees, of course, but I filled it out and sent it in. After all, if the paranoids are right, and the draft comes back, who better to sit in judgment than someone who already did some time in the Big Green Machine? So, all you 18- to 25-year-old young men… Uncle Sam might not want you yet, but if he does you know where to find me.
(and if that wasn’t enough proof that I am a hopeless authoritarian, I also signed up for Perrysburg’s Citizens’ Police Academy. So there.)

Joel does it again with this terrific essay on résumés and hiring. Since we’ve been collecting résumés for positions at 3sharp, I wholeheartedly echo everything he says (especially the part about not being able to follow basic instructions).

We don’t have a law firm yet, but I think we should hire Morrison and Foerster, based solely on their URL.

Last night I had dinner with Tom Meunier (a fellow Exchange MVP) and my partner, Peter. One of the topics for discussion was closed captioning; Tom mentioned that he and his wife often turned on captioning for DVDs so they could still follow the action when their kids were being noisy. It turns out that The Miracle Worker, a biography of Helen Keller, doesn’t have closed captioning. This struck us as particularly ironic: if you were deaf and wanted to see the definitive biography of perhaps the most famous deaf American, you’d be out of luck. (According to Tom, the DVD has French and Spanish subtitles, so all is not lost.)

It’s sad, but true: I have NADD. Worse still, David is showing early signs of the same disease.

I had to fire someone yesterday. This was a new and not very pleasant addition to my set of life experiences. We hired himin October. He had good references and good skills, but he had some trouble adapting to the kind of projects we had for him to do. His productivity slowed to the point where we were losing a significant amount of money on the project he worked on, and there was no clear end in sight. From a purely business standpoint, it was a simple decision, but I still didn’t like it. Maybe I’m not capitalist enough yet. Anyway, he made it easy by being mature about it, which I certainly appreciate. We’re trying to help him find another position where he can do direct-to-customer consulting, which is his real strength. I hope it’s a long time before I have to do it again.

Excellent news: the USAF Thunderbirds are coming for the 2004 Toledo Airshow (the Chamber of Commerce link still has info on the 2002 show, which Micah blogged here). Mark your calendars for 28-29 August!
(meanwhile, according to this page, the Toledo show is “approved for Naval Aviation support”, but no word on whether there will actually be any Navy or Marine Corps aircraft there.)