The Nuclear Notebook is researched and written by Hans M. Kristensen, director of the Information Project with Federation American Scientists, Matt Korda, a senior research associate project. column has been published in Bulletin Atomic Scientists since 1987. This issue examines status US nuclear arsenal. arsenal remained roughly unchanged last year, Department Defense maintaining an estimated ...

The Nuclear Notebook is researched and written by Hans M. Kristensen, director of the Information Project with Federation American Scientists, Matt Korda, a research associate project. column has been published in Bulletin Atomic Scientists since 1987. This issue examines status US nuclear arsenal. arsenal remained roughly unchanged last year, Defense Department maintaining an estimated stockpi...

Gregory Koblentz is a Junior Fellow with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, D.C. The missile competition in South Asia is on the verge of a new and dangerous phase that threatens to disrupt the delicate strategic balance of the subcontinent. India and Pakistan already have stockpiles of ballistic missiles, along with the associ...

A simulated battlefield, containing airborne lasers that shoot ballistic missiles down, provides an excellent test-bed for developing adaptive controllers. An airborne laser fire controller, which can adapt the strategy it uses for target selection, is developed. The approach is to transform a knowledge-based controller into an adaptable connectionist representation, use supervised training to ...

issue 64, 1 st quarter 2012 / JFQ 115 T hink about the current laser designation capability used to direct precision-guided munitions (PGMs) to destroy an enemy target. Now, imagine replacing that laser designator with a high-energy laser (HEL) weapon that emits enough thermal energy to directly render a target ineffective without using a conventional munition. That HEL weapon will affect targe...

The use of visual sensing to acquire and track targets has the potential to significantly reduce cost in comparison to active sensors. We present preliminary results for a system that combines a webcam with a toy foam missile launcher on an altitude-azimuth mount. The controller uses foreground segmentation to identity new elements in a scene. It then applies SURF feature detection and a pinhol...

For more than a decade, TRW has been involved in aerospace applications of the Global Positioning System (GPS). TRW Ballistic Missiles Division first began working with GPS on a Minuteman missile test flight program in 1980. Since then, TRW has applied GPS to programs such as the Peacekeeper missile, the F-22 fighter aircraft, the Orbital Maneuvering Vehicle, Brilliant Pebbles, and classified s...

According to 2007 data, gunshot wounds from homicides, suicides, and accidents caused 31,000 deaths in the United States, with even higher numbers of serious, nonfatal injuries. In recent years, new evidence on effective treatment of patients with gunshot wounds has come from military settings and is being adapted for civilian emergency departments (EDs). Effective, evidence-based management of...

Aaron Karp is Senior Faculty Associate with the Graduate Programs in International Studies at Old Dominion University and Assistant Professor at the US Armed Forces Staff College. He is the author of Ballistic Missile Proliferation: The Politics and Technics (Oxford University Press, 1996). This essay is based on a presentation at the United Nations Regional Disarmament Meeting in the Asia-Paci...

Uncertainties in certain features of target geometries result in a loss of confidence in the signature assessment of the target. Knowledge of the impact to a target’s radar cross section (RCS) due to changes to specific target features can assist to identify whether uncertainty in a certain target feature warrants a loss of confidence in the target signature. This study will allow a development...