Russia is one of the top three countries with the largest nuclear arsenal. However, it has struggled to catch up with America’s latest ICBM technologies during the last decade.
But all that is about to change with the nation’s latest addition to its vast arsenal: the state-of-the-art Satan 2 or Sarmat bomb.
Continue reading “Russia Says 16,000mph Satan-2 Nuke is Ready” »
The DEIMOS laser weapon is seen here in illustration, capable in the near future of knocking a drone, ordinance, aircraft and even missiles out of the sky.
It is the economics of laser weapon systems that makes this type of ordinance so attractive. At the moment various vendors like Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon are building 50 Kilowatt laser weapons. But there is no determining limit on the strength. The U.S. Department of Defense estimates a 100 Kilowatt laser could easily handle a drone, a small boat, a shell fired by artillery, and even a mortar. For a cruise missile, the estimate is a 300 Kilowatt laser, and for a ballistic missile or hypersonic weapon, a 1 Megawatt laser. Lockheed Martin is already testing a 300 Kilowatt version of DEIMOS.
The US Navy is looking at 100 Kilowatt versions of DEIMOS for its ships and looks like it will replace arming vessels with rail gun technology which now appears to be considered obsolete. Rail guns were high-speed ordinance systems designed to knock down incoming cruise missiles but when costs are compared the laser has the technology beat.
Continue reading “U.S. Military Plans to Deploy Laser Weapons by 2025” »
A four-star US General has warned of a possible conflict with China most likely over Taiwan as early as 2025. He urged his commanders to push their units to achieve maximum operational battle readiness this year and internal memorandum over the issue emerged in social media and was later confirmed genuine by the Pentagon.
#us #china #worldnews.
A device developed at the University of Florida for the U.S. military provides protection from mosquitos for an extended period and requires no heat, electricity or skin contact.
The controlled-release passive device was designed by Nagarajan Rajagopal, a Ph.D. candidate and Dr. Christopher Batich in UF’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering in the Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering. It recently was tested successfully in a four-week semi-field study at the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Gainesville in a collaboration with Dr. Daniel Kline, Dr. Jerry Hogsette and Adam Bowman from the USDA’s Center for Medical, Agricultural and Veterinary Entomology.
Results showed the controlled release of the repellent transfluthrin was effective in preventing multiple species of mosquitos from entering the testing site. Transfluthrin is an organic insecticide considered to be safe for humans and animals.
Microsoft made a multibillion dollar investment in OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, reigniting an old rivalry with Google. The move also set off an “AI arms race” that puts Google at risk. FT explains.
Boeing has come up with a new advanced airlifter concept with stealth features to meet the growing need for more durable cargo and tanker planes.
Boeing has shown an idea for a tactical, stealth-capable cargo plane with a blended wing body, or BWB. It comes almost two weeks after Frank Kendall, the secretary of the U.S. Air Force, said that having more airlifters and aerial refueling tankers that can survive will be important in future high-end conflicts against near-peer adversaries, especially China.
Continue reading “Boeing unveils stealth cargo plane concept for high-end conflicts” »
They’re warning of a global AI-pocalypse.
While artificial intelligence systems might make lives exponentially easier, they could also have a sinister side effect — making us go extinct. That’s right, researchers are deeming rogue AI an “existential threat to humanity” that needs to be regulated like nuclear weapons if we are to survive.
Please join the Project on Nuclear Issues for a book launch event, featuring “The Fragile Balance of Terror: Deterrence in the Nuclear Age.”
In The Fragile Balance of Terror, edited by Vipin Narang and Scott Sagan, the foremost experts on nuclear policy and strategy offer insight into an era rife with more nuclear powers. Some of these new powers suffer domestic instability, others are led by pathological personalist dictators, and many are situated in highly unstable regions of the world—a volatile mix of variables. The increasing fragility of deterrence in the twenty-first century is created by a confluence of forces: military technologies that create vulnerable arsenals, a novel information ecosystem that rapidly transmits both information and misinformation, nuclear rivalries that include three or more nuclear powers, and dictatorial decision making that encourages rash choices. The nuclear threats posed by India, Pakistan, Iran, and North Korea are thus fraught with danger.
Audience questions: https://forms.gle/t1ecgsgib9hhFjAC8
This event is made possible by general CSIS support.
Continue reading “Book Event: The Fragile Balance of Terror: Deterrence in the Nuclear Age” »
Tech giants from Google to Amazon and Alibaba —not to mention nation-states vying for technological supremacy—are racing to dominate this space. The global quantum-computing industry is projected to grow from $412 million in 2020 to $8.6 billion in 2027, according to an International Data Corp. analysis.
Whereas traditional computers rely on binary “bits”—switches either on or off, denoted as 1s and 0s—to process information, the “qubits” that underpin quantum computing are tiny subatomic particles that can exist in some percentage of both states simultaneously, rather like a coin spinning in midair. This leap from dual to multivariate processing exponentially boosts computing power. Complex problems that currently take the most powerful supercomputer several years could potentially be solved in seconds. Future quantum computers could open hitherto unfathomable frontiers in mathematics and science, helping to solve existential challenges like climate change and food security. A flurry of recent breakthroughs and government investment means we now sit on the cusp of a quantum revolution. “I believe we will do more in the next five years in quantum innovation than we did in the last 30,” says Gambetta.
But any disrupter comes with risks, and quantum has become a national-security migraine. Its problem-solving capacity will soon render all existing cryptography obsolete, jeopardizing communications, financial transactions, and even military defenses. “People describe quantum as a new space race,” says Dan O’Shea, operations manager for Inside Quantum Technology, an industry publication. In October, U.S. President Joe Biden toured IBM’s quantum data center in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., calling quantum “vital to our economy and equally important to our national security.” In this new era of great-power competition, China and the U.S. are particularly hell-bent on conquering the technology lest they lose vital ground. “This technology is going to be the next industrial revolution,” says Tony Uttley, president and COO for Quantinuum, a Colorado-based firm that offers commercial quantum applications. “It’s like the beginning of the internet, or the beginning of classical computing.”
Biological and chemical weapons have the potential to pose a national security threat to the U.S. that the country is not equipped to handle, a panel of lawmakers and a military leader told an audience at the Aspen Security Forum.
