Defusing Armageddon: A History of NEST
written by Steven Aftergood
January 12, 2009 | Secrecy News Blog
Federation of American Scientist

“In May 1974, the U.S. government received its first serious nuclear threat”,recalls author Jeffrey T. Richelson. A letter demanding that $200,00 be left at a particular location arrived at the FBI. Failure to comply, it claimed, would result in the [detonation] of a nuclear bomb somewhere in Boston.

The threat was soon exposed as a hoax, but it prompted the creation of a then-secret organization originally known as the Nuclear Emergency Search (later: Source) Team, or NEST, which would be responsible for the “search and identification of lost or stolen nuclear weapons and special nuclear materials, bomb threats, and radiation dispersal threats.

The history of that organization is unveiled by Richelson in his new book “Defusing Armageddon: Inside NEST, America’s Secret Nuclear Bomb Squad” (W.W. Norton, January 2009).

Earliest weapons-grade plutonium found in US dump
21 January 2009 – New Scientist

An old glass jar inside a beaten up old safe at the bottom of a waste pit may seem an unlikely place to find a pivotal piece of 20th century history. But that’s just where the first bulk batch of weapons-grade plutonium ever made has been found – abandoned at the world’s oldest nuclear processing site.

And this….

Update: Since publication, Jon Schwantes has discovered that a microgram sample of plutonium produced in 1942 by Glen Seaborg’s group at the University of California in Berkeley is also plutonium-239. The sample discovered at Hanford is technically the second oldest sample of plutonium-239, but remains the earliest produced during the Manhattan Project and the first bulk batch anywhere.

This reads like a Simpson’s episode. I can’t help but wonder what else we’ve waylaid, and where. The ocean? A watershed that supplies water to millions of people? The Arctic/Antarctic, where ice caps are receding? Some of the hair-brained schemes they hatched up in the 1950′s to dispose of nuclear waste, it just leaves me wondering where these nuclear easter eggs will pop up next. And what of the Russians? The French?

Other news source:
Old plutonium found in dump
Weapons-grade material discovered at Hanford nuclear site.
Nature | Geoff Brumfiel
Published online 22 January 2009

VMware Helps City of Aurora Serve Citizens, Cut Costs


Colorado City Leverages VMware Platform to Improve Timeliness and Reliability of Public Services, Achieves 100-percent ROI in 90 Days

“It was clear that our hardware-based approach to IT had to change,” said Steve Jenovai, senior systems administrator for the city of Aurora. “We simply can’t afford downtime in our infrastructure, and budgetary realities make it impossible to just throw money at the situation. Thanks to VMware, we’ve been able to consolidate 70 boxes down to five, with each box running close to 20 VMs. It has simplified system management dramatically while eliminating downtime and saving taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

Jenovai noted that provisioning of new VMs could be done in minutes, compared to the two weeks that used to be required for ordering, installing and configuring a physical server. This has helped the city become much more responsive to changing demands from residents. Likewise, VMware VMotion technology has been extremely valuable in helping ensure application availability by allowing the IT staff to move VMs during routine maintenance of physical hosts or when problems arise. And, VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) helps ensure outstanding performance by dynamically adding or reducing resources for specific applications as demand ebbs and flows.

“We took a long look at all virtual server offerings,” said Jenovai. “It quickly became a very easy decision. VMware provides a true virtualization solution, not just a hypervisor. VMware gives us a mature toolset, centralized manageability, DR capabilities and OS independence. We didn’t find any other virtualization offerings that could match it. And the fact that we could achieve 100-percent ROI in 90 days was phenomenal. And that’s just from hardware savings. We’ve also reduced power consumption and space requirements.”

“I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered! My life is my own.”

–No.6; Arrival

Telly Savalas – If

• Sleep Disorders: Warning Sign For Neurodegenerative Disease?

  People with a sleep disorder that causes them to kick or cry out during their sleep may be at greater risk of developing dementia or Parkinson’s disease, according to a  new study.

  ScienceDaily: Mind & Brain News / Wed, 24 Dec 2008 05:00:00 GMT

• Seven Personality Types Who Are Most Likely To Help Sick-listed Employees Back To Work

  Scientists have studied which leadership qualities could help employees return from sick leave early. Being considerate, understanding and able to maintain contact with the sick-listed are the most important leadership qualities, according to the study.

  ScienceDaily: Mind & Brain News / Mon, 05 Jan 2009 05:00:00 GMT

• Societal, Economic Burden Of Insomnia Is High

  The indirect costs of untreated insomnia are significantly greater than the direct costs associated with its treatment. The study estimates that the total annual cost of insomnia in the province of Quebec is 6.5 billion Canadian dollars, representing about one percent of the province’s $228.5 billion in gross domestic product for 2002. The largest proportions of all insomnia-related expenses are attributed to lost job productivity, absences from work and alcohol used as a sleep aid.

  ScienceDaily: Mind & Brain News / Thu, 01 Jan 2009 05:00:00 GMT

• Dan Walters: New approach needed to aid poor students

  “The analyst’s report proposes an overhaul of ED mitigation programs that would simplify them and redirect resources into those underlying reasons ED students do so poorly in school and concentrating them on the students truly at risk of failure.”

  “For example,” the report says, “a school district might receive significantly less funding for a student who is an English learner from an educated two-parent household living in a relatively safe suburb than a school district would receive for an English learner student living in a dangerous neighborhood who has one parent absent and one parent with a low level of education.”

  “It makes a lot of sense. Why aren’t we doing it?“

  SacBee — Dan Walters column / Wed, 07 Jan 2009 08:00:00 GMT

• Honey Bees On Cocaine Dance More, Changing Ideas About The Insect Brain
  In a study that challenges current ideas about the insect brain, researchers have found that honey bees on cocaine tend to exaggerate.
  ScienceDaily: Mind & Brain News / Fri, 26 Dec 2008 01:00:00 GMT

• 6-Year-Old Says Grand Theft Auto Taught Him To Drive

  nandemoari writes “A six-year-old who recently stole his parents’ car and drove it into a utility pole has passed the buck onto a familiar scapegoat: the video game, Grand Theft Auto. Rockstar Games’ controversial Grand Theft Auto video game has been criticized by parent groups and crusaders (or in the eyes of gamers, nincompoops) like former lawyer Jack Thompson for years (Thompson once tried to link the Virginia Tech slayings to late-night Counterstrike sessions. He’s since been disbarred). However, not as of yet has anyone under the age of, oh, ten, blamed the game for a car theft.”

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

• Spiraling Magnetic Signal Shows Up In the Cosmic Background

  pln2bz writes “Astronomers looking for confirmation for emissions from early stellar formation in the cosmic microwave background radiation instead found a signal indicating large amounts of unaccounted-for spiraling magnetic fields in space, but without any accompanying infrared emissions. The discovery possibly dredges up the claims of plasma cosmologists like Eric Lerner, who claim that the intergalactic medium is a strong absorber of the CMB with the absorption occurring in a fog of narrow filaments. These filaments are the result of plasma’s natural tendency, as observed within the plasma laboratory and in novelty plasma globes, to form braided, ropelike structures which are collimated by coiled magnetic fields.”

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

• Phishing Is a Minimum-Wage Job

  rohitm918 writes “A study by Microsoft Research concludes that phishers make very little (PDF): ‘…low-skill jobs pay like low-skill jobs, whether the activity is legal or not.’ They also find that the Gartner numbers that everyone quotes ($3.2B/year etc) are rubbish, off by a factor of 50. ‘Even though it harvests “free money,” phishing generates total revenue equal to the total costs incurred by the actors. Each participant earns, on average, only as much as he would have made in the opportunities he gave up elsewhere. As the total phishing effort increases the total phishing revenue declines: the harder individual phishers try the worse their collective situation gets. As a consequence, increasing effort is a sign of failure rather than of success.’”

  Read more of this story at Slashdot.

• CRS on Climate Change
  Secrecy News from the FAS Project on Government Secrecy
  Federation of American Scientists

  As a matter of policy, the Congressional Research Service does not make its products directly available to the public.  Recent reports from CRS on climate change and related topics obtained by Secrecy News include these (all pdf).

  “Global Climate Change: Three Policy Perspectives,” updated November 26, 2008.

  “Greenhouse Gas Emissions: Perspectives on the Top 20 Emitters and Developed Versus Developing Nations,” updated November 28, 2008.

  “Climate Change: Design Approaches for a Greenhouse Gas Reduction Program,” updated November 24, 2008.

  “Climate Change and the EU Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS): Kyoto and Beyond,” updated November 24, 2008.

  “Are Carbon Dioxide Emissions Rising More Rapidly Than Expected?,” October 17, 2008.

  “Capturing CO2 from Coal-Fired Power Plants: Challenges for a Comprehensive Strategy,” August 15, 2008.

  “The Carbon Cycle: Implications for Climate Change and Congress,” updated March 13, 2008.

  “Climate Change: Federal Laws and Policies Related to Greenhouse Gas Reductions,” updated January 28, 2008.

  “U.S. Global Climate Change Policy: Evolving Views on Cost, Competitiveness, and Comprehensiveness,” updated January 28, 2008.

  Bookmark It