The pebble bed reactor...

MIT PEBBLE BED SITE

Project Objective

Develop a sufficient technical and economic basis for this type of reactor plant to determine whether it can compete with natural gas and still meet safety, proliferation resistance and waste disposal concerns.

What is a Pebble Bed Reactor?

* 360,000 pebbles in core;
* about 3,000 pebbles handled by FHS each day;
* about 350 discarded daily;
* one pebble discharged every 30 seconds;
* average pebble cycles through core 15 times;
* Fuel handling most maintenance-intensive part of plant.

Project Prospect

Many believe that HTGRs are not credible due to past failures. Our work is meant to turn that belief around with substantive analysis. If successful, propose building a reactor research facility to 鬼license by test贡, explore different fuel cycles, process heat applications, and advanced control system design, helium gas turbines and other components. (Within five years!)

Prepare the regiment for fording...

Wikipedia has this image on their website of a T-64 Tank. The T-64 would have been a competant weapon against Nato forces of the period. THe T-64 combined all those progressive and daring elements of Soviet armor engineering. It had a powerful, smoothbore cannon, improved suspension from the t-62 series using live track, auto-loader which was very fast, and advanced armor (layers and cermiamic as opposed to rolled homogenous slabs of uniform steel). Also the tank had excellent NBC provisions, which for the warsaw pact armor meant that the tank could be fully sealed.

The river fording operations were very dangerous, and proabably seldom practiced. Tanks would line up together with each attached by towing lines. A lead tank would ford followed in turn by each tank in the regiment. The flotation of a tank was a difficult matter to estimate, and a stalled vehicle could be difficult to escape should something go wrong. I don't think SCUBA systems were ever employed, but the russians probably accepted that tanks could not be safley evacuated under water under any conditions. So what's a Soviet tanker to do? Well, ideally you stayed "buttoned up" in the vehicle and ride under the water until you safley come out on dry land. I can imagine the tension that such crews must have felt, and while I have no source for numbers, I suspect such operations were rare indeed. Wheter such tactics would have been used in war time is another matter.

Russian Strategic Nuclear forces Blog

The authors have a very polished webblog which keeps defense analysts up to date.

Russian Strategic Nuclear Forces Webblog

When the missiles start falling...

http://pvo.guns.ru/images/other/france/aster/mbda/aster30_2.jpg

The ICBM threat...1957

Think about this missile. It's above ground. It's unprotected. It has sensitive fueling eqiupment. Its basically a large ballon filled with LOX & Kerosene. Does it equal survivable? Answer=NO.

USA Code Name	SS-6
Nato Code Name:	Sapwood
Russian Designation:	8K71
Range:	19 000 Km
Stages:	2
Fuel:	Liquid - LOX & Kerosene
Engines Stage 1	RD-107
Engines Stage 2	RD-108
Inservice:	1957 - OOS
Max Number Deployed	Less than 10
Notes:	First ICBM in the world - forms the basis of Russian A-2 Rocket Launch System
Space Launcher Derivative	A-1 Family

Dream Factory Communism

A catalogue dedicated to the exhibition Dream Factory Communism. The Visual Culture of the Stalin Era held in the Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt. The later works of Soz-Art, a style in which characteristics of socialist realism are combined with Pop Art, provides a visual commentary and a critical take on the aesthetics of totalitarianism.

Text in German & English. Germany, 2003. 464 pages, 152 color & 108 b/w illus., hardcover. 9 1/4 x 11 3/8 in. (23.5 x 29 cm).

NSC 68

NSC 68: United States Objectives and Programs for National Security

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III. Fundamental Design of the Kremlin

The fundamental design of those who control the Soviet Union and the international communist movement is to retain and solidify their absolute power, first in the Soviet Union and second in the areas now under their control. In the minds of the Soviet leaders, however, achievement of this design requires the dynamic extension of their authority and the ultimate elimination of any effective opposition to their authority.

The design, therefore, calls for the complete subversion or forcible destruction of the machinery of government and structure of society in the countries of the non-Soviet world and their replacement by an apparatus and structure subservient to and controlled from the Kremlin. To that end Soviet efforts are now directed toward the domination of the Eurasian land mass. The United States, as the principal center of power in the non-Soviet world and the bulwark of opposition to Soviet expansion, is the principal enemy whose integrity and vitality must be subverted or destroyed by one means or another if the Kremlin is to achieve its fundamental design.