Nuclear Weapons Nerds

Re:Nuclear Weapons Nerds by jackpirate on Wednesday August 22, 2018 @09:07PM (#17823698)

If you're interested in the latest nuclear weapons developments, I highly recommend reading the blog https://armscontrolwonk.com . There's lots of detailed political and technical analysis of the world's nuclear weapons systems there with an effort to track and limit their proliferation. If you've never investigated this type of thing before, you might be surprised at just how much knowledge there is to be had in unclassified "open source" material like this.

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Re:Nuclear Weapons Nerds by irq on Wednesday August 22, 2018 @10:02PM (#17823946)

Your link is broken - I think it's because their TLS configuration doesn't support the non-www hostname. This link works though:

https://www.armscontrolwonk.com/

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Re:Nuclear Weapons Nerds by toufka on Wednesday August 22, 2018 @10:12PM (#17823988)

I second their recommendation and add that their podcast is really good and nerdy.

They also put to pragmatic social and geopolitical use a lot of tech in a low-budget way: imaging from Planet Labs, machine learning in inage analysis, etc. And they go through how they pit them to use in detail.

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Re:Nuclear Weapons Nerds by avar on Thursday August 23, 2018 @10:07AM (#17827346)

I'm also a regular listener to ACW. Where is it covered that they use machine learning?

According to the latest podcast, which goes into this topic in detail, they don't use machine learning at all (but would like to try it): https://www.armscontrolwonk.com/archive/1205801/south-korean...

Instead, they're finding missile sites by manually tracking information leaks in various places. E.g. that podcast discusses how they found a secret South Korean site partially from publicly available images (it had a really distinctive design), and from things like browsing the LinkedIn profiles of people known to work there, which would mention that they worked in some nearby town or county.

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Re:Nuclear Weapons Nerds by jpindar on Thursday August 23, 2018 @03:36PM (#17830029)

The founder of that site, Jeffrey Lewis, recently published "The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States: A Speculative Novel". Well worth reading IMO.

https://www.amazon.com/Commission-Report-Nuclear-Attacks-Aga...

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Re:Nuclear Weapons Nerds by 3pt14159 on Thursday August 23, 2018 @10:16AM (#17827419)

I also recommend the podcast by the same name[0]. Especially the episodes with Jeffery Lewis. There is also a guy named Scott LaFoy who has some pretty interesting things to say, but usually on other Podcasts and across a wider array of topics than just nuclear weapons, including cyberwarfare. He's @wslafoy on Twitter.

[0] I sponsor it on Patreon, and the sponsors only slack is fucking great.

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