so I assume Britain received its imaging intelligence from the US as part of five eyes. or else I cannot explain how a nuclear armed country has skipped over one of the main prerequisite for missile targeting for 60 years
The UK nuclear arsenal has always been a strategic deterrent. The weapons in the UK arsenal (trident missiles with MIRV warheads) are designed to destroy cities, so unless the Russians have managed to conceal the locations of their major cities, targeting shouldn’t be an issue.
>Presumably part of the nuclear doctrine is to take out your enemies nuclear launch sites before they launch
It is not. The UK, like most nuclear armed states, has a "No first use" doctrine, meaning its nukes exist only to retaliate, to turn cities to ash.
Whoever is nuking you, to the point that you use those retaliatory nukes, might be targeting your weapons, but they are on submarines in friendly waters, so not likely to be destroyed before they can launch.
I was 15 years old in 2004 when I have guessed the existence of that program :)
I was reading a scientific magazine article about the planed return of the Genesis spacecraft’s samples. They were writing about how the probe will float back to Earth under a parachute and a helicopter will catch it mid—air. That plan sounded absolutely bonkers crazy to me and I would have assumed they needed a long process of trial drops to practice this stunt, but the documented evidence shown that they were quite non-chalant about it. Almost as if they have done such things previously. But since there were no public evidence of prior art I assumed some classified spy stuff was what gave them the experience needed to be confident about the skill. (This was 7 years before the declassification of the existence of the KH-9 program)
You should see how often I was wrong about stuff though! :D
I only wrote about this because later it become clear that I was right.
I would never tell you about how much time I spent thinking about how a submarine could use laser back-scatter to track the slightly warmer wake of an enemy submarine. :P Not until they declassify that too.
No but the latter only works if you're already in proximity. With the speed these things come down you have to be already in the right vicinity to catch it.
This is where GPS+track prediction could help a lot. And why I think it's so impressive.
Probably a combination of Trump and Brexit. The Tory governments made a big song and dance of investing to replace the access to European space programs that they lost, I wouldn't be surprised if this project sat in the folds of one of those efforts - even just financially.
On the other hand - this was actually delivered, so maybe not a Tory thing at all... /S
There are some issues with the code he's criticizing (createPluralDependentMessageParts is satire), but his infatuation with ternary operators makes his code a mess
Care to explain how a conflict between two national groups that are indigenous to the same land is similar to a racial system of segregation including beaches and restrooms, based on race theory with different racial classifications?
Or are you using a word that describes something different just because it evokes negative emotions?
depends on who you ask, for german jews under the nazis before world war 2, it was almost the only place to go to, and definitely saved them from certain death in places like the netherlands.
not to mention after world war 2 for those who came back from the camps and found their homes taken.
moreover zionism did not start with the balfour declaration, but decades before with mass killings of jews in eastern europe
the western allies certainly could and should have done much pre-war, and arguably in the war (mosquito strikes on the camps, for example). my point was that few can dispute that, as we see today, the whole imposition of israel on its neighbours has been a disaster.
that's only when taking only palestinians into account. When the balfour declaration was signed already 10% of then population was jewish.
Mass killings of jews had already started in eastern europe decades before the holocaust. which was what prompted zionism. This is not a singular event, but a movement that would happen with the british or without them.
And any result of the conflict would cause serious "disaster" for one people or another
Very surprising for a country as large as the UK, I can only assume they used US satellites up until now, and started designing their own due to Trump