We are accustomed to defense technology being transferred into commercial applications, but we do not see technology often going the other direction. In this case, Arconic, a Pittsburgh-based supplier of aluminum, nickel and titanium parts to both commercial and defense industries, has brought about major manufacturing changes based on their successful application in commercial air frames.
In addition to their patented formulas for high-strength alloys, they have the extraordinary ability to manufacture an entire 21-foot-long, 7-foot tall-bulkhead out of a single piece of aluminum or titanium… driving out weight and cost. Well proven by their earlier work on the Airbus A380 airliner, Arconic’s extraordinary capital investment in a unique 50,000-pound machine and their proprietary metallurgical processes has made them a supplier to both Lockheed’s F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter and the Pratt & Whitney F135 jet engine. Click here for more about a great American manufacturing story. The 60-year anniversary of the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik 1, Oct. 4, 1957, finds the space environment very different than when the first human-made object began to orbit the Earth.
Now, only six decades later, space is a very different environment and increasingly “diverse, disruptive, disordered and dangerous.” This has major impacts on both deterrence and future conflict planning. So writes the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in a recent report, “Escalation and Deterrence in the Second Space Age,” by the CSIS Aerospace Security Project. The full CSIS report can be downloaded here, and the highlights of the report are summarized in this analysis by Breaking Defense. Both are worth your time. The Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz began his historic four-day visit to Moscow this week, which marks a major turning point in Middle East geopolitics and in the potential conduct of world oil markets.
Our readers will be aware of the 1973 agreement negotiated between the Nixon administration and Saudi King Fahd’s court that provided U.S. security guarantees to the House of Saud in return for their support that global oil sales be transacted in U.S. dollars. The oil-backed “petrodollar” has been the anchor of support to the dollar’s position as the world’s reserve currency despite defaulting on convertibility to gold in 1971. You should keep that 44-year petrodollar agreement in mind as you read about this trip to Moscow. In addition to more than 15 cooperation agreements that were signed, some of the most telling involved agreements between the Saudi Arabian Military Industries (SAMI) and the Russian state-owned arms exporter Rosoboronexport. The startling Saudi decision to buy the Russian S-400 surface-to-air missile system will be greeted with great dismay by U.S. policy planners who can no longer assume Saudi will be a welcoming air hub for U.S. or coalition air forces in future regional conflicts. The decision will have a major negative impact on the Royal Saudi Air Forces themselves, so this should be viewed as a major political signal that the House of Saud is still feeling betrayed by the Obama administration’s nuclear rapprochement with Iran. With this Moscow visit and Russian arms agreement, the Saudis are reminding the U.S. that their support for our 1973 petrodollar should not be taken for granted. Click here for more details on this significant visit. The Defense One news site recently published both sides of the question regarding the utility or folly of low-yield nuclear weapons. The article author, Michael Krepon, made the case that tactical nuclear weapons were both unwise and strategically unsound.
The counterargument was offered by Albert Mauroni, the director of the U.S. Air Force Center for Unconventional Weapons Studies. Mauroni rejected as “strategically illiterate” the premise that any use of nuclear weapons must lead to uncontrollable escalation. Both arguments make for interesting reading, but in the final analysis, this article describing Russia's 2,000 tactical nuclear weapons reminds us that potential adversaries of the U.S. get a vote as well. The United States and North Korea continue to ratchet up their war of words following the North Korean foreign minister’s recent suggestion that the country might test a hydrogen bomb in the Pacific Ocean.
As you follow the news, it is instructive to remember that the United States appreciates the risk of this more than most as we are the country that presided over the worst thermonuclear disaster in the world. In 1954, the United States detonated a thermonuclear device in the Castle Bravo H-bomb test that unexpectedly released 2½ times more explosive force and radiation than our scientists anticipated. The result of this miscalculation was radiation fallout that directly affected inhabited atolls in the Pacific Ocean. Today, as the North Koreans threaten their own H-bomb test, it is instructive, even if discomfiting, to consider the effects of a nuclear blast on an American city. Click here for an online simulation that allows you to select the target, height of burst and the yield of a nuclear weapon and model the effects of the nuclear blast zones. |
AuthorKevin Massengill is an entrepreneur, investor, and award winning Fortune 500 senior executive with a track record of massive business growth. Archives
September 2020
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