Author interview: Imaginary Weapons... from the Pentagon On Pub radio Now!

On the Public Radio show "Fresh Air" right now.

Her book is about all these Defense Department Weapons programs that are based on discredited Pseudo-Science, wasting LOTS of money! Links below:

<http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5478373>

Author Weinberger, Targeting 'Imaginary Weapons'

Audio for this story will be available at approx. 3:00 p.m. ET

Fresh Air from WHYY, June 12, 2006 · Sharon Weinberger's new book is Imaginary Weapons: A Journey Through the Pentagon's Scientific Underworld. She looks at some of the wild schemes and fringe science projects under way at the Department of Defense.

Her articles have appeared in The Washington Post, Slate and Aviation Week & Space Technology. She's editor-in-chief of Defense Technology International.

Here's a link to a page that lists live streaming: <http://www.publicradiofan.com/cgi-bin/program.pl?programid=17>

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1560258497/qid=1150140082/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/102-7494790-5025707?s=books&v=glance&n=283155

From Publishers Weekly
The Pentagon's fascination with fringe science is old news, writes veteran defense reporter Weinberger in this incisive study, but the Bush administration has pushed it to new levels of wackiness. After reviewing our government's pursuit of antimatter weapons, psychics and telepathy, she focuses on a "nuclear hand grenade" that may cost billions and seems certain to fail. Before the War on Terror and the avalanche of government money for advanced new weapons, few paid attention to physicists who said they could harness the energy of unstable atomic nuclei, or "isomers," through a wildly expensive process involving atomic reactors. But in recent years, a group of fringe scientists aided by defense industry insiders has convinced the Pentagon that America's post-9/11 survival depends on developing an isomer bomb. While proponents compare it to the Manhattan Project, opponents point out that independent researchers have not been able to duplicate the results attained by isomer enthusiasts, and that many assumptions behind the bomb contradict the laws of physics. Though Congress canceled isomer bomb development in 2004, the Department of Energy found $5 million to continue the research. (July 1)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

...but I guess if I ever do begin to understand the way they think, it will indicate that I truly have gone insane.

Another thing she said in the interview was, the Bushies think that the scientific peer revue process is an out of date systems of cronyism, and should be dis-credited. :crazy:

<http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5478373>

<http://www.npr.org/templates/rundowns/rundown.php?prgId=13>

:kick:

...but folks he show little interest.

http://images.amazon.com/images/P/1560258497.01._BO2,204,203,200_PIsitb-dp-500-arrow,TopRight,45,-64_AA240_SH20_SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

Book Description
How did a fluke experiment in 1998, involving a used dental X-ray machine and a dubious sample of radioactive material, become the Pentagon’s pet weapons project? It had been rejected by one of the Pentagon’s most important advisory groups, but the Pentagon found an eccentric scientist who believed that a super “isomer” bomb could be built, and deliver the punch of a two-kiloton nuke packaged in a hand grenade. Ideologues at the Pentagon claimed that the Russians were in the process of building one of their own, and that the weapon was essential to the Pentagon’s arsenal.

Imaginary Weapons tells the story of the battle that ensued, pitting the nation’s leading nuclear physicists against the Pentagon’s top brass, and the military against nuclear arms control advocates, as funds and experiments for the “isomer weapon” miraculously reappeared even after the project had been shelved numerous times, even by Congress.

This book also illuminates the dangerous trend that the Bush administration continues to follow of putting politics before science. The bomb is imaginary, and the only explosion produced by the “isomer weapon” will leave a hole in the nation’s budget and a fallout of the nation’s best and brightest scientists.
:kick: