From The Wall Street Journal….

The U.S. is alone among the five declared nuclear nations in not modernizing its arsenal. The U.K. and France are both doing so. Ditto China and Russia. “We’re the only ones who aren’t,” Gen. Chilton says. Congress has refused to fund the Department of Energy’s Reliable Replacement Warhead program beyond the concept stage and this year it cut funding even for that.

From later on in the article…

Gen. Chilton pulls out a prop to illustrate his point: a glass bulb about two inches high. “This is a component of a V-61” nuclear warhead, he says. It was in “one of our gravity weapons” — a weapon from the 1950s and ’60s that is still in the U.S. arsenal. He pauses to look around the Journal’s conference table. “I remember what these things were for. I bet you don’t. It’s a vacuum tube. My father used to take these out of the television set in the 1950s and ’60s down to the local supermarket to test them and replace them.”

And here comes the punch line: “This is the technology that we have . . . today.” The technology in the weapons the U.S. relies on for its nuclear deterrent dates back to before many of the people in the room were born.

I am not sure what to make of this. Sometimes old school works far better then the new fangled stuff. On the other hand, I would really hate to see the safety mechanisms degrade. The only thing worse than having a nuclear weapon go off on purpose would be for one to go off by accident.

From The Telegraph….

Islamist fighters have warned pirates holding a Saudi oil tanker they may launch an attack unless the ship and her crew are released.

Why have the Somali Islamist groups come out and demanded that the Saudi oil tanker be released? Perhapses this quote from later on in the article reveals the answer…

“Every Somali has great respect for the holy kingdom of Saudi Arabia. We have nothing against them but unfortunately what happened was just business for us and I hope the Saudis will understand,” the pirate said.

The Pirates seem to think that the Saudis are behind the Islamist threat. Wonder if they know about a connection between the two that is not common knowledge?

From the Guardian….

Yet the latest birth figures tell a story. In the state of Punjab, only 798 girls were born for every 1,000 boys. Haryana was next up the list with 819, followed by Chandigarh with 845 and Delhi, the national capital, came in fourth with 868. The Delhi-based Centre for Social Research, which recently surveyed the worst-affected parts of Delhi, estimates that 10 million girls have been lost to female foeticide in India over the past 20 years.

Most alarming for those monitoring the figures is the fact that the gap appears to be widening. Today the national average for births is 933 girls to 1,000 boys; in 1991 it was 945. ‘The low numbers in a state like Delhi tells us the enormity of the situation,’ said Anju Dubey Panbey, of the Centre for Social Research. ‘In India today, if you are blessed with a son you are almost revered, and if you are the mother of daughters you are made to feel guilty and your status in your family goes down. It is very, very disturbing.’

As India’s wealth and power grows, its sex unbalance gets even worse. The emerging Hindu middle class in India are more determined to kill their daughters than the more backward Hindu farmers in rural areas. This is one of the reasons that the sex imbalance is far worse in urban areas then it is in rural areas.

Remember this when you hear people predicting that India is going to become one of the next world powers.