Jeffrey Lewis

Why am I so unimpressed by these strikes? Israel and the US have failed to target significant elements of Iran's nuclear materials and production infrastructure. RISING LION and MIDNIGHT HAMMER are tactically brilliant, but may turn out to be strategic failures. 🧵 1/17

Think of treaties as like vaccines -- more effective than quack cures but deeply unpopular among the stupidest people on earth.

Starting to think the play here is to destabilize the regime more than cripple the nuclear program. It’s quite a bet by the Israelis.

Our friends at Planet Labs PBC got a shot of the launch barge hours before South Korea's "hypersonic" missile test. 👏All long-range missiles are hypersonic.👏

The Second Economic Commission watching its football team (Ponghwa) get trounced 4-1 by the Missile Administration (Hwasong). I imagine they made the same faces when Kim called Yang Sung Ho "a goat yoked to an ox cart."

Fact check: true!

This looks like a two-stage booster to me.

DPRK Missile Administration (left) vs. Thrusty (right). Assumes a booster that burns out at about 2.2 km/s.

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It’s a Hwasong-11 with a glider. BORING.

I did not realize the DF-15A had thrust termination ports!

It’s nice because I can ask Claude to generate complicated CLI strings, which I would routinely mistype.

+1. A lot of the construction of risk has to do with underlying priors about existential and catastrophic risk more so than the particularities of a given technology. That doesn’t mean the view is invalid; but it does imply one should interrogate those assumptions.