Tag: darpa

DARPA’s planned nuclear rocket would use enough fuel to build a bomb

High-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU) has been touted as the go-to fuel for powering next-gen nuclear reactors, which include the sodium-cooled TerraPower or the space-borne system powering Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations (DRACO). That’s because it was supposed to offer higher efficiency while keeping uranium enrichment “well below the threshold needed for weapons-grade material,” according to the US Department of Energy.

This justified huge government investments in HALEU production in the US and UK, as well as relaxed security requirements for facilities using it as fuel. But now, a team of scientists has published an article in Science that argues that you can make a nuclear bomb using HALEU.

“I looked it up and DRACO space reactor will use around 300 kg of HALEU. This is marginal, but I would say you could make one a weapon with that much,” says Edwin Lyman, the director of Nuclear Power Safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists and co-author of the paper.

Forgotten threats

“When uranium is mined out of the ground, it’s mostly a mixture of two isotopes: uranium-238 and uranium-235. Uranium 235 concentrations are below one percent,” says Lyman. This is sent through an enrichment process, usually in gas centrifuges, where it is turned into gaseous form and centrifuged till the two isotopes are separated from each other due to their slight difference in their atomic weights. This can produce uranium with various levels of enrichment. Material that’s under 10 percent uranium-235 is called low-enriched uranium (LEU) and is used in power reactors working today. Moving the enrichment level up to between 10 and 20 percent, we get HALEU; above 20 percent, we start talking about highly enriched uranium, which can reach over 90 percent enrichment for uses like nuclear weapons.

“Historically, 20 percent has been considered a threshold between highly enriched uranium and low enriched uranium and, over time, that’s been associated with the limit of what is usable in nuclear weapons and what isn’t. But the truth is that threshold is not really a limit of weapons usability,” says Lyman. And we knew that since long time ago.

A study assessing the weaponization potential of uranium with different enrichment levels was done by the Los Alamos National Laboratory back in 1954. The findings were clear: Uranium enriched up to 10 percent was no good for weapons, regardless of how much of it you had. HALEU, though, was found to be of “weapons significance,” provided a sufficient amount was available. “My sense is that once they established 20 percent is somewhat acceptable, and given the material is weapons-usable only when you have enough of it, they just thought we’d need to limit the quantities and we’d be okay. That sort of got baked into the international security framework for uranium because there was not that much HALEU,” says Lyman. The Los Alamos study recommended releasing 100 kg of uranium enriched to up to 20 percent for research purposes in other countries, as they didn’t think 100 kg could lead to any nuclear threats.

The question that wasn’t answered at the time was how much was too much.

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Open Source Tools for Fighting Disinformation

Deepfakes and disinformation have the ability to move financial markets, influence public opinion, and scam businesses and individuals out of millions of dollars. The Semantic Forensics program (SemaFor) is a DARPA-funded initiative to create comprehensive forensic technologies to help mitigate online threats perpetuated via synthetic and manipulated media. Over the last eight years, Kitware has helped DARPA create a powerful set of tools to analyze whether media has been artificially generated or manipulated. Kitware and DARPA are now bringing those tools out of the lab to defend digital authenticity in the real world.

Kitware has a history of building various image and video forensics algorithms to defend against disinformation by detecting various types of manipulations, beginning with DARPA’s Media Forensics (MediFor) program. Building on this foundation, our team expanded its focus to include multimodal analysis of text, audio, and video under the SemaFor program. For additional information about Kitware’s contributions to SemaFor, check out the “Voices from DARPA” podcast episode, “Demystifying Deepfakes,” where Arslan Basharat, assistant director of computer vision at Kitware, is a guest speaker.

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FBI File On Jeff Bezos’ Grandfather, A DARPA Co-Founder, Has Been Destroyed

ZeroHedge reported that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ grandfather, Lawrence Preston Gise, helped form the Pentagon’s supersecret Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA—renamed DARPA) in 1958. Years later, DARPA developed the internet and spurred breakthroughs in high-speed networking, voice recognition, and internet search. When Gise’s FBI file was requested through the Freedom of Information Act, the FBI responded that if there was one, it has been destroyed. News website Leading Report’s Patrick Webb wrote that “There has long been speculation that DARPA has been involved in the creation of many popular big tech companies, using “frontmen” for the allusion of a startup led by outsiders.” Questions swirl about DARPA’s involvement in creating Amazon that hosts ‘secret’ cloud services for the CIA and NSA, and other intel agencies. Some critics speculated that if not for the government contracts, Amazon would be a struggling company.

What’s not widely known is that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ grandfather, Lawrence Preston Gise, helped form the Pentagon’s supersecret Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA—renamed DARPA) in 1958. Years later, DARPA developed the internet and spurred breakthroughs in high-speed networking, voice recognition, and internet search. 

John Greenewald Jr., who operates The Black Vault, a website dedicated to revealing declassified government documents through obtaining Freedom of Information Act requests, posted on X that he went after Gise’s “FBI file, but found out if there was one, it has been destroyed.” 

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DARPA’s Defiant Fully Uncrewed Demonstrator Ship Will Hit The Seas Later This Year

Plans to test a new uncrewed surface vessel are making waves, with the company heading the project targeting the end of this year to put its demonstrator in the water. Serco Inc.’s Defiant testbed has been designed from the ground up with the knowledge that there will never be a human onboard while it’s at sea. Conceived as being capable of operating autonomously for months to years with minimal maintenance, the vessel is already being eyed by the Navy as a path to fielding a fleet of missile-laden drone boats in the future.

Defiant is being procured under the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) No Manning Required Ship (NOMARS) program, which aims to field a new medium uncrewed surface vessel (MUSV) prototype. The NOMARS program was launched in 2020, and Serco’s involvement in it stretches back to that time.

In 2022, the company was awarded a $68.5 million total-value contract to build, test, and demonstrate its solution as the prime contractor. This is all prior to the start of more rigorous at-sea testing, which a representative for Serco confirmed to The War Zone on the floor of the Navy League’s Sea Air Space symposium this week is scheduled to start in January 2025.

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Manta Ray High-Endurance Underwater Drone Unveiled

Northrop Grumman has completed the construction of its first full-scale Manta Ray uncrewed underwater vehicle, or UUV, prototype. The company is developing the drone under the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Manta Ray program, which seeks to demonstrate critical technologies for a new class of very long-endurance payload-capable UUVs. 

The news was announced by Northrop earlier today, along with the release of the first image of its full-size testbed, seen in the feature image of this article. Now that its assembly has been finalized, the next step will be to actually test it, which Northrop has previously said will take place at some stage this year.

While details on the overall dimensions of the prototype have not been made public, Northrop describes it as an “extra-large glider” that draws inspiration from the “graceful glide” of the manta ray. In mimicking the shape and movement of the fish after which it’s named, Northrop’s drone features a lifting body that has sea glider-like properties, but is not a glider in the true sense of the term (i.e., it does not strictly employ variable-buoyancy propulsion alone instead of thrusters or propellers to move it forward).

In the video below, released by Northrop in 2022, we see computer-generated footage of Manta Ray being propelled via four small propellers. Imagery of the full-size testbed released by Northrop today also shows the presence of rear propellers, of which there appear to be two, rather than four.

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Why was mRNA the Government Vaccine of Choice for COVID-19?

John Solomon on Real America’s Voice Just the News asked me why was mRNA chosen over traditional vaccines for the COVID-19 pandemic? My answer goes back many years to the US Department of Defense Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (DARPA) ADEPT PROTECT P3 program which stated in 2012 the US will use mRNA vaccines to end pandemics in 60 days.

Former president Trump and the White House Task Force should have done their homework with a phone calls to DARPA and a few clicks on the internet and told America that mRNA was the plan for many years. It was not developed during the few months of Operation Warp Speed.

mRNA has a scientific “seduction” that lathers up molecular biologists unlike any other product I have ever witnessed with 9,613 patents licensed to giants in biotech and the US government. The National Institutes of Health Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) and DARPA have had a torrid love affair with mRNA for decades. Note how both agencies end with the designation “Authority.” The speed from sequencing a novel virus to production of a mRNA vaccine is breathtaking. However, seduction leads to blunder and that is exactly what happened with the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna mRNA vaccine programs.

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DARPA picks Northrop Grumman to develop ‘lunar raiload’ concept

Railroads could open the moon to serious and sustained economic development, as they did in the American West in the late 19th century.

That’s apparently the hope of the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which is supporting the development of a “lunar railroad” concept proposed by aerospace giant Northrop Grumman.

“The envisioned lunar railroad network could transport humans, supplies and resources for commercial ventures across the lunar surface, contributing to a space economy for the United States and international partners,” Northrop Grumman representatives wrote in a press statement on Tuesday (March 19).

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SECRET PENTAGON PROGRAM ECHOES PEDOPHILE RING IN “TRUE DETECTIVE” SERIES

THE PENTAGON IS pursuing a high-tech program that will “minimize cognitive burden” on soldiers, according to budget documents released last week. The $40 million-plus classified program, codenamed “CARCOSA,” shares the same name as “the temple” in the first season of the HBO TV series “True Detective,” a place where an elite pedophile ring performs ritual abuse on children.

The program is overseen by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, the Pentagon’s premier organization funding the development of futuristic weapons and military capabilities. 

There is of course no evidence that the military’s CARCOSA is involved in anything like that; but it’s unclear why, at a time when the White House has prioritized fighting “dangerous conspiracy theories,” DARPA is providing the conspiracy crowd with such fodder. The Intercept reached out to DARPA to inquire whether the elite research agency was aware of the strange coincidence or whether there’s a “True Detective” fan at the agency. DARPA did not respond at the time of publication.

The Pentagon’s CARCOSA is its own temple of information, an AI-driven aggregator that is intended to acquire, sort, and display the blizzard of information that reflects what is going on on a fast-moving future battlefield. “The Carcosa program is developing and demonstrating cyber technologies for use by warfighters during tactical operations,” DARPA’s new fiscal year 2025 budget request says. “Carcosa cyber technology aims to provide warfighters in the field with enhanced situational awareness of their immediate battlespace.

CARCOSA, DARPA says, will help to “minimize cognitive burden on tactical cyber operators.” In other words, headaches caused by the same information overload we all have to deal with everyday. Individual cyber warriors on high-intensity battlefields such as Ukraine and Israel are inundated with data, from their own communications and IT systems, from a virtual Niagara of intelligence inputs, and from electronic attacks via computers, machines, and drones. On top of it all, the modern battlefield is a venue for “information operations,” which seek to manipulate what the enemy sees and believes.

CARCOSA will support an Army mission area called Cyberspace and Electromagnetic Activities, or CEMA, which provides battlefield commanders “with technical and tactical advice on all aspects of offensive and defensive cyberspace and electronic warfare operations.” The Army says CEMA operators are so inundated with information that they need augmented intelligence technology to help sort the signal from the noise.

CARCOSA stands for Cyber-Augmented Reality and Cyber-Operations Suite for Augmented Intelligence. “Augmented reality” refers to immersive technology that produces computer-generated images overlaying a user’s view of the real world, like Apple’s Vision Pro headset. The program supports development of various technologies, at least according to vague budget documents, all of which seek to defeat a new reality of combat: Individual soldiers and commanders can’t process all of the information that they are bombarded with. 

The full CARCOSA name, which has not been previously reported, appears in a November $26 million DARPA contract to Two Six Labs, a part of Two Six Technologies and owned by the Carlyle Group. Two Six Labs says it supplies “situational awareness interfaces for cyber operators to distributed sensor networks, from machine learning models that learn to reverse engineer malware to embedded devices that enable and protect our nation’s warfighters.” 

“We want to do everything we can to help the US government and the intelligence community,” says Two Six Technologies CEO Joe Logue. “Starting from over here for information operations and influence up through cyber, command control and operations.” In its three years of operations, the Arlington, Virginia, based company has doubled its national security contracts to some $650 million.

“DARPA’s Cyber-Augmented Operations, also known as CAOs, are a vast spectrum of military programs many of which seek to enhance, if not replace, humans with machines,” says Annie Jacobsen, author of “The Pentagon’s Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America’s Top-Secret Military Research Agency.”

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PENTAGON’S BLUE PROGRAM AIMS TO FUEL UNDERWATER REMOTE SENSORS USING MICROSCOPIC MARINE ORGANISMS

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has launched an ambitious effort to harness the power of microscopic marine organisms to power remotely deployed naval sensor platforms. 

The initiative, known as the “BioLogical Undersea Energy” or “BLUE” program, seeks to revolutionize the capabilities of ocean-deployed sensor technologies by developing self-refueling power supplies that run on dissolved organic matter abundantly found throughout the world’s oceans. 

“The BLUE program seeks to develop technologies to continuously provide electrical power that will expand the capabilities of remote, ocean-deployed sensor systems,” reads documents issued to prospective industry partners. “Such systems hold great potential for national security, understanding dynamics of marine environments, and monitoring marine climate change.”

According to a solicitation notice issued last week by DARPA, the BLUE program is driven by the recognition that current battery-powered sensor systems face limitations due to their finite energy capacity and frequent need for recharging or swapping of batteries.

Replacing batteries for some underwater sensors can present significant logistical hurdles and even risks to personnel and equipment. This is particularly evident in scenarios involving covert sensor systems that monitor strategic waters adjacent to a potential foreign adversary.

By exploring alternative energy sources derived from marine biomass, DARPA seeks to overcome these challenges and unlock new remote marine monitoring and surveillance possibilities.

Specifically, the BLUE program will target microscopic forms of marine biomass, including dissolved organic matter, phytoplankton, bacteria, and microscopic zooplankton, as potential electrical power sources. 

Unlike approaches utilizing macroscopic biomass, such as seaweed or kelp, BLUE will focus solely on harnessing energy from the abundant and diverse microorganisms in marine environments. 

“It is our hypothesis that the energy requirements of many ocean-deployed systems can be met by development of an onboard device that converts marine biomass into simple fuels and then converts those fuels into operational power,” Dr. Leonard Tender, BLUE program manager, said in a statement issued by DARPA. 

Using natural processes to convert organic waste into usable energy is hardly a novel idea.

Anaerobic digestion, a process where microorganisms break down biodegradable material without oxygen, is a significant source of renewable energy and biofuel production. The International Energy Agency reports that biofuels currently contribute to over 3.5% of the world’s transport energy, with projections indicating a 150% increase by 2030.

This is also not the first time the Pentagon has tried to recruit marine life to serve out U.S. national security interests. A previous DARPA effort, the “Persistent Aquatic Living Sensors” or “PALS” program, sought to use marine animal behavior as a way of monitoring strategic waters, including tracking adversarial subs. 

Nevertheless, DARPA’s aim to replicate biofuel production within a self-contained underwater system is unprecedented. While innovative, this ambitious endeavor could likely encounter some engineering hurdles, primarily due to the intricacies of operating in remote marine environments.

To meet program requirements, a power supply must sustain at least 0.1 kW average continuous power for over a year while remaining fully submerged. The device should also be compact enough to fit within the specified size and weight constraints of a form factor of less than 180 liters or 440 lbs. 

Crucially, the power supply should be expected to self-refuel on marine biomass, offering a persistent and sustainable energy solution for remote sensor systems in oceanic environments. 

As with most programs run by the Pentagon’s brain trust, DARPA does not elaborate on what times of sensor platforms a new microscopic marine power supply might fuel. However, solicitation documents repeatedly mention the need for systems to operate underwater and be capable of independently providing consistent power for “at least one year.” The microscopic marine organisms fueling the system must also be “sufficiently abundant” in locations identified through sources such as satellite imaging. 

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DARPA’S NEW REMA PROGRAM IS TURNING ORDINARY DRONES INTO AUTONOMOUS KILLING MACHINES. KIND OF.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has selected the contractors for their Rapid Experimental Missionized Autonomy (REMA) program, which will practically turn ordinary commercial and military drones into autonomous killing machines.

By joining a program that was announced less than three months ago, the newly awarded partner companies will create a universal system that can equip existing drones with the capability to act autonomously and finish their mission even when the connection to their human operator has been lost.

“REMA is focused on creating autonomous solutions to maximize effectiveness of stock commercial and small military drones on the battlefield,” said Dr. Lael Rudd, REMA program manager when announcing the new awards. “Through creating an autonomy adapter that works with all commercial drones, regardless of manufacturer, and by developing mission-specific autonomy that is constantly refreshed and easy to upload prior to a mission, we aim to give drone operators the advantage in fast-paced combat operations.”

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