Time Lapse of Nuke Detonations Since 1945

Japanese artist Isao Hashimoto has created a beautiful, undeniably scary time-lapse map of the 2053 nuclear explosions which have taken place between 1945 and 1998, beginning with the Manhattan Project's "Trinity" test near Los Alamos and concluding with Pakistan's nuclear tests in May of 1998. This leaves out North Korea's two alleged nuclear tests in this past decade (the legitimacy of both of which is not 100% clear).

Each nation gets a blip and a flashing dot on the map whenever they detonate a nuclear weapon, with a running tally kept on the top and bottom bars of the screen. Hashimoto, who began the project in 2003, says that he created it with the goal of showing"the fear and folly of nuclear weapons." It starts really slow — if you want to see real action, skip ahead to 1962 or so — but the buildup becomes overwhelming.


http://www.ctbto.org/specials/1945-1998-by-isao-hashimoto/

Car Wars: Roadmaps to Libya's Ground Conflict

This article is a bit of a solicitation for much more Western intervention on the ground, but it does give some good insight into history and military tactics.

Car wars: Roadmaps to Libya's ground conflict

Almost exactly one hundred years ago on November 1, 1911, air war was invented in the Italian invasion of Libya when army pilot Lt Giulio Gavotti dropped four grenades on Ottoman positions in the oasis of 'Ain Zara just outside Tripoli.

In the century since, the air campaign has become the spectacular centrepiece of western warfare, but the failure of NATO's intervention to tip the balance against Gaddafi is a reminder that it's hard to win a war from 10,000 feet.

The horrifying siege of Misurata, whose only relief comes from the sea, not the air, and the back and forth movement on the road that links Benghazi to Sirte by way of Ajdabia, Brega and Ras Lanuf suggest that this war will be played out on the ground.

In the last weeks the alliance between NATO and the Libyan rebels has begun to fray. NATO airstrikes decimated a convoy of rebel tanks and a bus full of fighters between Brega and Ajdabiya on April 7, and NATO refused to apologise. The rebels have found that close air support without sufficient ground resources is not the magic bullet that many supporters of intervention imagined.

With only few paramilitary intelligence officers on the ground in Libya, tactical attacks on Gaddafi's mobile forces are severely limited and isolated in their scope.

Full story at link:

http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/04/2011421122738383699.html