SECRECY NEWS
from the FAS Project on Government Secrecy
Volume 2019, Issue No. 36
September 13, 2019

Secrecy News Blog: https://fas.org/blogs/secrecy/

ELECTION "EMERGENCY" ORDER AGAIN YIELDS NO CULPRITS

A "national emergency" declared by President Trump last year to deal with the threat of foreign interference in U.S. elections has still not resulted in the identification or punishment of any perpetrators of such interference, according to the second periodic report to Congress on the emergency.

"No entities or individuals have been designated pursuant to E.O. 13848," the executive order which declared the election interference emergency. "As a result, OFAC [Office of Foreign Assets Control] took no licensing actions involving E.O. 13848," the Secretary of the Treasury told Congress in a report last month, echoing the identical outcome reported in March 2019.

This week the President renewed the underlying declaration of emergency for another year.

"The ability of persons located, in whole or in substantial part, outside the United States to interfere in or undermine public confidence in United States elections, including through the unauthorized accessing of election and campaign infrastructure or the covert distribution of propaganda and disinformation, continues to pose an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States," according to a September 10 notice to Congress.

"For this reason, the national emergency declared on September 12, 2018, must continue in effect beyond September 12, 2019."

Separately, the President issued an executive order that terminated a 1995 national emergency concerning Middle East terrorism and directed additional steps to respond to another terrorism-related national emergency.

Meanwhile, the President also renewed the national emergency that was declared after 9/11. "Because the terrorist threat continues, the national emergency declared on September 14, 2001, and the powers and authorities adopted to deal with that emergency must continue in effect beyond September 14, 2019."

GARWIN ON SERENDIPITY AND SOLAR SAILING

In July, the Planetary Society's Lightsail 2 spacecraft demonstrated the viability of "solar sailing," becoming "the first spacecraft in Earth orbit propelled solely by sunlight."

But the practicality of solar sailing was first described six decades earlier by physicist Richard L. Garwin.

"It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of solar radiation pressure for the propulsion of satellites or space ships within the solar system," he wrote in the Journal of the American Rocket Society in March 1958, when he was 30 years old. "Although the acceleration is numerically small, the velocity changes in reasonable times by significant amounts."

This week, Garwin reflected on this and other episodes in his lifetime of problem solving and technical innovation. He spoke to post-doctoral researchers from the Harvard Physics Department. See Serendipities from Long Ago by Richard L. Garwin, keynote address, September 11, 2019.

How did he come up with solar sailing?

"As physicists do, I had been thinking about how things worked or could work and learned about radiation pressure, as did everybody in high school," he said.

Not everyone grasped the concept immediately, Garwin noted.

"I recall that when the Chief Scientist of the U.S. Air Force was asked about this proposal at a press conference, he explained that even if it would work, it could only be used for going outward beyond Earth orbit around the Sun and not for going inward, because radiation pressure was radially outward from the Sun."

"What he missed, of course, was that the fact that the sail was in Earth orbit or, for that matter solar orbit, meant that a reflective sail could be angled so as to provide a force perpendicular to the sail, that would have a component either along the velocity vector or in the opposite direction, so that the orbital velocity component could be increased or reduced; thus, the SS could either gain or lose energy and so spiral in or out from the Sun, or in Earth orbit."

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Secrecy News is written by Steven Aftergood and published by the Federation of American Scientists.

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