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The base is a main locus of the United States’ strategic nuclear forces. The 90th Missile Wing, headquartered there, controls 150 Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic nuclear missiles. They’re on full-time alert and are housed in a variety of bunkers across the base.

On Saturday morning, according to people briefed on what happened, a squadron of ICBMs suddenly dropped down into what’s known as “LF Down” status, meaning that the missileers in their bunkers could no longer communicate with the missiles themselves. LF Down status also means that various security protocols built into the missile delivery system, like intrusion alarms and warhead separation alarms, were offline. In LF Down status, the missiles are still technically launch-able, but they can only be controlled by an airborne command and control platform like the Boeing E-6 NAOC “Kneecap” aircraft, or perhaps the TACAMO fleet, which is primarily used to communicate with nuclear submarines. Had the country been placed on a higher state of nuclear alert, those platforms would be operating automatically.

According to the official, engineers believe that a launch control center computer (LCC), responsible for a package of five missiles, began to “ping” out of sequence, resulting in a surge of “noise” through the system. The LCCs interrogate each missile in sequence, so if they begin to send signals out when they’re not supposed to, receivers on the missiles themselves will notice this and send out error codes.

Since LCCs ping out of sequence on occasion, missileers tried quick fixes. But as more and more missiles began to display error settings, they decided to take off-line all five LCCs that the malfunctioning center was connected to. That left 50 missiles in the dark. The missileers then restarted one of the LCCs, which began to normally interrogate the missile transceiver. Three other LCCs were successfully restarted. The suspect LCC remains off-line.

Commanders at the Air Force Base sent warning notices to colleagues at the country’s two other nuclear missile command centers, as well as the to the National Military Command Center in Washington. At that point, they did not know what was causing the failure, and they did not know whether other missile systems were experiencing similar symptoms.

According to the official, engineers discovered that similar hardware failures had triggered a similar cascading failure 12 years ago at Minot AFB in North Dakota and Malmstrom AFB in Montana. That piece of hardware is the prime suspect.

The defense official said that there had not been a power failure, though the official acknowledged that that explanation had made its way through public affairs channels. Engineers working on the system presented a draft of their initial findings late this afternoon, the official said.

An administration official, speaking about the president’s ability to control nuclear forces, said: “At no time did the president’s ability decrease,” an administration official said. ”

Still, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Michael Mullen, was immediately notified on Saturday, and he, in turn, briefed Secretary of Defense Robert Gates.

“We’ve never had something as big as this happen,” a military officer who was briefed on the incident said. Occasionally, one or two might blink out, the officer said, and several warheads are routinely out of service for maintenance. At an extreme, “[w]e can deal with maybe 5, 6, or 7 at a time, but we’ve never lost complete command and control and functionality of 50 ICBMs.”

Last year, under pressure from politicians citing spiraling expenses, the Pentagon backed out of a $6.5 billion deal with Lockheed Martin and AgustaWestland to provide 28 new, state-of-the-art birds. President Barack Obama described the procurement process as gone amok,” with the choppers projected to reach $400 million each, almost double the original price.

Now a detailed look at campaign finance records connected to the Marine One contracts, undertaken for the first time by Wired.com and MAPLight.org, shows a flurry of corporate contributions from Lockheed rivals to lawmakers involved in the decision-making immediately before and after the deal was grounded. And with a government call for new proposals for a revised contract expected next year, pay-to-play contributions to win the coveted deal continue to flow unabated, records show.

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NanoLauncher’s suborbital services will be rendered under the brand name NanoLauncher Blue (so named for “blue skies”) and orbital insertions will fall under NanoLauncher Black, named for the “black” of space.

For the latter service, NanoLauncher has advertised sending a maximum of 44 pounds (20 kg) into a high, circular 155-mile (250-km) orbit, although pricing is still being worked out.

Per its existing technology philosophy, NanoLauncher will make use of the standard deployment system developed at Cal Poly and Stanford University known as the poly picosatellite orbital deployer, or P-POD. This spring-loaded instrument can deposit three standard-size CubeSats into space, but is modifiable for various size and shape payloads.

The inflow has been sudden, and dramatic.

“Up to the end of last year, the amount of Chinese investment in Brazil was tiny, less than 400 million dollars. Over the first half of 2010, it’s gone over 20 billion dollars — and it should hit 30 billion dollars this year,” Charles Tang, head of the Brazil-China Chamber of Commerce and Industry in Sao Paulo, told AFP.

Two-thirds of the total coming into Brazil this year will be invested in the oil sector, to which China has privileged access after extending a 10-billion-dollar credit line to Brazil’s state-owned Petrobras, and after China’s Sinopec bought the Brazilian subsidiary of Spain’s Repsol for seven billion dollars.

“China is investing everywhere in the world to ensure it gets the strategic resources it needs. And Brazil, obviously, is important,” Tang said.

In return, Brazil gets “capital for its growth and job-creation,” he explained.

“China needs the mineral resources, oil and land that Brazil has in abundance,” Tang added before predicting that the relationship between the two BRIC economies “has only just begun.”

In 2009, China became Brazil’s top trading partner, overtaking the United States. Bilateral exchanges topped 36 billion dollars last year.

Bernanke next week is likely to preside over a decision to launch another round of large-scale asset purchases after deploying $1.7 trillion to pull the economy out of the financial crisis, comments from policy makers over the past week indicate. This time, with interest rates already near zero, the Fed will be aiming to increase the rate of inflation and reduce the cost of borrowing in real terms. The goal is to unlock consumer spending and jump-start an economy that’s growing too slowly to push unemployment lower.

Estimates for the ultimate size of the asset-purchase program range from $1 trillion at Bank of America-Merrill Lynch Global Research to $2 trillion at Goldman Sachs Group Inc., with economists at both firms agreeing the Fed will likely start by announcing $500 billion after the Nov. 2-3 meeting. The danger is that once the Fed kindles price increases, inflation will be difficult to control.

“By reducing real interest rates and trying to break the psychology of ‘Why spend today when I can buy goods cheaper tomorrow,’ they are hoping to drive growth that would be more commensurate with a pickup in employment,” said Dan Greenhaus, chief economic strategist at Miller Tabak & Co. in New York. “The risk is a late 1970s type of scenario where the inflation genie gets out of the bottle.”

The top and bottom three countries on the list remain unchanged from 2009: Denmark, New Zealand and Singapore are seen as having the world’s cleanest governments, while Somalia, Afghanistan and Myanmar, are seen to have the most corrupt. Finland, Sweden, Canada, Netherlands, Australia, Switzerland and Norway rounded out the top 10. Japan ranked 17, Britain ranked 20.

The United States, which ranked 19th in 2009, fell to 22. Also falling in the rankings were the Czech Republic, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Madagascar, Niger and Russia, which took the 154th slot. China ranked 78, up from 79 last year, according to the 2010 corruption perceptions index. The index, which seeks to gauge domestic, public sector corruption, is figured with data compiled from surveys of country experts and business leaders, and relies on perceptions rather than legal findings, which can differ sharply across borders depending on enforcement.

Instead, poor healthcare may be to blame, the team at Columbia University in New York reported.

More than 20 months later, after saying at least five times that a response was imminent, Treasury officials responded with 560 pages of printed-out e-mails — none of which Pittman requested. They were so heavily redacted that most of what’s left are everyday messages such as “Did you just try to call me?” and “Monday will be a busy day!”

None of the documents answers Pittman’s request for “records sufficient to show the names of the relevant securities” or the dates and terms of the guarantees. Even so, the U.S. government considers the collection of e-mails a partial response to an official request under the federal Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA. The Justice Department in July cited an increase in such responses as evidence that “more information is being released” under the law.

President Barack Obama vowed to usher in a new era of open government. On Jan. 21, 2009, the day after his inauguration and a week before Pittman submitted his FOIA request, Obama directed agencies to “adopt a presumption in favor of disclosure, in order to renew their commitment to the principles embodied in FOIA.”

Limits of Transparency