1. Jonathan D. Pollack My father, Jonathan Pollack, died at the end of May after what’s politely called a long convalescence. He had worked over several decades as a scholar of Chinese foreign and defense policy. After completing his PhD…
The following is a guest post by Friend of Blog Daniel Salisbury. Last month, I published an article in Intelligence and National Security exploring the role of intelligence operatives in perpetrating arms trafficking and that of intelligence agencies in countering…
Some unresolved questions surround the huge new mobile missiles that North Korea showed off in last month’s parade. Most of all: what will they carry, and when will the North Koreans reveal it through flight-testing? Let’s start with what we…
By Joshua H. Pollack and Scott LaFoy P.W. Singer and Ma Xiu have an important story in PopSci with a nifty find about China’s DF-26 intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM), which carries either nuclear or conventional payloads. It goes some way…
Now with a minor update. News of the initial deployment of Russia’s first hypersonic glide vehicle (HGV), called Avangard, comes just a few months after China exhibited its first such weapon, the DF-17, in a parade. This is as a…
Not long after the August 8 explosion at Nyonoksa in northern Russia–and the initial report of a spike in radioactivity in the nearby city of Severodvinsk–something else unexpected happened. Multiple radionuclide (RN) detectors inside Russia, part of the International Monitoring…
While we’re waiting to hear whether US-DPRK talks ever get on track, it may be worth reflecting on just what Pyongyang imagined would come out of the Hanoi summit back in February. Several hours after President Trump had his say,…
As Jeffrey likes to say, the Singapore summit of June 2018 was a goat rodeo—the contained chaos that results from putting some kids with ropes into a corral with some, well, kids. It looks like this: That makes last month’s…
While we’re waiting for the Singapore Summit to produce whatever it produces, it may be useful to ponder the record. There’s now more than a quarter-century’s worth of statements by North Korea and various other parties that have addressed Pyongyang’s…
Korean Workers’ Party Vice Chairman Kim Yong Chol is in New York today to see Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, in what seems to be a pivotal moment for determining whether a June 12 date for a U.S.-North Korean summit…
