France's Role in the LEU-TRR Deal
Yes, we’ve all had a big helping of TRR lately, but this extra tidbit is just too juicy to pass up. Other topics again soon, I promise. A friend of the blog who shall go nameless points out that just…
Joshua Pollack
Writing on ACW 2008–2025 · 162 posts
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TRR Tradeoffs
The immediate advantages of last week’s agreement-in-principle between Iran and the P5+1 / E3+3 are pretty clear. Iran gets about five years’ worth of fuel for the Tehran Research Reactor (TRR). And removing 1,200 kg of Iran’s LEU and returning…
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Parallel Fuel Cycles, Revisited
Reacting to last week’s Qom revelation, Andreas Persbo wrote that National technical means combined with human intelligence, however, seems to have averted the worst outcome, the establishment of a parallel fuel cycle. (See: Parallel Fuel Cycles, September 25, 2009.) So…
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Qom, In The Basement
It is difficult to understate overstate the severity of the present crisis. President Obama had it exactly right on Friday morning when he said, Iran’s decision to build yet another nuclear facility without notifying the IAEA represents a direct challenge…
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Testing European Missile Defense
Plenty has already been said about last week’s missile defense announcement, with the diplomacy and the politics taking center stage. Now let’s see if we can’t tip the balance back just slightly towards the wonky. After all, that’s where President…
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Pief Panofsky on Missile Defense
For reasons not worth going into, lately I’ve been reading an awful lot about ballistic missile warfare. Today’s cutting-edge theater missile made in Russia, China, or the United States is a precision battlefield weapon, suitable for attacking military bases or…
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Parsing Enrichment in North Korea
Last week’s letter of the Permanent Representative of the DPRK to the UN Security Council President — see the KCNA translation — has stirred up a lot of excitement for what it says about uranium enrichment, or, to be precise,…
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Nuclear Warfare
By no means do I wish to pick on Lourdes Garcia-Navarro, who was only repeating a common misconception in an NPR segment this evening when she said: On June 7, 1981, Israel launched the first confirmed military strike ever against…
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Iran Week
Yes, yes, it is shameless, but I can’t resist pointing out that NPR is running a boatload of analytical, talking-head-driven pieces on Iran this week. (At least in this instance, NPR is not the Congressionally mandated bureaucratic process, but the…
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Why Iran's Clock Keeps Resetting
I’ve never asked, but am willing to bet that the good folks at The Bulletin get a fair bit of grief over the Doomsday Clock. Seeing as we’ve been at five minutes to midnight since 2007 (the typical snide question…