When Jimmy Carter was last in Pyongyang, according to KCNA, he was reminded that “it is the behest of President Kim Il Sung to denuclearize the peninsula.” How wholeheartedly NDC Chairman Kim Jong Il shares that wish is another question.…
Last Thursday, Alireza Jafarzadeh of NCRI fame held one of his trademark press conferences to announce the discovery of a hidden Iranian enrichment facility, near Qazvin, to the assembled news media. The AEOI — the Iranian nuclear authority — has…
According to Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency, North Korean leader Kim Jong Il used his visit to China to express his desire to return to the Six-Party Talks. But skepticism abounds. In Wednesday’s Washington Post, Chico Harlan reported that nameless…
Some of the most informative and provocative reporting on nuclear proliferation and policy to be found these days emerges from the keyboard of the Wall Street Journal’s Jay Solomon. More’s the pity, then, when he seems to be cutting corners.…
It was easy to overlook amid the discussion of the Bushehr reactor starting up, but Iran’s military, always busy, announced a new ballistic missile test last week. According to Defense Minister Ahmad Vahidi, the new Qiam-1 liquid-fueled ballistic missile marks…
It’s been a busy week or so on the Iran front. Just getting caught up may take a little while. Let’s start with the diplomacy. Technology will be tackled in a follow-up post. Starting in late June, there were some…
After reading Jeffrey Goldberg’s lengthy article in The Atlantic about Israeli calculations on whether to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities, I’m left with an observation and a judgment. First, the observation. We’re being ushered into an unusual conversation here. Months before…
Over at ForeignPolicy.com, David Hoffman examines biological weapons and the Biological Weapons Convention through the lens of the State Department’s 2010 Compliance Report. (There’s a lot to say about this, but here’s the bottom line: if you want to know…
Vuong Huu Tan, director of the Vietnam Atomic Energy Institute, a government office, said Vietnamese and U.S. officials reached an initial agreement on nuclear cooperation in March and hope to finalize the pact later this year. He said Vietnam didn’t…
As regular readers are well aware, North Korea’s KCNA often features heartwarming turns of phrase like this one: The DPRK will bolster up its war deterrent under the uplifted banner of Songun as long as the U.S. military threat and…
