The Team with the Football
Two vignettes and an organizational chart: I. In August 1991, I was part of a group of maybe fifteen Americans who visited with Gennady Yanayev in the Kremlin. Yanayev was a big deal at the time — the Vice President…
Michael Krepon
Haggling over Peripherals
Negotiations between the United States and Pakistan over the cost of hauling freight from Karachi port to Afghanistan and the wording of a statement of regret or apology over Pakistani deaths at a border clash last November have become demeaning…
Brodie Wonkathon
Great strategic analysts make the most of the opportunity to conceptualize the dawn of a new era. Bernard Brodie hit the jackpot twice, writing at a time when revolutions in military affairs came with dizzying frequency. As noted in an…
Multilateral Negotiations
Even though the stock price of multilateral arms control is extremely low, there still aren’t many buyers. The heyday of the Conference on Disarmament was in the mid-1990s, when the Chemical Weapons Convention and the Comprehensive Test Ban treaties were…
The Well Read Wonk
Aspiring Wonks: The Absolute Weapon (1946) is required reading. It’s a slim book of essays written by an exceptional group of analysts based at the Yale Institute of International Studies. In these pages, you will find the most prescient, earliest…
Memorial Day
My Dad was one of five brothers — first generation American citizens whose parents emigrated from Kiev. During World War II, he worked at the Watertown (Massachusetts) Arsenal making munitions. The metallic substances he ingested there most likely caused his…
Peeling or Trading Onions?
J.P. Donleavy used to be a popular author. He made a big splash with The Ginger Man, but many readers lost interest when it became apparent in The Saddest Summer of Samuel S and The Onion Eaters that he kept…
Are We Winning or Losing? (Continued)
We’ve now passed the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, and widely expected acts of nuclear terrorism have yet to occur. One example: Graham Allison predicted in Nuclear Terrorism (2004) that, “In my considered judgment, on the current path, a…
Are We Winning or Losing?
Are we winning or losing the battle against proliferation? This simple question does not have a simple answer because bad headlines mask quiet progress. Since the 1960s, reports on the status of proliferation have almost always been pessimistic. It doesn’t…
The Bomber Gap
There is a long history of deceptive practices and bogus military displays designed to project greater firepower than is actually available. In my military dictionary, this is known as creative deterrence, or deterrence on the cheap. A classic case in…
