Reuters reports that Chinese General Zhu “I think we will have to respond with nuclear weapons” Chenghu received an “administrative demerit” recently from the National Defense University, barring him from promotion for one year. An administrative demerit is the second…
One of the persistent problems with the intelligence community (and its critics) is a form of selection bias—some of the folks who take an interest in intelligence matters do so because they’ve seen one to many James Bond movies. Even…
China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has launched a procurement website to promote “integrity, fairness and openness” in military procurement. China Daily quotes a PAP officer saying the website will reduce corruption: Ma Qiang, from the Gansu Division of the Chinese…
A few weeks ago, I noticed a slight inconsistency in a couple of otherwise outstanding articles by Mark Hibbs regarding Iran’s Uranium Conversion Facility (UCF) The question concerned the method of extracting impurities from uranium—impurities that might crash Iran’s centrifuge…
Apparently, China’s Second Artillery uses Powerpoint, too. Paul Eckert of Reuters has a decent article on Secretary Rumsfeld’s visit to the Second Artillery HQ in Qinghe. Big events were a PP briefing on the “organization and mission” of the Deuce…
Ann Scott Tyson of the Washington Post reports that Secretary Rumsfeld will “for the first time to visit the headquarters of China’s most secretive military command, the Second Artillery Corps … at Qinghe outside Beijing… (right).” The news reports are…
A few months ago, David Albright and Corey Hinderstein wrote a very interesting article, “Unraveling the A. Q. Khan and Future Proliferation Networks,” in The Washington Quarterly that contained some previously upublished information about that Chinese nuclear weapons design that…
Read “The Next Killer Flu” by National Geographic’s Tim Appenzeller with photographs by Lynn Johnson. Some analysts claiming to be “tough” on security are just “stupid” on security. One class of wonks define “security” narrowly, restricting threats to the deliberate…
Two months ago, I wrote a blog post entitled Zhang Liying: China’s Missile Gal. At issue were a pair of quotations in an unclassified publication from the National Air and Space Intelligence Center (NASIC) that suggested China was building anti-satellite…
A couple of days ago, I blogged about China’s export controls, specifically relating to missiles. One issue was the difficulty of enforcing controls on commercial items such as aluminum powder used to paint heating equipment, powder that can also be…
