Years · 2004

August 2004

29 posts

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Chinese SSBN

Damn. Just finished Lyle Goldstein and William Murray’s “Undersea Dragons: China’s Maturing Submarine Force,” (International Security, Spring 2004, pp.161-196). It contains what I would call several factual errors. This requires some additional research, but some things are awfully suspicious. For…

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CISAC SMACKDOWN!

CISAC has made audio files of its August 11 Seminar Post-Cold War U. S. Nuclear Strategy:A Search for Technical and Policy Common Ground available on their website. Representative David Hobson (R-OH) just takes the piss out of the nuclear weapons…

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Missile Defense, Russian reaction …

Bill Gertz reports Rummy’s every word with the enthusiasm of an eromenos: Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld took a jab at critics of U.S. missile defense efforts during a speech last week in Huntsville, Ala. He noted his cordial discussions…

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Intelligence Analysis and Bayesian Analysis

I am writing a piece for Arms Control Today on foreign counterspace systems. The mandate was to summarize foreign counterspace capabilities to accompany an article being written by Michael Krepon. The more I look, the more I realize that the…

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China and Russia Submit Non-papers in CD

China and Russia submitted a pair of non-papers to the Conference on Disarmament in speeches by Ambassadors Leonid A. Skotnikov (Russia) and Hu Xiaodi (China). The two speeches had a de facto division of labor, with Skotnikov talking substance and…

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Nuclear Information Project

Hans M. Kristensen, formerly of the Nautilus Institute and now a consultant to the National Resources Defense Council, has a new project and website. The Nuclear Information Project “is a private, independent, and non-profit project created with the purpose of…

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Feel the love

Matt Bunn has a nice foogin’ summary of the proposed Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty (FMCT) on the Nuclear Threat Initiative website. Apart from saying lots of sensible things–including calling on the Bush Administration to “reverse its new position and return…

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NFIRE KV Pulled?

Space News on Monday reports similar information to my August 20 post, announcing that MDA will (1) remove the kill vehicle from NFIRE, (2) use the NFIRE KV as a ground-based risk reduction asset, and (3) slip the launch date…

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NATO Nuclear Weapons

With the Bush Administration proposing a gradual withdrawal of some 70,000 US troops from Europe to “help us fight and win these wars of the 21st century,” why did NATO recently reaffim support for keeping US nuclear weapons forward deployed…

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Edwards Introduces Dr. Strangelove

Democratic vice presidential nominee Sen. John Edwards has taped an introduction for a Turner Classic Movies screening of Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 Cold War classic Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. The Chicago Tribune…