Blair Banned Bolton from Libya Talks
Newsweek follows up on its October 2004 report that Tony Blair personally requested that John Bolton be removed from negotiations with Libya.
April 2005
51 posts
The Fourth Customer
The Lost Angeles Times reports some old news—that a shipment of components for advanced centrifuges, bound for Libya, may have been diverted to an unknown country. Speculation continues about the identity of AQ Khan’s “fourth customer.”
THUNK! DART, Meet MUBLCOM
NASA’s DART satellite may have bumped into the MUBLCOM satellite during a proximity operation.
STP-R1
In May 2004, I blogged that the Air Force “exercised an option order for a Minotaur space launch vehicle … to launch a classified payload in 2005.” Given that the Minotaur’s other payloads include XSS-11 and NFIRE, I was pretty…
Rice on North Korea: It's All Good
Condoleeza Rice willfully misrepresents the Agreed Framework in order to argue that the United States is safer with stalled Six Party talks and an unfrozen North Korean plutonium program than the Clinton-era Agreed Framework, which produced a verifiable freeze on North Korea’s plutonium efforts.
Yongbyon Shut Down
North Korea has shut down its 5 MWe reactor at Yongbyon, probably to unload spent fuel rods that will be reprocessed to recover plutonium for North Korea’s nuclear weapons program. Senior North Korean officials recently informed Selig Harrison of the…
State Dept. Terrorism Report Begone!
The State Department will no longer publish “Patterns of Global Terrorism.” Some officials justified the decision based on methodologocal objetions, but others suggested the statistics were suppressed because they contained bad news about the war on terror. Paul Kerr asks: Which of those explanations sounds more compelling to you?
Bolton and BW Inspections
Bolton’s (in)famous speech about the Cuban offensive BW effort originally “called for international observers of Cuba’s biological facilities.” Of course, these observers don’t exist because Bolton and the Bush Administration sank the BWC verification protocol.
The Ambiguous Arsenal
My article about the Chinese nuclear force—“The Ambiguous Arsenal”—is available in the May/June 2005 issue of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. The Table of Contents accurately summarizes the larger article: Analysts tend to grossly exaggerate China’s nuclear arsenal, thanks to…
Moh-mentum: IAEA Governors To Consider 3rd Term for ElBaradei
The IAEA Board of Governors will hold a closed-door meeting on 27 April 2005 to decide whether Mohamed ElBaradei will recieve a third term as IAEA Director General. ElBaradei’s supporters are pushing for a meeting before Bob Joseph can be confirmed as John Bolton’s successor, but most observers expect the 27 April meeting will simply defer a decision on ElBaradeis future until June.