Years · 2009

March 2009

24 posts

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IAEA DG Horserace

I’ve been struggling to say something witty about the race to succeed Mohamed ElBaradei as IAEA Director-General. Mark Heinrich at Reuters sums it up pretty well: The International Atomic Energy Agency failed to agree on a new chief on Friday,…

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Defensive Transition

No, not the switch from an offense-dominated world to a defense-dominated one — you might remember that idea from the 1980s, kids — but the switch from a Republican administration to a Democratic one, and what that means for ballistic…

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DPRK: Reading Between the Blurs

The image comes from ISIS while the outline to the left is my handiwork. I’m starting to feel rather parasitic about using ISIS’s pictures for analysis so I’d like to thank them for publishing them in such a timely fashion!…

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DPRK: Keeping its Secrets

Click on the image for a larger version (The 26 March 2009 image is from ISIS) If you haven’t seen it, check out ISIS’s latest report on North Korea’s missile launch preparation which shows an image of the launch site…

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Minimum Means of Something

At the end of an article about the National Academies glossary project, Lionel Beehner in SEED Magazine mentions the trouble that beset the translation of my book into Chinese: That means translation will likely remain a sensitive and sometimes contentious…

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Cosmic Clockwork

Click on the image for a larger version Just how much warning do you need? If a strange satellite came within 10 km of your satellite every month, would you start to worry? Apparently not, not that is, if you…

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Ripping Off Ronen Bergman

The blog-o-sphere is all worked up over an op-ed (in German) by Hans Rühle claiming that Iran funded Syria’s Al Kibar reactor. Central to Rühle’s stardom is the credence lent to his claims by his former position — he is…

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Bodman Letter to Gates on RRW

I came across an interesting letter (full text) from then-Secretary of Energy Samuel Bodman to Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. The letter was Bodman’s parting shot — he cc’d then Energy Secretary-designate Steven Chu — on nuclear weapons modernization. (Chu…

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T-Baum on RRW

I’ve been working for weeks on a couple of posts, including one on FOGBANK. As a result, I’ve neglected a bunch important things including the fantastic article that Benn Tannenbaum and Francis Slakey (aka T-Baum and Slake) wrote about the…

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Iran's Equinox: FMP Comes Online

Cross-posted from TotalWonkerr.com. As visitors to the White House website know, today is the Zoroastrian new year, No Ruz (“New Day”), which is celebrated by pretty much all Iranians. It marks the vernal equinox, the transition between seasons. According to…