Years · 2009

September 2009

28 posts

Article

Secret Iranian Missile Memos

I have been given access to a series of what appeared to be internal secret Iranian documents by sources I trust. If authentic, and I believe they are, they provide important insights into Iran’s missile development program and have important…

Article

The Intersection of Two Proposals

The Obama Administration has agreed to start negotiations with Iran on the basis of the latest Iranian proposal. A decision I certainly applaud and fervently hope that we can finesse to include the nuclear issue (an issue that was part…

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Herman Kahn

Herman Kahn has a favored place in my shoe box collection because he followed his logic train to territory where other deterrence strategists feared to tread. Kahn was plus-sized (above), utterly confident, and easily caricatured. A sense of the man’s…

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Missiles on Parade

October 1 is the Sixtieth Anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. You know what that means: Silly hats! And, of course, missiles on parade! Apparently, this year the wonkporn factor will be higher than average. Kang…

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Parsing Enrichment in North Korea

Last week’s letter of the Permanent Representative of the DPRK to the UN Security Council President — see the KCNA translation — has stirred up a lot of excitement for what it says about uranium enrichment, or, to be precise,…

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Treaty Math

A pop quiz for wonks: Question: What do the following numbers represent? 95, 93, 93, 88, 87, 80, and 74 Answer: The number of Senators voting for the SORT, START I, INF, ABM, START II, Limited Test Ban Treaty and…

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Monitoring the Test Ban

I am working on a series of longer posts related to monitoring the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, but wanted to share an amusing paragraph from the March 2009 edition of Science & Technology Review, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s…

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More Debate Re: The EastWest Institute JTA

Diagram of Iranian liquid-propellant missiles from the EWI–JTA Technical Appendix. The latest debate, however, mainly focuses on Iran’s solid-propellant missiles. If I knew a year ago what I know now, I wouldn’t have lost so much money in the stock…