Command & Control in South Asia
The twain between my ACW posts and my day job at the Stimson Center have not met — until now. The following analysis, a trimmed-down version of which has been posted on Stimson’s website, seems way too wonkish to be…
December 2009
29 posts
Estimating SWU with Expert Opinion
So what is the separative power of the IR-1 centrifuge, really? We’ve touched on this question before, sometimes in connection with Natanz breakout scenarios. Lately, it’s come up in connection with the Qom facility, a.k.a. Fordow (see: Iran: Compliance in…
Greetings from Monterey, CA
Greetings from Monterey, California and the 20th Anniversary Conference of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies. (After convalescing in the hot tub last night, I made it half way through John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row and a demi bouteille of…
More on Britain's Independent Deterrent
Last winter, after a visit to the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston — the Los Alamos or Livermore of the United Kingdom — I came away with a new understanding of how intertwined the US and UK nuclear weapons programs…
Naysayers and Defenders of Arms Control
Our son has introduced me to Drive By Truckers – a great band, but I’d be disinclined to rent them hotel rooms. My new favorite lyric (the song is Marry Me, in Decoration Day) is “Just cause I don’t run…
Revisiting Votkinsk
Nicholas Kralev has an interesting story on the impending closure of the Votkinsk Portal Monitoring Facility. The key grafs confirm that rumor that the Bush Administration made the concession to Russian on ending monitoring at Votkinsk in November 2008: Congressional…
Cirincione on Colbert
Dear god. The best part is the sanction, bomb, marry game.
He3 & DHS, Pt2: A Modest Proposal
We usually think of the enrichment power of a centrifuge as fixed by its physical parameters. For a given gas, that of course is true. For enriching uranium hexafluoride, centrifuges with larger rotational speeds (the enrichment power of a centrifuge…
Iran: Compliance in Defiance?
Warning: Even more speculative than usual. The Iranian government has spoken: in response to the the rebuke contained in Friday’s IAEA Board of Governors resolution, Iran has defiantly announced that it will build another ten enrichment facilities: “We had no…