Nuclear Nightmares & Abolition
Back in the day, Paul Warnke and I would joke that rooting for the Red Sox was excellent training for arms control. (For non-US readers of ACW, the Red Sox are a baseball team that, until the advent of new…
2009
377 posts
Parking Cold War Relics
The two seat SR-71 never got to fulfill its primary mission, thank goodness! Or is it an A-12? I am never so glad my phone has a camera as when I am in Los Angeles. The city has an amazing…
Off to Winnipeg
Things I know about Winnipeg: 1. It is the capital and largest city of Manitoba, Canada. 2. Bobby Hull played 411 games for the Winnipeg Jets, before the WHA merged with the NHL. 3. The University of Manitoba is hosting…
4 Score and 7 Interceptors
Scores. No, not Scores. Scores, as in, “four score and seven years ago …” Or, as in, the US will deploy “scores” of missile defense interceptors in Europe. Bob Gates defends the Obama Administration’s shift in missile defense architecture in…
2005 Iran NIE Details
Regular readers know that I have tried to accumulate all the information I can about the 2005 NIE on Iran’s nuclear program — it is interesting in its own right and as a predecessor to the much misunderstood 2007 NIE.…
Gates On 'Likely Conclusions' of NPR
It’s baaaaack. SECDEF Robert Gates told the Air Force Association last week that a “ likely conclusion” of the Nuclear Posture Review will be that “in one or two cases” existing warheads would be replaced with “new designs”: SEC. GATES:…
Testing European Missile Defense
Plenty has already been said about last week’s missile defense announcement, with the diplomacy and the politics taking center stage. Now let’s see if we can’t tip the balance back just slightly towards the wonky. After all, that’s where President…
Hidden Agendas and Missile Defenses
Back in 1970, I had the good fortune of taking a graduate seminar taught by Mort Halperin, who was then working on his book, Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy, with the help of a very bright research assistant, Arnie Kanter.…
A Sensible Missile Defense for NATO
The Obama Administration has replaced the ground-based missile defense architecture in Europe with a series of theater missile defenses centered on the Aegis system. I think this makes a lot of sense, as regular readers know, on both technical and…
Pief Panofsky on Missile Defense
For reasons not worth going into, lately I’ve been reading an awful lot about ballistic missile warfare. Today’s cutting-edge theater missile made in Russia, China, or the United States is a precision battlefield weapon, suitable for attacking military bases or…