377 posts
One of the many benefits of foreign travel is discovering what hotel nightstands offer as their equivalent to the Gideon Bible. In 1996, while spending the night at a hotel near Narita airport awaiting a morning flight to Beijing, I…
Jon Herskovitz of Reuers penned an odd little news analysis the other day suggesting that North Korea might start from scratch on its bomb program, shifting from the well-developed infrastructure for producing plutonium at Yongbyon to an Iran-like centrifuge program.…
Should the Nuclear Posture Review use the the Final Report of the Strategic Posture Commission, led by Bill Perry and James Schlesinger, as a starting point? That question was recently raised at the Huffington Post by Joe Cirincione (right), who…
The launch of South Korea’s “indigenous” space launch vehicle (KSLV-1) has once again been postponed, this time to around August 19th; presumably due to weather issues. I haven’t been able learn the intended orbit (other than its going to be…
Tehran University, one of the Iranian universities that has significant research in material sciences including advanced composite materials. My previous two posts ( part 3 and part 4 of this series on a proliferation case study examining Iran’s possible indigenous…
I failed to mention that Steven Aftergood caught ODNI passing off flimsy Russian news accounts as intelligence regarding Russian counterspace capabilities: Some of the DNI’s statements are surprisingly flimsy. For example, he declares (question 17) that “In 2003, the Russian…
Students of nuclear deterrence could learn something from the financial crisis. (So I’ve argued before.) One reason to think so appears in a review of Justin Fox’s new book, The Myth of the Rational Market. In Paul Krugman’s telling, Fox…
Mark Hibbs finds further evidence that the BOB is not a reactor, but a giant industrial facility: Beginning two weeks ago, some private researchers have posted photographs on the Internet that they speculated might show a secret reactor being constructed…
Yesterday, I attended a meeting on the Nuclear Posture Review at the Pentagon. The ground-rules weren’t super clear, so I won’t say anything about the meeting itself. The Pentagon did, however, use the occasion to release two fact sheets: Nuclear…
Yesterday, I started to present a framework to think about how proliferators get the know-how and industrial infrastructure necessary to make weapons of mass destruction. This framework has proved very helpful to me in understanding various WMD programs. It becomes…
