An Alternative View of the ZFS
(As in “Zombie Fuel Swap.”) Late Update | 7 pm, May 21. A2 has asked me to add some clarifying remarks. See below. At this late date, there might be reason to believe that the LEU/TRR deal was a bridge…
May 2010
32 posts
BMD Hearts Lewis and Postol
Direct hit is like bowling—if you do not hit the pocket exactly, then many pins will continue to stand” Dr. Hans Mark, as quoted by Richard Lloyd in “Physics of Direct Hit and Near Miss Warhead Technology”, p. 12. For…
The Cheonan Report
The Cheonan report is out, and it’s not pretty. The most thorough accounts of the press conference appear to be those of the Sydney Morning Herald and the New York Times. The investigators — a team from South Korea, America,…
The Tripartite Agreement
Here’s my two cent’s worth on the Iran-Brazil-Turkey trilateral agreement. The heads of state of Brazil and Turkey appear to have made the avoidance of confrontation their top-most priority, trumping the avoidance of gains in Tehran’s ability to make nuclear…
Safeguards and the NPT review conference
These days, the dignified art of arms control verification is both lauded and lambasted in the conference rooms of UN Headquarters. Having spent a week in New York, I feel fairly ready to tell a tale of mild schizophrenia in…
Confidence-Demolition Measure
From the Dept. of Two Cents. With all due respect to Geoff’s take, the latest Iranian position in the endless saga of the Zombie Fuel Swap is not, properly speaking, a confidence-building measure; it’s a confidence-demolition measure. Except for one…
CBMs Gone Wild
If confidence building measures (CBM) were people, the TRR refueling deal would be a college student partying it up in Cancun, complete with all the risky behavior usually associated with that lifestyle. Why didn’t the West simply say, “Thanks, but…
Zombie Fuel Swap, Back from Dead, Again
It seems Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan have convinced Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to send 1200 kg of low enriched uranium to Turkey in exchange for new fuel for the TRR.…
New START and Missile Alert Rates
We have a bunch of New START documents now, including the article-by-article analysis and an unclassified summary of the 1251 report. I am still a little puzzled by the proposed treaty compliant force structure, but I think — think —…
Canada Reclaims its Space
Canada is again a serious player on space security. One case in point is a thoughtful paper submitted to the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva last June (CD/1865, “Working Paper on the Merits of Certain Draft Transparency and Confidence-Building Measures…