22 posts
Earlier this week, the appearance of an Iranian-style nosecone on a North Korean missile raised eyebrows all over the wonk-o-sphere. That the two countries cooperate in missile development is not exactly new news, but the images from Kim Il Sung…
Several chroniclers of The Bomb have concluded that the term “nuclear strategy” is an oxymoron. The dilemmas of crafting a nuclear strategy and planning to execute are best dealt with on paper. But even on paper, dilemmas are hard to…
In all the hubbub over the Musudan IRBM (to say nothing of the artful illusion of hair) it was all too easy to miss that this weekend’s big parade in Pyongyang also featured the first appearance of at least one…
Holy cow. Kim Jong Il’s famous pompadour is a comb-over! Well, now we are sure it is not a wig. My guess is that the photographer from Iran’s Mehr News Agency doesn’t get another visa to North Korea. The much…
After a long wait, North Korea’s “Musudan” intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM), a weapon with a reported range of 2,500 to 3,000 km, has made its first public appearance. Described as a copy of the Soviet R-27 submarine-launched ballistic missile (a.k.a.…
So, I got a little note the other day from the Bombspotters: After we noticed our January filmed visit of Kleine Brogel airbase caused some interesting discussions, we have put some effort in a more extensive investigation. To our surprise…
Paul Carroll sends along a very thoughtful note (also published on the Ploughshares website) about the perils of waiting for North Korea’s apparent leadership process to play out. Don’t get to clever, Paul suggests, because you just might miss your…
Last week, David Albright and Paul Brannan of ISIS published a DigitalGlobe image showing new construction in the area of the demolished cooling tower of the 5 MW(e) reactor at Yongbyon. They were circumspect in their analysis, concluding only that…
Not all, Cold War secrets have been revealed. The time has come at last to reveal one more. During a particularly nasty chapter of the Cold War in the 1980s, an amazing couple from New Hampshire, Jim and Carol O’Rourke,…
Deep in the last IAEA safeguards report on Iran (GOV/2010/46, para. 7) is a mention of a curious finding at the Fuel Enrichment Plant (FEP), the larger of Iran’s two centrifuge enrichment facilities at Natanz. FEP isn’t supposed to enrich…
