Years

2010

317 posts

Article

Burma, North Korea, and the WSJ

Some of the most informative and provocative reporting on nuclear proliferation and policy to be found these days emerges from the keyboard of the Wall Street Journal’s Jay Solomon. More’s the pity, then, when he seems to be cutting corners.…

Article

Iran’s Qiam Missile Comments

If you are interested in the technical details regarding Iran’s Qiam ballistic missile — or really, in how to estimate the measurements of a ballistic missile from photographs — you really ought to be reading the comments to my post,…

Article

On the “Urgency” of the B61 LEP

Growing up in Albuquerque, New Mexico during the Cold War meant that I had a lot of friends whose parents worked at Sandia National Labs (SNL) doing “nuclear bomb things”, or whatever vague description they’d get out of their parents…

Article

Schmucker/Schiller on Iran’s Qiam

Our friends Robert Schmucker and Markus Schiller send along a short note on Iran’s Qiam missile, concluding that it is a test bed for a new guidance system that will eventually find its way in the Sejil.

Article

Saudi Arabian Uranium Enrichment?

A couple of weeks ago I summarized here that Saudi Arabia was moving ahead with plans to do nuclear power and that there were some potential issues. In July, after having read that some weighty nuclear industry companies were trying…

Article

The Least Abhorrent Choice

The military cemetery at Nuttuno, thirty miles south of Rome, is serene and immaculately kept. Almost as many GIs are buried there – 7,861 – as at Normandy, painful testimony of how botched the Italian campaign was. I’m named after…

Article

Iran’s New Missile

It was easy to overlook amid the discussion of the Bushehr reactor starting up, but Iran’s military, always busy, announced a new ballistic missile test last week. According to Defense Minister Ahmad Vahidi, the new Qiam-1 liquid-fueled ballistic missile marks…

Article

Toward Smaller Nuclear Forces

There’s a serious new study by a group of authors in the United States and Russia being published in the coming days that calls for deeper cuts in nuclear weapons—well beyond those envisioned in the New Start treaty pending before…

Article

The Ayatollah Shuts the Door, Again

It’s been a busy week or so on the Iran front. Just getting caught up may take a little while. Let’s start with the diplomacy. Technology will be tackled in a follow-up post. Starting in late June, there were some…

Article

China’s Space Power in 2010

So the 2010 iteration of the Department of Defense’s China Military Power report is out. The 2009 version came out on March 24, 2009, about two months after Inauguration Day, so this is probably the first one for which the…