Years

2010

317 posts

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Persistent Engagement and DPRK Transition

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…

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North Korea’s Carrot and Stick

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…

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Cold War Secrets

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,…

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Over-Enrichment at Natanz

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…

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How Suicide Bombers Are Like Nuclear Ones

That’s not a joke, but the answer is part of the core question explored in Mike Horowitz‘s book, The Diffusion of Military Power: Why some military innovations spread and influence international politics, while others do not. CSIS is hosting a…

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KPA Journal

As one of the continuing efforts to provide additional resources to our readers,  I thought I would provide links and article lists of the KPA Journal by Joseph S. Bermudez Jr. KPA Journal is a valuable resource on the Korean…

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Carnegie is Hiring

Think you’ve got what it takes? I haven’t heard where Deepti Choubey is headed, but the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace is seeking a new Research Scholar & Deputy Director, Nuclear Policy Program. That’s one position with two titles, for…

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The Mystery of Stuxnet

One of the strangest and most interesting stories of the last week has been the apparent cyber attack on Iranian computer systems that may have targeted the nuclear plant at Bushehr. The malware virus, Stuxnet, also struck parts of China,…

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Why China Won’t Engage

Washington is abuzz with flummery purporting to explain why the Chinese are so damned obdurate as of late.  (Ah, the inscrutable Chinese.) For a representative, if credulous, account of this palaver, see Josh Rogin’s story, Has China Realized It Overplayed…

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Space Diplomacy

Those who still seek an ambitious military space diplomacy initiative during the Obama administration would do well to dwell on New START. President Obama, already tackling half a dozen outrageously hard problems, has to work overtime to convince two-thirds of…