Years · 2011

January 2011

16 posts

Article

China Peeps about Plutonium

Anthony Trollope lived and wrote half a century before plutonium was discovered, and maybe that’s why during the holidays I was deeply immersed in three of his novels. Shortly before New Year’s and about 400 pages into The Eustace Diamonds,…

Article

Joint Verification Experiments

During the Reagan administration, the 1974 Threshold Test Ban Treaty was in Senate limbo, mired in arguments over Soviet cheating. The TTBT limited underground tests to yields no greater than 150 kilotons, but the U.S. intelligence community did not have…

Article

Operation Groundhog

One of the great things about the Wikileaks cables is that they contain a bunch of stuff that I should have known, but didn’t.  For example, Operation Groundhog. One of the Wikileaks cables — a February 2010 scene-setter for a…

Article

The Next START

What fan of the hapless Chicago Cubs doesn’t look at a sunny day and think of Ernie Banks? His “Let’s play two!” expressed optimism in the face of fatigue, off-field worries and the inevitability that a doubleheader meant the luckless…

Article

Read Behind

An idiosyncratic survey of  the arms control, disarmament and nonproliferation universe in no particular order. The first in a possibly regular installment. FACEBOOK | Mark Hibbs says “there is no Chinese reprocessing ‘breakthrough’ as announced by Chinese official media. This…

Article

The First Conversation

Go figure: The very first conversation between Washington and Moscow on the relationship between strategic offense and missile defense took place at Glassboro, New Jersey. Soviet Premier Alexey Kosygin was visiting the United States in June 1967, and President Lyndon…