Heads I Win, Tails You Lose
I was reading this tendentious little op-ed by Keith Payne when I thought — “What a hypocrite!” It took me about ten minutes to find Payne making the same argument that he’s now lambasting. Well, that was easy.
May 2012
18 posts
Schmucker & Schiller on the SS-N-6
One of the discussions that Markus Schiller and I have about North Korea’s ballistic missile program centers on the SS-N-6 aka BM-25 aka Musudan ballistic missile. I was skeptical of the missile at first — although we’ve subsequently seen a…
Say “Landscape Architect” in Farsi
Fredrik Dahl of Reuters reports that the IAEA has satellite images, including one dated May 25, that show “two side buildings had been dismantled and other possible clean-up work” described as “ground-scraping activities” at Parchin. (The sourcing is “diplomats who…
US/ROK SOF in the DPRK?
Last week, BG Neil H. Tolley, Commander of Special Operations Command, Korea, participated on a panel at the 2012 SOFIC (Special Operations Forces Industry Conference) with other theater special operations commanders. He was talking about the challenges in dealing with…
Iranian HEU Traces: Don’t Panic
By now everyone has seen the latest IAEA Iran report, GOV/2012/23. Among other bits that have drawn attention is paragraph 28, concerning swipe samples taken at the subterranean enrichment facility outside of Qom in mid-February. These samples “showed the presence…
Memorial Day
My Dad was one of five brothers — first generation American citizens whose parents emigrated from Kiev. During World War II, he worked at the Watertown (Massachusetts) Arsenal making munitions. The metallic substances he ingested there most likely caused his…
On That East Coast GMD Site
As you probably know, the House Armed Services Committee wants to build a third missile defense site somewhere on the East Coast of the United States. Al Kamen is running a very funny contest to suggest possible sites (“Where to…
Detonation Chamber at Parchin
Some commentators are annoyed that I haven’t written much about Iran. In my defense, I now direct a nonproliferation program focused on East Asia. Still, they have a point. This post is a small step in that direction. I…
Pierre Noir Revisited
After I blogged about Pierre Noir — the IAEA official who died in 1978 during an inspection in Taiwan (formally, the Republic of China) — Matthew Harries noted that the papers of the Nuclear Control Institute, housed at the University…
Secret US Trip To Pyongyang?
Well, this is very interesting. This, as far as I can tell, a YouTube clip from ResetKBS! claiming that US officials apparently made a secret trip to Pyongyang on April 7, apparently in a last-ditch, ultimately unsuccessful effort to head…