162 posts
Major diplomatic accomplishments for space are as rare as triple crown winners in baseball. The last year both occurred was in 1967, when the Outer Space Treaty was finalized and Carl Yastrzemski powered the Red Sox into the World Series.…
Did you know there is a Scud missile in the lobby of the Defense Intelligence Analysis Center. A colleague sent along this little video, noting that if you look closely, there it is at 0:13! (Apparently, they also use it as a rally point as…
Reading 1,000 pages of memoranda, meeting notes, and transcripts of conversations about SALT I in Volume XXXII of Foreign Relations of the United States prompts many unsettling questions, beginning with the competence of President Richard Nixon and National Security Adviser…
A fun time was had by all yesterday morning at the Carnegie Endowment in Washington, DC, where I presented my research on AQ Khan and his fourth customer. (Well, perhaps there might have been a few stony faces out there.)…
The journal Asia Policy has published a “book review roundtable” with essays about Jonathan Pollack’s excellent book No Exit: North Korea, Nuclear Weapons and International Security, followed by a response essay from Pollack The Elder. I contributed one of the essays,…
Pakistani and Indian politics baffle me, even after two decades of watching. You can’t keep track of the players, even with a scorecard, because they change positions so often. In Pakistan, jockeying for power used to be a triangular affair…
Sad news today, as Bruno Tertrais has emailed me to say that Thérèse Delpech, doyenne of the French strategic studies community, has passed away. The last time I saw Thérèse, my wife and I were standing at the TGV station in Avignon, trying…
In a postscript of sorts to a recent debate in Australia over the supply of uranium to India, blogger and political scientist NAJ Taylor approvingly cites my recent article on the A.Q. Khan network and its fourth customer, and draws…
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s announcement that the Obama administration will lend its support to international efforts to craft a Code of Conduct for responsible space-faring nations is welcome news. The fourth year of a presidential term is not the…
Happy New Year! There have been five particularly horrific years of living dangerously in the nuclear age. The first was, most jarringly, 1945, when the Bomb made its spectacular appearance. No advance in the history of warfare was more jarring…
