164 posts
Two weeks ago, I had the pleasure of serving my second term as the Director-General of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO). I played my role in a simulation set up by the CTBTO’s Capacity Development Initiative (CDI).…
In the mid-1980s, many smart people predicted the death of arms control. Thomas Schelling was one of them. Others included Richard Haass, Albert Carnesale, Les Gelb, and Zbigniew Brzezinski. US-Soviet relations were in terrible shape. The White House and the…
Greetings from Hiroshima, Japan — or, as I like to say, within range of a Nodong. As you can see, North Korea appears to have paraded a Hwaseong-13 (KN-08) without the camouflage we saw last time. The Scuds got a…
The Stimson Center will release an edited volume in September comparing and contrasting deterrence against nuclear and space warfare. Here’s a preview. Nuclear deterrence and space deterrence have common elements as well as distinct differences. No difference is more striking…
This edition of FYRP is an experiment. Instead of a roundup on different subjects, it focuses on just one: Iran’s President-Elect Hassan Rohani and what his presidency might mean for the nuclear issue. A regular FYRP will be published shortly.…
Steph Hagard wrote a great little piece on the Chong Chon Gang interdiction. I have only a few additional comments. 1. I find the story that Cuba was sending the equipment to North Korea for refurbishment plausible. In fact, it…
Sean O’Connor has a really great article on Saudi Arabia’s missile force in Jane’s Intelligence Review (“Saudi ballistic missile site revealed“) that nicely updates his 2009 blog post on the same subject. O’Connor’s article offers a nice excuse to tackle…
The Nixon administration needed to make many adjustments in order to prepare for strategic arms limitation talks with the Kremlin. One change was in the terminology used to describe how US nuclear forces were supposed to stack up against the…
Hans Blix said a lot of things while Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency for 16 years, and one of them was this: “We cannot inspect every nook and cranny in a large country.” Before running the IAEA,…
The CTBTO is going to live-stream a policy course entitled Proven Treaty, Political Challenge: The CTBT and Multistakeholder Security, with a pretty high quality list of speakers. And, if you are in Vienna, the course is free of charge. The CTBT…
