Years

2014

142 posts

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Japan’s Pu and the Cookie Problem

Regular readers know I love public policy, especially perverse effects.  One of my favorite perverse effects is what I call “the cookie” problem after the plight of a beleaguered friend.  Let’s say you’ve come thisclose to cheating on a spouse…

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PENAID Control & the MTCR

Richard H. Speier, K. Scott McMahon and George Nacouzi have a new RAND monograph out entitled Penaid Nonproliferation: Hindering the Spread of Countermeasures Against Ballistic Missile Defenses. The report is very simple, which is not to say simplistic. Speier et al believe the MTCR should be expanded…

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US-RF Nuclear Security Cooperation

Editor’s note:  I am holding to my commitment to make three blog posts a week, no excuses.  But my post today will be a short one.  So, to make up for that, here is the Managing the Atom’s Nick Roth…

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A Wobbly Nuclear Order

Five years ago, President Barack Obama was preparing to deliver a speech in Prague calling for the elimination of nuclear weapons. Nongovernmental organizations, including the Stimson Center, helped with blueprints for getting to zero, and distinguished “formers” were lending their…

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DPRK’s New 300 mm MLRS

I’ve been mulling a post over the recent North Korean launches of Scud and now Nodong missiles, but I want to draw attention to a wrinkle that’s been neglected — North Korea’s new 300 mm artillery system.

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Security Lapse at Volkel

A few disarmament posters by Robert Wout, better known as Opland. Many of my colleagues are attending the 2014 Nuclear Security Summit in Amsterdam, Netherlands. (My friend @MilesPomper is tweeting up a storm for #NSS2014.) It is normal for the assembled heads of government…

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Trial Operational Deterrence

Yeah, that’s a weird title, huh?  Well, it’s a weird idea.  Bear with me. Over the course of my writing, teaching and corresponding about China’s nuclear forces, I kept stumbling over the same question: Why does China insist on calling…

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Project Dribble (Uniform Vela)

There is something unsettling about seeing a Confederate flag fluttering above a nuclear test site. No, this isn’t some alternate history where the South rises again, armed with nuclear weapons.  It’s a (cropped) image after the October 1964 Salmon shot…

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Pakistan/US: Ties that Chafe and Bind

Husain Haqqani has many detractors in Pakistan due to his shifting political allegiances and book publications. The thesis of Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military (2005) is about a longstanding alliance of convenience between the Army and Pakistan’s religious parties “to…

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Hagap (하갑) UGF

Apologies for the nonexistent blogging as of late — I wrote a book! (More on that later.) Writing takes an enormous amount of time, which is to say pretty much every second that doesn’t involve chasing two tiny lunatics around…