Collections
Explore ideas with these reading lists of articles, curated by topic from more than twenty years of writing.
Wonk 101
- Nuclear weapons, explained Where to start: how bombs, missiles and missile defenses actually work, and how analysts size them up from the outside. 11 posts
- Open-source intelligence: how the work is done Shadows, metadata, satellite pictures and propaganda photos: the methods and tools, the cases they cracked, and a reminder of how it goes wrong. 13 posts
- Missile war in the Middle East, 2019–2026 From the Abqaiq attack to True Promise II: Iranian, Houthi, Israeli and American missiles and interceptors, tracked from wreckage, video and imagery as it happened. 13 posts
- Counting China’s bombs Twenty years of estimating China’s nuclear forces: the “about 100 warheads” of 2004, the 3,000-warhead myth, noisy submarines and the missile silo fields found in 2021. 12 posts
Pull up a chair
- North Korea’s missiles, decoded What the names mean, where the missiles came from, and how each new one was worked out from parades, photos, video and satellite imagery. 13 posts
- The Iran nuclear deal, from first offer to last days How the deal came together and came apart: the 2003 offer, the fuel swap, the interim deal, the fine print of the JCPOA, and its collapse. 12 posts
- The Box on the Euphrates: Syria’s secret reactor A building in the Syrian desert, an Israeli airstrike, and years of argument over what it was, worked out post by post from 2007 on. 12 posts
- The A.Q. Khan network The Pakistani metallurgist who sold centrifuges and bomb designs to Iran, Libya and North Korea: his customers, his suppliers, his papers, even his house. 13 posts
- North Korea’s smugglers and sanctions-busters Front companies, flags of convenience, arms brokers and a radio maker called Glocom: how North Korea keeps trading, traced through court records, ship tracking and company filings. 13 posts
- Broken arrows and near misses Lost bombs, crashed bombers, misplaced warheads and false alarms: the accidents and close calls of the nuclear age, and what they say about luck. 13 posts
- The return of nuclear testing? Test sites, seismic signals and subcritical experiments: how tests are detected, what the test ban allows, and why the old test sites got busy again. 13 posts
- Putin’s wonder weapons Burevestnik, Poseidon, Avangard, Oreshnik and Sarmat: the exotic Russian weapons, and the satellite imagery of their tests and of the accident at Nyonoksa. 13 posts
- Nuclear shadows over Ukraine Budapest, Zaporizhzhia and Putin’s threats: the nuclear side of Russia’s war on Ukraine. 13 posts
- India and Pakistan: nuclear rivals Mostly Michael Krepon on the subcontinent: deterrence that doesn’t stabilize, crises that keep recurring, and arsenals that keep growing. 13 posts
- How arms control was invented From the bomber gap to Reykjavik: the people, bargains and blunders behind the first nuclear treaties, mostly told by Michael Krepon. 13 posts
- Myths, hoaxes and nonsense Suitcase nukes, red mercury, Hitler’s bomb and the EMP apocalypse: persistent nuclear myths, and how they fall apart. 12 posts
- Israel’s bomb: opacity and its secrets Dimona, the 1979 flash, the Yom Kippur War and the Jericho: how the world’s least-acknowledged arsenal has been studied anyway. 10 posts
- Bombing Iran’s bomb: the long argument Would strikes stop Iran’s nuclear program? Two decades of the debate, from Osirak’s lessons to the strikes of 2025. 13 posts
- War in space? ASATs, debris and the rules of the road China’s 2007 test, the USA-193 shoot-down, colliding satellites and laser sites: the case for rules in orbit, and the weapons that make it urgent. 13 posts
Deep in the stacks
- Heroes of arms control Michael Krepon’s portraits of the people who made arms control work: theorists, negotiators, officials and the occasional secretary of state. 13 posts
- North Korea’s uranium: from doubt to Kangson Did North Korea really have a secret enrichment program? Two decades of doubts, centrifuge-making lathes, uranium mills and, finally, the Kangson and Yongbyon enrichment plants. 13 posts
- How the INF Treaty died The 1987 ban on intermediate-range missiles, from Russia’s first complaints in 2007 through the new cruise missile, Iskanders in Kaliningrad and the US withdrawal, to Oreshnik in Belarus. 12 posts
- Iraq’s missing WMD, written at the time The intelligence failure behind the 2003 war, as it came out: Curveball, the Iraq Survey Group, the Niger uranium story and what the inspectors had already found. 12 posts
- Bombspotting: US nuclear weapons in Europe The B61 bombs still stored at European air bases, and the activists, leaked cables and blurred satellite images that keep revealing how they are guarded. 11 posts
- Fukushima, as it happened March 2011, day by day: the Japanese industry’s own status reports from the stricken plant, posted as they came in, with what they did and didn’t tell us. 12 posts
- The bombs that weren’t Sweden, South Africa, Taiwan, Brazil, Libya, Kazakhstan and South Korea: countries that built, bought or sought the bomb, and then stopped. 13 posts
Lend us your ears
Short listening lists from the podcast.
- Nuclear testing Who might test again: North Korea, Russia, China and the United States, and the test ban 7 episodes
- Hypersonic missiles Avangard, China’s orbital glider, North Korea’s MaRVs and the US Navy’s own: the hype and the physics 6 episodes
- Nuclear history Hiroshima, the Cuban missile crisis, Okinawa and a plan to nuke the Moon: the history behind today’s arsenals, often from newly declassified papers. 12 episodes
- On video Episodes you can watch as well as hear. 5 episodes