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…
Amidst talk of budget cuts and further strategic arms reductions, the Pentagon has issued another ritualistic affirmation of the Triad in its report to Congress on Nuclear Employment Strategy. During the Cold War, the big plus of maintaining a strategic…
Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Hosseini Khamenei, is the most important player in decisions on Iran’s nuclear program. For anything that Iran’s new president-elect, Hassan Rouhani, may propose to the outside world to solve the Iranian nuclear crisis, we won’t…
Sonni Efron has an article online at the TheAtlantic.com detailing the efforts of a Syrian activist to crowd-source missile launches [link fixed] against civilians in Aleppo and other opposition-held areas: [Dishad] Othman’s SCUD early warning system began operating on Wednesday.…
Reader Chris Camp, who comments under the name Cthippo, sent me an essay last week that I wanted to share with readers. Camp asks which states would be winners (or losers) if some sorcerer used a magic wand make all…
There have been only two Democratic Presidents since FDR who have been elected to serve two full terms. On nuclear issues, Barack Obama seems to be following in the footsteps of Bill Clinton. President Clinton achieved considerable success in reducing…
