Holiday Season Contest
It’s that time of year – time for the annual ACW contest for best lyrical stanzas relating to the Bomb. There are two categories for this competition, as before: (1) A lyric about the Bomb that has been written and…
Arms Control Wonk
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SLA versus SLC
One aspect of the current tizzy over the future course for IAEA safeguards is a certain frustration expressed by a number of states about how the IAEA’s terms of reference all fit together exactly. Above all, confusion reigns in these quarters about the extent of congruity between Integrated Safeguards and State-Level Safeguards. Are…
Iranians in North Korea?
Kyodo news — citing the inevitable single “Western diplomatic source” — has an interesting report that Iran has agreed to permantly station four missile (and perhaps nuclear) experts at a facility in North Korea, about 85 kilometers from the Chinese…
Patton on Pakistan’s U Supply
My colleague, Tamara Patton, has published her much anticipated master’s thesis on estimating the size of the Pakistani plutonium production reactors at Khushab in Science and Global Security (Combining Satellite Imagery and 3D Drawing Tools for Nonproliferation Analysis: A Case…
Russia’s Safeguards Problem
I’ve been away from this blog for a couple months working on, among other things, the subject of this post. I also knocked about a while in Rome, where I was inspired to read Helen Langdon’s magnificent biography of the painter Caravaggio. This opus was the fruit of many…
Verification, Risk, and Nuclear Testing
Concerns over verification and compliance are a refuge for skeptics of arms control. These concerns can be substantive as well as overdramatized. No treaty is risk-free, and no monitoring regime is foolproof. Will a powerful cheater be called out, even…
Iran, Immunity and Diagrams
By now, readers will have seen this strange little diagram foisted upon the reading public by AP’s George Jahn. The significant issues are whether the document is genuine, a question I will return to at the end of this post,…
IAEA Hacking
A group presenting itself as Iranian — the call themselves Parastoo, which is apparently Farsi for “swallow” — somehow acquired an old IAEA server. The machine was not wiped clean of data. Parastoo has now posted some of the data online,…
Myanmar Rare Earths Stuff
One of my favorite novels is Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana. If you are not familiar with the basic plot, a British expatriate living in Havana, desperate for a little extra cash, passes off sketches of vacuum cleaner parts…
SALT’s Rise and Fall
Opposition to the SALT process was firmly rooted in negotiations over the Interim Agreement and the ABM Treaty. Never have two arms control agreements been approved by such overwhelming margins (two votes against, in both cases) despite such deep reservations…