Aspiring wonks: your homework assignment this week is to read Robert Jervis. In my view, his best writing is about the impact of nuclear weapons on world politics and the psychology of nuclear deterrence. As the salience of nuclear weapons…
Some of you know that I am a regular visitor in Vienna, and that I haven’t missed a General Conference since 2004. Most of you also know that I’m not a very diligent blogger anymore. Having said that, I thought…
All options are on the table. How many times have we heard this? The administrations of Presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush directed such declarations to Saddam Hussein. North Korea is no stranger to this formulation. Then there’s…
This space has periodically sung the praises of Bernard Brodie, but even All Stars occasionally go into slumps. Brodie was off his game in Escalation and the Nuclear Option (1966), in which he argued the case for tactical nuclear weapons.…
A friend and colleague who prefers to remain anonymous has asked me to post the following. For reasons you can probably guess, I haven’t had time to take a hard look at the numbers. By now everyone already knows about…
Not for the first time, the IAEA Board of Governors on Thursday afternoon passed a resolution on safeguards implementation in Iran which said a few things that its sponsors neglected to point out when they explained the results to the Vienna press corps minutes…
So, baby number 2 is due any day now. I don’t expect to be blogging much over the coming month. One of the great joys of working at the Monterey Institute is the tremendous number of talented students with amazing…
Two decades of Stimson Center Research Assistants and interns have compiled a chronology of confidence-building measures between India and Pakistan. I asked the most recent keeper of this database, Drew Stommes, to help me discover patterns in these data points.…
Is that a plastic model of Obama with his hand on the proverbial button? Turns out, it is a little red phone. The product is an “Obama 3 am Phone Call Squeezable Figure.” It reminds my of my favorite Onion…
Did you know that China occasionally exports enrichment services? I didn’t. But, sure enough, they do from time to time.
