Arms Control Wonk

Article

Berlin and Moscow

I am a frequent flier and have a plastic, gold “Million Miler” card from United to prove it. None of my business flights have had more meaning than one I took in 1989 to watch people hammer away at the…

Article

DPRK GDAE Stationery

When the Washington Post published a letter, purportedly from Jon Byong Ho to AQ Khan, we had a lively debate here about whether or not it was real. Some of the questions related to font, kerning, stationery and even how…

Article

Saudi Storm Shadow Sale Confirmed

Thanks to Wikileaks (not work safe!), we now know that the UK did, in fact, sell the Storm Shadow cruise missile — an MTCR category I system if I’ve ever seen one — to Saudi Arabia. LtG Abdulrahman Al-Faisal, Commander…

Article

Hedley Bull

Hedley Bull is probably the least well-known founding father of the theory of modern arms control. He’s not very well known because he toiled under three considerable disadvantages. First, he was an Australian based in the United Kingdom, when the…

Article

The NPT, the NSG, and the AAAS

Steve Miller is a friend, a colleague, and an authority on the Sangiovese grape in central Tuscany and on the chunky red wines of the Piemonte. He also happens to be a tenured professor at Harvard who has just published this essay for the American Academy of…

Article

Hostile Intent

I am back from London –where I participated in a Track 2 conversation with real live North Korean officials, with Kim Il Sung pins and everything.  It was very interesting!

Article

The Big Shift

Since the Cold War ended, no region has experienced more shocks or a more significant reorientation in US foreign policy than South Asia. The big shift was enabled by the demise of the Soviet Union and New Delhi’s turn away…

Article

Rockets and the Leap Day Deal

I am beginning to understand how the US-DPRK “Leap Day Deal” came apart . You have to hand it to the North Koreans.  They screwed the Obama Administration. But the Obama Administration didn’t do itself any favors, either.

Article

A Nuclear Coup

  If you liked reading Frederick Forsyth’s Day of the Jackal, wait until you see the new monograph by Bruno Tertrais, A “Nuclear Coup”? France, the Algerian War and the April 1961 Nuclear Test.

Article

The Gift of Giving (II)

Back in my youth, before thumbs were essential for home entertainment, some of us played a board game called Chutes and Ladders, where you could zoom way up and down the board, depending on where your piece landed after rolling…