AQ Khan and India at CEIP
A fun time was had by all yesterday morning at the Carnegie Endowment in Washington, DC, where I presented my research on AQ Khan and his fourth customer. (Well, perhaps there might have been a few stony faces out there.)…
Arms Control Wonk
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North Korea’s Leadership Transition and Proliferation
The journal Asia Policy has published a “book review roundtable” with essays about Jonathan Pollack’s excellent book No Exit: North Korea, Nuclear Weapons and International Security, followed by a response essay from Pollack The Elder. I contributed one of the essays,…
Prime Ministers and Army Chiefs
Pakistani and Indian politics baffle me, even after two decades of watching. You can’t keep track of the players, even with a scorecard, because they change positions so often. In Pakistan, jockeying for power used to be a triangular affair…
Thérèse Delpech (1948-2012)
Sad news today, as Bruno Tertrais has emailed me to say that Thérèse Delpech, doyenne of the French strategic studies community, has passed away. The last time I saw Thérèse, my wife and I were standing at the TGV station in Avignon, trying…
AQ Khan and India: So What?
In a postscript of sorts to a recent debate in Australia over the supply of uranium to India, blogger and political scientist NAJ Taylor approvingly cites my recent article on the A.Q. Khan network and its fourth customer, and draws…
Space Code of Conduct Advances
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s announcement that the Obama administration will lend its support to international efforts to craft a Code of Conduct for responsible space-faring nations is welcome news. The fourth year of a presidential term is not the…
Years of Living Dangerously
Happy New Year! There have been five particularly horrific years of living dangerously in the nuclear age. The first was, most jarringly, 1945, when the Bomb made its spectacular appearance. No advance in the history of warfare was more jarring…
Lyric Contest Results
The contest to pick the best lyric about the Bomb and best adapted lyric about the Bomb generated so many superb entries that our distinguished panel of judges had great difficulty selecting winners. Truth be told, in both categories we…
Iran’s Quest for the F6 in its UF6
In the old days before the first Gulf War, most nuclear export controls were pretty cut-and-dried: Exporters checked for items on a short “trigger list” that could be used for making nuclear bomb fuel. But after they learned what Iraq had secretly been up to for about a decade before…
Broken Arrows
Consider this long post a crude proselytizing effort in this holiday season for those who doubt the existence of God, angels, guardians, guides, benevolent spirits, or deities of any kind or persuasion. One way to get religion is to have…