At The Crossroads With Iran
An observer, who wishes to remain nameless, sends along this dispatch on the recent drumbeat to war with Iran: For some reason, everyone and his cousin are suddenly seized on the idea that there must be an urgent need to…
Arms Control Wonk
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The Arms Crawl that Wasn’t
Ashley Tellis’ important book, India’s Emerging Nuclear Posture (2001), predicted an “arms crawl” instead of a nuclear arms race on the subcontinent. One major reason for Ashley’s benign assessment was that Indian decision makers “view their nuclear weapons primarily as…
Closing The File On Hasaka
I think we can put to bed the suspicions about the Hasaka Spinning Factory. After this blog placed online the website of the Hasaka Spinning Factory, German journalist Paul-Anton Krüger tracked down the chief engineer of the original project in…
Magical Realism
The Bomb lends itself to magical thinking on both sides of the usual divide. Died-in-the-wool realists scoff at arms control, let alone the plans of abolitionists. They tend to ascribe powers to nuclear weapons even beyond the Bomb’s destructive capacity,…
AP On Hasaka
For the past week or so, we’ve been discussing the Hasaka Spinning Factory — a textile factory in Syria that drew the interest of the IAEA (See: Hasaka Spinning Factory and Hasaka Spinning Factory Revisited). Today, Desmond Butler and George…
Missile Exhibition in Tehran
Trick or treat! The About Iran Blog, which is run anonymously, has posted images from a defense exhibition in Tehran. The images show placards with technical data for the Shahab, Ghadr, Qiam and Seijil missiles. This is definitely a treat.
Patton on Khushab
Assistant Secretary of State for Arms Control, Verification and Compliance Rose Gottemoeller, in a speech at Stanford, praised one of my students, Tamara Patton, for her outstanding work on modeling Pakistan’s Khushab Plutonium Production Complex: I recently learned about some…
Hasaka Spinning Factory Revisited
Earlier this week, I posted about a location in Syria that some folks in the IAEA believe was originally intended to house centrifuges as part of a nuclear weapons program. This is just a housekeeping post, bringing that conversation up…
Full Cost Accounting & the B53
Workers at PANTEX dismantled the last B53 nuclear gravity bomb, a nine-megaton behemoth affectionately known as the “Crowd Pleaser.” It sheer size and unfathomable explosive power — 600 Hiroshimas! — are so difficult to comprehend that one can’t help think…
Hasaka Spinning Factory
Reporters are calling around town inquiring about this site, which is located at 36°30’33.99″N, 40°46’34.75″E near the town of Al Hasaka in Syria (sometimes transliterated as Hasakah or Hasekeh). The facility is said to be of some interest to the…
