122 countries just adopted a treaty banning nuclear weapons, in the same week that North Korea tested an ICBM. Andrea, Gaukhar, and Beatrice Fihn from the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons talk about what made the cut for the final treaty, debate some of the implications, and evaluate whether diplomats are most like a …
Is Space the Final War-Fighting Frontier?
by | 2017-07-26 | 8 Comments
Quote of the week: “ASATs possess considerably greater capacity for transforming a crisis into a war, and for enlarging wars, than they do for assisting in military missions or enhancing deterrence.” —Kurt Gottfried and Richard Ned Lebow, “Anti-Satellite Weapons: Weighing the Risks,” 1985. There are two generic kinds of failure in the arms control and …
Deterrence Stability is a Hoax. The Delicate Balance of Terror is, Too.
by | 2017-07-19 | 14 Comments
Quote of the week: “It has in fact become abundantly clear… since the dawn of the nuclear age, that the balance of terror is decidedly not delicate.” —Bernard Brodie, War & Politics Can we hold two contrary notions in our heads at the same time? Can we acknowledge that the delicate balance of terror and …
North Korea’s New Missiles
by | 2017-07-18 | No Comments
No one has better sources in the U.S. government when it comes to North Korea’s missile program than the Diplomat’s Ankit Panda. He joins Jeffrey and Scott to discuss the Hwasong-12, Hwasong-14, a very strange North Korean concert, and Ankit shares some never-before-released data on the Hwasong-12 and some KN designations. This podcast is a …
