Arms Control Wonk

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Clinton PDDs and PRDs

I somehow missed the fact that the Clinton Library has posted online six declassified Presidential Decision Directives (PDD) and two Presidential Review Directives, most of which involve nuclear weapons, ballistic missile defense and space policy.

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Klaatu Barada Nikto

The nutjobs at it again, suggesting that aliens — extraterrestrials, not undocumented workers — are monitoring US “nuclear sites.” Lee Speigel of AOL’s Weird News Team offers a nice summary: UFOs have monitored and possibly tampered with American nuclear weapons,…

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Brain Drain

This is a photo I took on February 14, 1992 at one of the two Soviet nuclear weapons laboratories, the All-Union Scientific Research Institute of Technical Physics, in a closed city known then as Chelyabinsk-70, and now renamed Snezhinsk. Seated…

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Iran, the NAM, and Amano

Since 1985 I have spent two years and four months of my life in Vienna—not bad if you consider that I never have owned or rented a flat there. I’m right now halfway through another Vienna stay with one week…

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A Curious Sort of Leak

I am fascinated by this curious “intelligence issue” that Senator Risch cited in an unsuccessful effort to delay the Senate Foreign Relations Committee vote on the resolution of ratification for the New START Treaty. It seems, according to a pair…

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The Unipolar Moment

Charles Krauthammer is a rapier-witted columnist who reminds me of Joseph Alsop, who skewered liberals, détentists, and anti-Vietnam War activists in Washington Post op-eds during the Cold War. Alsop used his Georgetown salon to extend his influence; Krauthammer’s salon is…

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Kim Jong Il and the Grim Reaper

When Jimmy Carter was last in Pyongyang, according to KCNA, he was reminded that “it is the behest of President Kim Il Sung to denuclearize the peninsula.” How wholeheartedly NDC Chairman Kim Jong Il shares that wish is another question.…

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Why ICBMs are Hard to Build

UCS’s David Wright has written a nice post at All Things Nuclear that replots a graph originally produced by IISS to explain that ICBMs are hard to build because the principal trick to increasing range is adding fuel:

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The Flood

The clearest thinking and writing I’ve ever done was under the influence of chemo drips. The prospect of death can be life affirming… or not. The Soviet Union was on a chemo drip for the decade before it died, but…

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Back in the US

I am just back from a swing through Asia that ended in a little visit to the Lighthouse of Hope for Happiness and Prosperity on Earth — better known as the Korea Institute for Nuclear Nonproliferation and Control. (Think I…