What is it about the New START treaty’s Bilateral Consultative Commission that seems to stir up such paranoia on the right-wing? Jack Goldsmith and Jeremy Rabkin, two conservative legal scholars, have what at first glance to be the most boring…
As regular readers are well aware, North Korea’s KCNA often features heartwarming turns of phrase like this one: The DPRK will bolster up its war deterrent under the uplifted banner of Songun as long as the U.S. military threat and…
Conventional wisdom has it that New START matters only at the margins, fitting comfortably within projected U.S. and Russian strategic plans, foreclosing nothing of substance and costing the usual ransom to assuage skeptics. I’m not buying this line of argument.
By now, New START aficionados (if that’s the right word) will know all the talking points about missile defenses. Treaty critics in search of unacceptable restrictions on interceptors have homed in on Art. V, Paragraph 3, which prohibits either the…
The Keeper of the Shoeboxes touched on the new National Space Policy (.pdf) a few weeks back, focusing on the diplomatic side of it. As he noted, the language on diplomacy and arms control is substantially different from that in…
That’s about the level of the rhetoric these days surrounding the new State Department “compliance” report. Although the Compliance Report (properly, Adherence to and Compliance with Arms Control, Nonproliferation, and Disarmament Agreements and Commitments) isn’t strictly speaking part of the…
In 1985, obstructionists and nuclear deal makers in Ronald Reagan’s administration fought pitched battles over the President’s divided mind. Secretary of Defense Cap Weinberger and his allies appealed at every turn to President Reagan’s strong attachment to the Strategic Defense…
Or, Chillax About the China Military Power Report. Five Republican Senators — John Cornyn, John McCain, James Risch, Pat Roberts and James Inhofe — have written a letter suggesting that the Department of Defense is deliberately delaying the annual Report…
On Saturday, I had the pleasure of attending the American Ensemble Theater’s production of Less Blessing’s A Walk In The Woods — a play about the relationship between an American arms control negotiator and his Soviet counterpart that was (very)…
Greetings from (not so) sunny San Diego. I hope the people back east are enjoying the sweltering heat. I just finished the first of three weeks at the UCSD IGCC Public Policy and Nuclear Threats Summer Training Program. But, last…
