Another Bulava Failure
After a brief UFO-scare — really, people — the Russians have confirmed that the spiraling light seen from Norway was yet another failed Bulava test. Pavel Podvig has a nice post up. This is pretty much the best video I…
Arms Control Wonk
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History Proves…. What?
Original Caption: “Professor Bernard Brodie conducting a class.” September 1946. Walter Sanders, photographer. George Santayana managed to have it both ways. He once opined that, “History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who…
SMART
When the real life disappoints, as it is wont to do, human beings often take comfort in fiction, imagining an alternate reality where our problems aren’t so daunting and where we aren’t so fallible. We dream, in short, of a…
Ros-Lehtinen on Arms Control
Ok, this is just downright weird. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen rounds up the usual crowd to co-sponsor an utterly meaningless “Sense of the House” on the START Treaty. (Utterly meaningless since the Senate ratifies treaties. I don’t even want to hear about…
Official: Ankara Doesn't Need NATO Nukes
I attended an interesting meeting today that Flynt Leverett hosted with two high-powered Turkish officials from the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) — Ibrahim Kalin, chief foreign policy adviser to the Prime Minister, and a Suat Kiniklioglu, a Turkish…
Bosworth in Pyongyang
[Maybe you had to be there.] After a day-long stopover in Seoul, U.S. special envoy Stephen Bosworth is now in Pyongyang for the first time in his official capacity. It’s a three-day trip, so it looks pretty serious. Is there…
Command & Control in South Asia
The twain between my ACW posts and my day job at the Stimson Center have not met — until now. The following analysis, a trimmed-down version of which has been posted on Stimson’s website, seems way too wonkish to be…
Estimating SWU with Expert Opinion
So what is the separative power of the IR-1 centrifuge, really? We’ve touched on this question before, sometimes in connection with Natanz breakout scenarios. Lately, it’s come up in connection with the Qom facility, a.k.a. Fordow (see: Iran: Compliance in…
Greetings from Monterey, CA
Greetings from Monterey, California and the 20th Anniversary Conference of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies. (After convalescing in the hot tub last night, I made it half way through John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row and a demi bouteille of…
More on Britain's Independent Deterrent
Last winter, after a visit to the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston — the Los Alamos or Livermore of the United Kingdom — I came away with a new understanding of how intertwined the US and UK nuclear weapons programs…