2005 Iran NIE Details
Regular readers know that I have tried to accumulate all the information I can about the 2005 NIE on Iran’s nuclear program — it is interesting in its own right and as a predecessor to the much misunderstood 2007 NIE.…
Arms Control Wonk
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Gates On 'Likely Conclusions' of NPR
It’s baaaaack. SECDEF Robert Gates told the Air Force Association last week that a “ likely conclusion” of the Nuclear Posture Review will be that “in one or two cases” existing warheads would be replaced with “new designs”: SEC. GATES:…
Testing European Missile Defense
Plenty has already been said about last week’s missile defense announcement, with the diplomacy and the politics taking center stage. Now let’s see if we can’t tip the balance back just slightly towards the wonky. After all, that’s where President…
Hidden Agendas and Missile Defenses
Back in 1970, I had the good fortune of taking a graduate seminar taught by Mort Halperin, who was then working on his book, Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy, with the help of a very bright research assistant, Arnie Kanter.…
A Sensible Missile Defense for NATO
The Obama Administration has replaced the ground-based missile defense architecture in Europe with a series of theater missile defenses centered on the Aegis system. I think this makes a lot of sense, as regular readers know, on both technical and…
Pief Panofsky on Missile Defense
For reasons not worth going into, lately I’ve been reading an awful lot about ballistic missile warfare. Today’s cutting-edge theater missile made in Russia, China, or the United States is a precision battlefield weapon, suitable for attacking military bases or…
B61 Replacement and Vacuum Tubes
You may recall the little spring dust-up that Kingston Reif and I had with STRATCOM Commander General Kevin P. Chilton over whether he should be running around with a vacuum tube in his pocket to make the case for warhead…
Secret Iranian Missile Memos
I have been given access to a series of what appeared to be internal secret Iranian documents by sources I trust. If authentic, and I believe they are, they provide important insights into Iran’s missile development program and have important…
The Intersection of Two Proposals
The Obama Administration has agreed to start negotiations with Iran on the basis of the latest Iranian proposal. A decision I certainly applaud and fervently hope that we can finesse to include the nuclear issue (an issue that was part…
Herman Kahn
Herman Kahn has a favored place in my shoe box collection because he followed his logic train to territory where other deterrence strategists feared to tread. Kahn was plus-sized (above), utterly confident, and easily caricatured. A sense of the man’s…