Nuclear Warfare
By no means do I wish to pick on Lourdes Garcia-Navarro, who was only repeating a common misconception in an NPR segment this evening when she said: On June 7, 1981, Israel launched the first confirmed military strike ever against…
Arms Control Wonk
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Persbo & Hibbs on ElBaradei
Six bucks or not, Andreas Persbo and Mark Hibbs have a must read profile of outgoing IAEA Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists: The IAEA after ElBaradei. As ElBaradei’s tenure reaches its close, a deep and troubling…
START Follow On Sessions
I keep hearing that there have been four rounds of START Follow On negotiations — but that omits two Presidential Summits, a meeting between lead negotiators in Rome and at least two “experts” meetings. So I’ve tried to collect all…
Iran Week
Yes, yes, it is shameless, but I can’t resist pointing out that NPR is running a boatload of analytical, talking-head-driven pieces on Iran this week. (At least in this instance, NPR is not the Congressionally mandated bureaucratic process, but the…
KSLV-1 and the MTCR
Mating the Indigenous KSLV-1 Second Stage with the Angara It always helps to go back and read the original documents, even to things you think you know fairly well. I found myself doing that recently when a number of (…
National Academies CTBT Study
As many of you know, the Obama Administration has tasked the National Academies Committee on International Security and Arms Control (NAS–CISAC) to prepare a study on technical issues related to the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). The National Academies…
Massive Retaliation
What was the apogee of U.S. nuclear excess? Numerically speaking, one could argue that it was in the 1960s, when the overall size of the U.S. nuclear stockpile peaked, or in the 1980s, if we’re counting the number of warheads…
Why Iran's Clock Keeps Resetting
I’ve never asked, but am willing to bet that the good folks at The Bulletin get a fair bit of grief over the Doomsday Clock. Seeing as we’ve been at five minutes to midnight since 2007 (the typical snide question…
Bye Jack, We’re Proud to Have Known You
Jack McGeorge, left, in one of his rubber suits examines an Iraqi 122 mm rocket potentially filled with sarin One of the great unsung heroes of the UN weapons inspections in Iraq passed away during cardiac surgery on 18 August…
South Korea Blinks
The Republic of Korea (ROK) aborted today’s launch of the KSLV-1 at T minus seven minutes. The crystal-clear blue skies shown in the picture, with the only cloud present being the venting of LOX boil-off, seem to indicate that it…