Steph Hagard wrote a great little piece on the Chong Chon Gang interdiction. I have only a few additional comments. 1. I find the story that Cuba was sending the equipment to North Korea for refurbishment plausible. In fact, it resolves a minor mystery. In 2006, the Cuban’s revealed new mobile launchers for the S-75 …
Saudi Arabia’s Strategic Dyad
by | 2013-07-15 | 28 Comments
Sean O’Connor has a really great article on Saudi Arabia’s missile force in Jane’s Intelligence Review (“Saudi ballistic missile site revealed“) that nicely updates his 2009 blog post on the same subject. O’Connor’s article offers a nice excuse to tackle what I like to call Saudi Arabia’s “Strategic Dyad.” Over the past decade, I suspect …
Sufficiency
by | 2013-07-15 | 1 Comment
The Nixon administration needed to make many adjustments in order to prepare for strategic arms limitation talks with the Kremlin. One change was in the terminology used to describe how US nuclear forces were supposed to stack up against the Soviet Union. Prior to the SALT negotiations, US Presidents and Congressional leaders lined up squarely …
Nooks and Crannies in Iran
by | 2013-07-11 | 13 Comments
Hans Blix said a lot of things while Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency for 16 years, and one of them was this: “We cannot inspect every nook and cranny in a large country.” Before running the IAEA, Blix was a politician, a career civil servant, and a foreign minister, and in public …
