Kyodo news — citing the inevitable single “Western diplomatic source” — has an interesting report that Iran has agreed to permantly station four missile (and perhaps nuclear) experts at a facility in North Korea, about 85 kilometers from the Chinese boarder. The source said the mission is comprised of four experts from Iran’s Ministry of Defense …
Patton on Pakistan’s U Supply
by | 2012-12-03 | 20 Comments
My colleague, Tamara Patton, has published her much anticipated master’s thesis on estimating the size of the Pakistani plutonium production reactors at Khushab in Science and Global Security (Combining Satellite Imagery and 3D Drawing Tools for Nonproliferation Analysis: A Case Study of Pakistan’s Khushab Plutonium Production Reactors). It’s one heck of a paper and available …
Russia’s Safeguards Problem
by | 2012-12-03 | 10 Comments
I’ve been away from this blog for a couple months working on, among other things, the subject of this post. I also knocked about a while in Rome, where I was inspired to read Helen Langdon’s magnificent biography of the painter Caravaggio. This opus was the fruit of many years of research and observation in several disciplines and Langdon stitched together a complex fabric of patronage, contemporary learned discourse, and artists’ …
Verification, Risk, and Nuclear Testing
by | 2012-12-01 | 5 Comments
Concerns over verification and compliance are a refuge for skeptics of arms control. These concerns can be substantive as well as overdramatized. No treaty is risk-free, and no monitoring regime is foolproof. Will a powerful cheater be called out, even if discovered? And what then? No treaty seeking to tame the Bomb offers the prospect …
