One aspect of the current tizzy over the future course for IAEA safeguards is a certain frustration expressed by a number of states about how the IAEA’s terms of reference all fit together exactly. Above all, confusion reigns in these quarters about the extent of congruity between Integrated Safeguards and State-Level Safeguards. Are they the same or not? Does the second follow from the first, or is it the other …
Iranians in North Korea?
by | 2012-12-05 | 9 Comments
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’ …
