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 …
Iran, Immunity and Diagrams
by | 2012-11-30 | 100 Comments
By now, readers will have seen this strange little diagram foisted upon the reading public by AP’s George Jahn. The significant issues are whether the document is genuine, a question I will return to at the end of this post, and if it is, what it means. As I have written elsewhere, I believe there …
IAEA Hacking
by | 2012-11-29 | 9 Comments
A group presenting itself as Iranian — the call themselves Parastoo, which is apparently Farsi for “swallow” — somehow acquired an old IAEA server. The machine was not wiped clean of data. Parastoo has now posted some of the data online, vaguely threatening a number of persons with compromised emails, unless they sign a petition demanding …
