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 …
Myanmar Rare Earths Stuff
by | 2012-11-28 | 10 Comments
One of my favorite novels is Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana. If you are not familiar with the basic plot, a British expatriate living in Havana, desperate for a little extra cash, passes off sketches of vacuum cleaner parts to MI6, claiming they depict a secret military installation in the mountains. (The screen grab, …
