Some of you know that I am a regular visitor in Vienna, and that I haven’t missed a General Conference since 2004. Most of you also know that I’m not a very diligent blogger anymore. Having said that, I thought it would be useful to give the ACW community my take on what’s been going …
Options On and Off the Table
by | 2012-09-23 | 38 Comments
All options are on the table. How many times have we heard this? The administrations of Presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush directed such declarations to Saddam Hussein. North Korea is no stranger to this formulation. Then there’s Iran. Here’s what President Barack Obama had to say at the 2012 AIPAC Policy Conference …
Brodie’s Weakest Book
by | 2012-09-17 | 7 Comments
This space has periodically sung the praises of Bernard Brodie, but even All Stars occasionally go into slumps. Brodie was off his game in Escalation and the Nuclear Option (1966), in which he argued the case for tactical nuclear weapons. One cringe-inducing example: Imaginative use of special types of nuclear weapons much earlier in the …
Where Is Israel’s Red Line for Iran?
by | 2012-09-14 | 59 Comments
A friend and colleague who prefers to remain anonymous has asked me to post the following. For reasons you can probably guess, I haven’t had time to take a hard look at the numbers. By now everyone already knows about the spat between Israeli PM Netanyahu and the Obama administration over “red lines” for the …
