Avatar photoOrigins of the Musudan IRBM

Over the years, I’ve been very interested in North Korea’s development of a new IRBM — called variously the SS-N-6 (US designation of a Soviet precursor system), the Musudan (US designation of the DPRK version) and the BM-25 (used in reference to kits allegedly exported from the DPRK to Iran), as well as a few …

Avatar photoMultilateral Negotiations

Even though the stock price of multilateral arms control is extremely low, there still aren’t many buyers. The heyday of the Conference on Disarmament was in the mid-1990s, when the Chemical Weapons Convention and the Comprehensive Test Ban treaties were finalized. The CD has been moribund ever since, a victim of its unwieldy size and …

Avatar photoNuclear Weapons Budget, Revisited

Russell Rumbaugh and Nathan Cohn, at the Stimson Center, have a new report out entitled, Resolving Ambiguity: Costing Nuclear Weapons, with a nice companion piece in Arms Control Today.

Avatar photoNo BOG Iran Work Plan Endorsement

Iran has been making quarterly statements to the IAEA Board of Governors (BOG) for nine long years. That’s longer than most current IAEA member state permanent mission representatives in Vienna can recall because virtually none of these individuals were here in Vienna back then. But there are a few exceptions. And today one of them showed me that institutional memory matters. Agenda item 7(d) of …