Critical foreign languages won’t make or break a career, but they can help aspiring wonks gain comparative advantage in the job market. Learning a critical foreign language can also lead to great travel opportunities, and travel, as Mark Twain once said, is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness. My sense is that the least successful …
DPRK Nuclear Tests
by | 2011-10-17 | 9 Comments
Jack Murphy and several colleagues at SAIC have released a very interesting paper that uses a variety of geospatial and seismic data to locate the 2006 and 2009 nuclear explosions conducted by the DPRK, as well as estimate the yield and depth of burial. (Murphy et al, Exploitation of the IMS and Other Data For …
Reykjavik
by | 2011-10-11 | 6 Comments
Twenty-five years ago, the world’s highest-stakes poker game was played in Reykjavik. This characterization comes from a man with a pretty good poker face, George Shultz, who was the US Secretary of State at the time. Secretary Shultz appeared to be one of only three participants at the Reykjavik summit who had no reservations about …
DPRK Road Mobile ICBM?
by | 2011-10-05 | 39 Comments
At the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore in June, outgoing-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates dropped a little bombshell: With the continued development of long-range missiles and potentially a road-mobile intercontinental ballistic missile and their continued development of nuclear weapons, North Korea is in the process of becoming a direct threat to the United States. I thought …
