Arms Control Wonk

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SpySat Revealed: It's MISTY

The Washington Post’s Dana Priest reports that government officials confirmed the classified “major funding acquisition program” to which Senator Rockefeller objected was the next stealth reconnaissance satellite in the MISTY program (MISTY-3). This blog has covered the MISTY program in…

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Sig Harrison on North Korea: The Other Shoe

A careful reader observes that Selig Harrison’s article in Foreign Affairs was advertising for Ending the North Korea Nuclear Crisis, “the report of a high-level Task Force on U.S./Korea Policy [associated with the Center for International Policy] presenting important new…

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Spysat Follow-up 2

The Federation of American Scientists Secrecy Project has the collected statements relating to continued funding for a classified program opposed by Senator Rockefeller. Among the statements is an e-mail from his press office that Senator Rockefeller’s statement “was fully vetted…

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Inscrutable Chinese: Silliness With Security Clearances

Apparently a judge believes no one with relatives in China should hold a security clearance. (Previous rulings to this effect have been upheld on appeals, see here and here.) Bill Gertz and Rowan Scarborough approve. Gertz and Scarborough report that…

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SpySat Follow-up

The program is not some space weapon. Rockefeller has backed off the “dangerous” comment. “He was referring to the fact that it was a misallocation of funds,” his spokeswoman Wendy Morigi told AP. That still leaves the question of its…

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SpySats: Sometimes It's Just a Cigar

Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) recently refused to support the intelligence bill due to his “strenuous objection—shared by many in our committee—to a particular major funding acquisition program that I believe is totally unjustified and very wasteful and dangerous to national…

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Another North Korea Intelligence Summary

I always appreciate it when Jeffrey plugs my scribbling, but I will add something further. This is a more recent article about North Korea’s nuclear programs. The section on the enrichment program reads: North Korea denies U.S. charges that it…

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North Korea: Intelligence Under Complexity

A North Korean poster from the UCLA Asia Institute. Sig Harrison has a review of intelligence assessments about North Korea’s uranium enrichment program in Foreign Affairs which concludes “those assessments were exaggerated and blurred the important distinction between weapons-grade uranium…

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Iran: The Verification Trap

The Bush administration may be laying the ground work to sabotage any deal that the EU-3 conclude with Iran regarding the suspension of Tehran’s uranium enrichment program. The grounds? The deal is unverifiable. Obviously, we would all like to see…