Last month Secretary Gates made the comment that North Korea was within five years of being able to hit the United States with an ICBM. Over at Joel Wit’s wonderful 38 North Blog, David Wright and myself have complementary pieces regarding North Korea’s ICBM capabilities. My piece, “Official Estimates of the Taepo Dong 2”, examines …
Burmese Space Shuttle
by | 2011-02-03 | 7 Comments
I am doing a lot of work on Myanmar these days. One of the most interesting phenomenon is how rumors tend to inspire people with fertile imaginations. There are two cables from the US Embassy in Rangoon (Yangon) that are like that — in one leaked cable, an embassy contact notices unusual security and care …
Proliferation Assessments
by | 2011-02-02 | 14 Comments
What if I could lower your electricity bill by about 45 cents a month in exchange for helping Syria and one or two other countries acquire a nuclear weapons capability? How about it? What, not so excited about that? Ok, lets just say it increases the chance of the Syrian bomb by 10 percent over …
The Well-Read Wonk
by | 2011-02-02 | 5 Comments
An early shoebox posting highlighted Kenneth Waltz’s classic Adelphi Paper, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons — More May be Better (1981). Another Adelphi Paper on the Bomb that’s worth reading, in my view, is Neil Joeck’s Maintaining Nuclear Stability in South Asia (1997). Neil is a product of the University of California system, but he …
