Arms Control Wonk

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Brazil: Milhollin goes HEU over Resende

Readers may have noticed references over the past few days to a long-running dispute between the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and Brazil over access to a Brazilian facility to enrich uranium, INB Resende. The dispute centers over whether the…

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PIPA Gets Some Hot Blog Action

A couple of weeks after I mentioned a study by Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA)—a joint program of the Center on Policy Attitudes (COPA) and my employer the Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland (CISSM), School of…

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Paris Negotiations 1: Boucher Confuses Everyone Over Iran

Apparently we do have an Iran policy: be very, very vague. Check out these headlines: U.S. Signals Opposition to Light-Water Reactor Offer to Iran; Tehran Expected to Offer Deal to Europeans (Global Security Newswire, October 21, 2004) US presses Iran…

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Impasse at the Conference on Disarmament

My talk at the UN went well today. I heard a couple of especially blunt comments by officials from national delegations to the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva. Among the things I heard: The Conference remains at an “impasse” created…

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Paul Nitze, 1907-2004

The New York Times and Washington Post have excellent obituaries that capture Nitze’s good and bad qualities. Decorum inhibits candor, however. Nitze’s role in slandering Paul Warnke, during Warnke’s confirmation hearing for Director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency…

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CSRS and CounterCom (Blame it on Nanjing)

While I was in Nanjing, Space News confirmed (“U.S. Declates Satellite Jammer Ready” October 11, 2004, p.1) that the Air Force canceled the Counter Surveillance Reconnaissance System (CSRS or “scissors) and has delivered the first Counter Communications System (now called…

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Cuba BW "Program" Redux

I had an interesting conversation with Steve Weisman at the New York Times regarding his story on the “new” intelligence estimate that concludes “it is no longer clear that Cuba has an active, offensive bio-weapons program.” We still disagree about…

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CIA Declassifies 1948-1972 NIEs on China

The CIA has partially declassified “over seventy National Intelligence Estimates on China covering the period 1948-76.” The Agency claims this is “the largest such release ever made at one time.” The documents were also published in a book and CD/ROM…