Anthony Trollope lived and wrote half a century before plutonium was discovered, and maybe that’s why during the holidays I was deeply immersed in three of his novels. Shortly before New Year’s and about 400 pages into The Eustace Diamonds, I got an e-mail from a friend in Beijing, telling me that something noteworthy had …
Joint Verification Experiments
by | 2011-01-11 | 4 Comments
During the Reagan administration, the 1974 Threshold Test Ban Treaty was in Senate limbo, mired in arguments over Soviet cheating. The TTBT limited underground tests to yields no greater than 150 kilotons, but the U.S. intelligence community did not have sound geological data of the Soviet test sites and used questionable extrapolations to infer yields. …
Operation Groundhog
by | 2011-01-10 | 9 Comments
One of the great things about the Wikileaks cables is that they contain a bunch of stuff that I should have known, but didn’t. For example, Operation Groundhog. One of the Wikileaks cables — a February 2010 scene-setter for a visit to Kazakhstan by CENTCOM Commander General David Petraeus — notes that “of all of …
The Next START
by | 2011-01-06 | 21 Comments
What fan of the hapless Chicago Cubs doesn’t look at a sunny day and think of Ernie Banks? His “Let’s play two!” expressed optimism in the face of fatigue, off-field worries and the inevitability that a doubleheader meant the luckless Cubs would receive two merciless drubbings by the visting team. Come to think of it, …
