I have acquired two IAEA documents relating to the establishment of an IAEA fuel bank, which I am making available to the community as a public service.\ Have at ’em. Assurance of Supply, Establishment of an IAEA Low Enriched Uranium (LEU) Bank for the Supply of LEU to Member States, GOV/2010/67, (26 November 2010) Assurance …
China Peeps about Plutonium
by | 2011-01-11 | 8 Comments
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 …
