Arms Control Wonk

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A Democratic National Security Strategy & Arms Control

Large majorities of Bush supporters also support a variety of arms control agreeements, such as the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the International Criminal Court and the Ottawa Convention banning land mines, that Bush himself opposes: This is a huge missed…

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North Korea’s Nuclear Weapons

I was struggling for something interesting to say about North Korean Deputy Foreign Minister Choe Su-hon’s claim that S2R* had “already reprocessed 8,000 wasted fuel rods and transformed them into arms.” [*Secretive Stalinist Regime. Apparently respectable news outlets think this…

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Missile Defense Errata

MDA (operating in its little know role as a 527 for the Bush Administration) is sticking interceptors in the frozen tundra of Alaska and calling it a missile defense. Not that the thing works: MDA has delayed the next flight…

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High quality work over at MDA

The GAO just released a shocking report, Diploma Mills: Diploma Mills Are Easily Created and Some Have Issued Bogus Degrees at Government Expense to Federal Employees, that finds “28 [GS-15 (or equivalent) and above] employees [from eight agencies] listed degrees…

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Who says China is not transparent?

I was reading the Jiefangjun Bao (PLA Daily) when I came across a most unusual column. It appears that someone felt that a CCTV program called “The Missile Brigade Commander” lacked realism. So, in case you had any questions, this…

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Prospects for Peace and Security in Outer Space

On October 21, 2004, Dr. Arms Control Wonk will be on a panel, “Prospects for Peace and Security in Outer Space,” hosted by Jonathan Dean and the Union of Concerned Scientists at the United Nations. In addition to Ambassador Dean…

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Cuba BW Effort Revisited

Continuing the Cuba BW thread, The Report of the Select Committee on Intelligence on the U.S. Intelligence Community’s Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq contains the backstory on Undersecretary Bolton’s effort to distort intelligence regarding Cuba. The New York Times contained…

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Minimum Means of Reprisal Revisited

After some adventures in pagination, I successfully submitted the final copy of the dissertation, The Minimum Means of Reprisal: China’s Search for Security in the Nuclear Age, today. For my defense, I dispensed with a powerpoint presentation. Edward Tufte, in…

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New Assessment of Cuban BW Effort

The lead paragraph of “In Stricter Study, U.S. Scales Back Claim on Cuba Arms” in the New York Times (September 17, 2004) leads: The Bush administration, using stringent standards adopted after the failure to find banned weapons in Iraq, has…

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DARPA gets the X-37

DARPA is now running the X-37 program. A few days ago, Space News reported that NASA had turned the X-37 program over to an unnamed government agency. NASA spokesman Michael Braukus has now confirmed that DARPA was the government agency…