Arms Control Wonk

As regular readers are well aware, North Korea’s KCNA often features heartwarming turns of phrase like this one: The DPRK will bolster up its war deterrent under the uplifted banner of Songun as long as the U.S. military threat and provocations against it persist. “Bolstering” is ideally carried out through nuclear or missile tests, but …

Conventional wisdom has it that New START matters only at the margins, fitting comfortably within projected U.S. and Russian strategic plans, foreclosing nothing of substance and costing the usual ransom to assuage skeptics. I’m not buying this line of argument.

By now, New START aficionados (if that’s the right word) will know all the talking points about missile defenses. Treaty critics in search of unacceptable restrictions on interceptors have homed in on Art. V, Paragraph 3, which prohibits either the conversion of ICBM silos or submarine missile tubes into interceptor launchers, or conversion the other …

The Keeper of the Shoeboxes touched on the new National Space Policy (.pdf) a few weeks back, focusing on the diplomatic side of it. As he noted, the language on diplomacy and arms control is substantially different from that in the 2006 policy. But I wanted to focus on a different aspect, the concept of …