Arms Control Wonk

Direct hit is like bowling—if you do not hit the pocket exactly, then many pins will continue to stand” Dr. Hans Mark, as quoted by Richard Lloyd in “Physics of Direct Hit and Near Miss Warhead Technology”, p. 12. For every winner in a Defense contract competition, there is a loser. And those losers never …

The Cheonan report is out, and it’s not pretty. The most thorough accounts of the press conference appear to be those of the Sydney Morning Herald and the New York Times. The investigators — a team from South Korea, America, the UK, Australia and Sweden — concluded that: The South Korean corvette Cheonan was split …

Here’s my two cent’s worth on the Iran-Brazil-Turkey trilateral agreement. The heads of state of Brazil and Turkey appear to have made the avoidance of confrontation their top-most priority, trumping the avoidance of gains in Tehran’s ability to make nuclear weapons. We’ve seen this movie before, and the ending isn’t going to be pretty. In …

These days, the dignified art of arms control verification is both lauded and lambasted in the conference rooms of UN Headquarters. Having spent a week in New York, I feel fairly ready to tell a tale of mild schizophrenia in States’ attitudes towards confidence-building through transparency and verification. The CTBT and its verification regime has …