The debate between Ken Waltz and Scott Sagan, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons (2nd edition, 2003) is a great teaching tool. Waltz, the academic Grinch of proliferation studies, argues that more proliferation is better than any of the alternatives — as long as the Bomb spreads slowly. Sagan argues that more proliferation increases the likelihood …
Geneva: The TRR and Enrichment Abroad
by | 2009-10-01 | 21 Comments
Long time, no speak. Time for a spot of guest blogging at this busy time. Interesting news from the meetings in Geneva today. Iran has agreed, “in principle”, to have some LEU from Natanz further enriched abroad and fabricated into fuel for the Tehran Research Reactor. (You might remember President Ahmedinijad recently floated the idea …
Safeguards v. EXPO
by | 2009-10-01 | 4 Comments
Well, I guess Mark Hibbs isn’t going to be getting a building pass to the VIC. That VIC, of course, is the Vienna International Center, home to the IAEA. Hibbs has a long piece on the vicious infighting within the IAEA over whether to release information collected by the IAEA documenting alleged weaponization activities by …
Parallel Fuel Cycles, Revisited
by | 2009-10-01 | 5 Comments
Reacting to last week’s Qom revelation, Andreas Persbo wrote that National technical means combined with human intelligence, however, seems to have averted the worst outcome, the establishment of a parallel fuel cycle. (See: Parallel Fuel Cycles, September 25, 2009.) So was the Qom facility was intended as part of a larger system, isolated from the …
