Avatar photoParsing Enrichment in North Korea

Last week’s letter of the Permanent Representative of the DPRK to the UN Security Council President — see the KCNA translation — has stirred up a lot of excitement for what it says about uranium enrichment, or, to be precise, for what it doesn’t say about uranium enrichment. The statement doesn’t mention nuclear weapons in …

Avatar photoTreaty Math

A pop quiz for wonks: Question: What do the following numbers represent? 95, 93, 93, 88, 87, 80, and 74 Answer: The number of Senators voting for the SORT, START I, INF, ABM, START II, Limited Test Ban Treaty and the Chemical Weapons Convention. One of the conclusions that Dan Caldwell and I reached in …

Avatar photoMonitoring the Test Ban

I am working on a series of longer posts related to monitoring the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, but wanted to share an amusing paragraph from the March 2009 edition of Science & Technology Review, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s magazine. (I love S&T Review, by the way.) I sometimes joke that, if the intelligence …

Avatar photoMore Debate Re: The EastWest Institute JTA

Diagram of Iranian liquid-propellant missiles from the EWI–JTA Technical Appendix. The latest debate, however, mainly focuses on Iran’s solid-propellant missiles. If I knew a year ago what I know now, I wouldn’t have lost so much money in the stock market. But as important as that money would have been when I retire, it was …