Arms Control Wonk

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Iran Nuclear Propulsion: IAEA Firewalls

Last month Iran raised the specter that it may expand the scope of its nuclear activities, especially if its interpretations concerning what constitutes non-compliance with the JCPOA do not prevail. This was not the first time Iran has dropped this…

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OSINT Brief for PEOTUS

Welcome to 2017! I’m still on vacation (can’t you tell?), but Trump sure isn’t. He shot off two tweets last night. North Korea just stated that it is in the final stages of developing a nuclear weapon capable of reaching…

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Thomas Schelling: Compellence in Asia

For the first part of this two-part essay, see: Thomas Schelling: Deterrence in Europe. (Now with minor corrections and an update in the middle of the post.) * * * So much for Europe. Let’s consider the role of events…

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Thomas Schelling: Deterrence in Europe

(Now with updates and minor corrections, for extra goodness.) When I came to the University of Maryland College Park for grad school in the fall of 1998, I didn’t have to buy either The Strategy of Conflict or Arms and…

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Year End Blues

The year ends on many somber notes – the election of Donald Trump, his modus operandi and appointments to senior positions, the push on Capitol Hill to expand national missile defenses and to once again explore space-based systems, and the…

Episode63 min

THE GREEN BEE

In the mid-60s, The Green Hornet was a popular TV show. Popular enough for the Taiwanese to apparently name an early ballistic missile after it, the Green Bee (青蜂). Also, did you know Taiwan had its own ballistic missile program? Its anti-ship…

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Holiday Greetings: Rave On, Dear Friends

Guidance from Van Morrison: Rave on John Donne, rave on thy Holy fool Down through the weeks of ages In the moss borne dark dank pools Rave on, down through the industrial revolution Empiricism, atomic and nuclear age Rave on…

Episode47 min

Andrea Berger Talks UNSC 2321

Can the North Koreans still trade coal effectively? What is going on with North Korean ships? Are transit lounges smokey dens of proliferative behavior? Andrea Berger, Deputy Director of Proliferation and Nuclear Policy at the Royal United Services Institute, joins Jeffrey…

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Iskanders in Kaliningrad

Last week, Geoff Brumfiel at NPR wrote a story about my research, with Veli-Pekka Kivimäki, showing that Russia was now deploying the Iskander missile system to Kaliningrad.  This is the longer analysis that outlines the evidence that Russia is putting the…