Inside Defense has published excerpts from a draft of the Quadrennial Defense Review. The QDR announced that DOD will “reduce the number of deployed Minuteman III ballistic missiles from 500 to 450.” This raises an interesting question—what happens to the nuclear warheads from those 50 ICBMs? As recently as 2004, the United States planned to …
Hans Brix! Oh No!
by | 2006-01-26 | 4 Comments
Hans Blix rules. Yesterday, during the ACA Annual Meeting, Dr. Hans Blix — Chairman of the Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission and fromer head of UNMOVIC — referred to his cameo in Team America: World Police. Actually, he RE-ENACTED THE SCENE (mostly). Download the clip He was making a serious point about the role of …
Safeguarding Breeder Reactors
by | 2006-01-24 | 12 Comments
A pair of interesting stories appeared over the past week relating to negotiations about which facilities India will declare “military” (and hence, exempt from safeguards) under the US-India Nuclear Cooperation Agreement. Siddharth Varadarajan reports that the Bush Administration has dropped its insistance that the CIRUS reactor be listed as a civilian facility. (For some background, …
Strangers With Candy
by | 2006-01-23 | 4 Comments
I’ve put my first post up in the TPM Cafe, asking whether US & EU diplomacy might usefully exploit divisions within Iranian politics to slow Iran’s nuclear programs. (Update: I’ve added a second post asking what happens if Iran “gets” the bomb.) Here are links to my three part series on the “big questions” about …
