Lyric of the week: “Hark, now hear the sailors cry,Smell the sea, and feel the sky,Let your soul & spirit fly, into the mystic.” — Van Morrison Quote of the week: “Fail alone; succeed together.” — Les Gelb Les Gelb, who died over the weekend, had a stunning resumé. The Pentagon. Brookings. The State Department. …
Abu Musa Island: The “Beating Heart” of Iran in the Persian Gulf
by | 2019-08-29 | No Comments
by Cyrus Jabbari, CNS Graduate Research Assistant Major General Mohammad Ali Jafari, who commanded the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) for eight years until April 2019, referred to Abu Musa Island as Iran’s beating heart at the beginning of this year. Recent military deployments and actions taken by the IRGC on the island indeed suggest …
Guest Post: the Odds of Simultaneous Multiple Independent Detector Failures
by | 2019-08-28 | 2 Comments
Not long after the August 8 explosion at Nyonoksa in northern Russia–and the initial report of a spike in radioactivity in the nearby city of Severodvinsk–something else unexpected happened. Multiple radionuclide (RN) detectors inside Russia, part of the International Monitoring System of the CTBTO, stopped relaying their data to the CTBTO in Vienna. The Russian …
India Fuzzes Up No First Use
by | 2019-08-26 | 5 Comments
Quote of the week: “Foreign policy is the face a nation wears to the world.” — Arthur Schlesinger The Press Trust of India ran this story on August 16th: NEW DELHI — Defence Minister Rajnath Singh on Friday said India remained “firmly committed” to the doctrine of ‘no first use’ for nuclear weapons but what …
