Month: October 2015
Links – Science Edition October 30, 2015
Branching out today beyond nuclear. There’s been a lot of science, good and bad, in the news lately. Read More
Links – October 26, 2015
A new portrait of Carl von Clausewitz, master theorist of war, has been found. Read More
Y-12 Ships Too Much Uranium-235
In July, Oak Ridge’s Y-12 National Security Complex shipped too much highly enriched uranium. Frank Munger has the story. It was ten times too much. That breached the rules for shipping “special nuclear material” – material that could be used to make nuclear weapons. Read More
Links – October 21, 2015
How do you find plutonium? Go to nuclear inspector school. All IAEA inspectors are trained at Los Alamos. NPR reporter Geoff Brumfiel went with one group. The plutonium can he mentions was designed by my team back in the 1990s, if it’s the one in this LANL photo. And back when I started at Los Alamos, the orientation included passing around a nickel-plated plutonium hemisphere. It was warm. Read More
Sunday Cartoons
Links – October 16, 2015
Jeffrey Lewis and I discussed IAEA sampling at Iran’s Parchin military base and why Iran isn’t “inspecting itself” in a podcast at Arms Control Wonk. Read More
Russian And American Interests In Syria
Realist political thought is said to focus on national interests. But you wouldn’t know that from recent commentary, like Stephen Walt’s piece touting Vladimir Putin as a master strategist and Barack Obama as bumbler. Or Edward Luttwak’s paen to Putin’s strategic brilliance. Both Walt and Luttwak are regarded as being of the realist foreign policy school, but neither seems to consider national interests. Rather, they focus on – well, both articles are conceptual messes, so it’s hard to tell what they are focusing on. But it’s not national interests, unless you define national interest, as many are doing these days, in terms of the nebulous “reputation.” Read More
Links – October 8, 2015
A very overhyped article on nuclear smuggling. A few things to put this in perspective: A market requires buyers and sellers. Typically these articles report on sting buyers from various law-enforcement organizations. They do not count as a market. Only one “real” possible buyer is mentioned in the article. Also, more and more of these materials are locked up every year. Russia, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, was the largest potential source of illicit nuclear materials. In 24 years, there has been no serious incident of nuclear material getting loose. And Russia’s security has improved greatly. I commented further on Twitter: start here and here and follow the linked tweets. Read More
Nuclear Diner 