Photo from Al Jazeera’s timeline of the Korean Summit. Kim Jong-un and Moon Jae-in shaking hands across the border.
Trump needs to pare back his goals for his meeting with Kim Jong Un. Suspicious factory underscores challenge of verifying North Korea’s nuclear promises. Nothing that Trump has said indicates that he has any concept of verification. What to do if the talks with North Korea succeed: Develop a program like the Nunn-Lugar program for Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union. Since Siegfried Hecker was instrumental in the program with Russia, I’ve always thought that North Korea’s invitation to him to visit in 2004 was an attempt at building such a program. From 2017, on how to deter North Korea.
LONG read on Iran – history and current actions. Trump’s middle ground on Iran sanctions waivers is a myth.
Too many conspiracy theories about Syria. The confrontation of Israel and Iran interwoven in Syria.
Long read on Novichok, with photos from a visit to a Soviet chemical weapons facility in 1987. What is a chemical weapon? When is chlorine a chemical weapon? Russia is pulling out all the stops to avoid blame.
Excess enriched uranium from decommissioned nuclear weapons may make a new enrichment plant unnecessary in the US. This is a good report on the excess plutonium from decommissioned nuclear weapons, which is more difficult to deal with. Another analysis of the plutonium problem, but I don’t think that a relatively small bureaucratic change will solve it.
The official US government usage is now Kyiv, the Ukrainian form, rather than Kiev, the Russian form.
Photo essay on Magnitogorsk, a mining town that was to be a model of Soviet socialism.
Ukraine’s decision not to proliferate nuclear weapons after the fall of the Soviet Union. The article conflates the presence of Soviet nuclear missiles in Ukraine with Ukraine’s potential for building nuclear weapons, but the points about what it lacked are good.
Nuclear Diner 