by Kingston Reif While there is widespread agreement that sequestration is not a wise way to manage reductions in military spending, it is the law of the land. Unless Congress changes the legislation, the Pentagon will be forced to find $500 billion in spending reductions over the next decade beyond what is has already planned. […]
Don’t blame Moscow
Published in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists Online on August 5, 2013. Article summary below; read the full text here. On July 12, the US State Department released a major annual report on arms control compliance that has riled up nuclear weapons hawks. In its annual “Report on Adherence to and Compliance With Arms Control, […]
New Study Downplays Threat of “Nuclear Handoff,” But Nuclear Terrorism Threat Remains
Over the past few weeks, several blogs have spotlighted a recent article by scholars Keir Lieber and Daryl Press that analyzes the threat of a nuclear weapons state transferring nuclear weapons to a terrorist organization. The article – “Why States Won’t Give Nuclear Weapons to Terrorists” — asserts that a state has little incentive to deliberately transfer nuclear weapons to a terrorist group, because if that group were to carry out a nuclear attack with said weapons, neither party would remain anonymous, and retribution from the attacked state would undoubtedly ensue.
The Sequel’s Not Any Better: Why the US Should Be Wary of Pyongyang’s Shift in Rhetoric
Let’s start this post off with a pop culture confession: I didn’t like The Hangover. I realize that this probably puts me in the minority of the American movie-going public (the film earned nearly a half-billion dollars at the box office, making it the highest-grossing R-rated comedy of all-time), but I found it to be a bit too crass and a bit too formulaic for my taste.
DefenseOne OpEd: What Ash Carter Gets Wrong about Nuclear Weapons Spending
Published in DefenseOne on July 24, 2013 What Ash Carter Gets Wrong about Nuclear Weapons SpendingHistorically, cost has not played a decisive role in the United States’ nuclear weapons policy. For most of the nuclear age, money for the nuclear enterprise was viewed almost entirely in the abstract: $1 million was just a number and […]
