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, Nonproliferation, and Disarmament Agreements and Commitments,” the Department’s Bureau of Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance assessed whether numerous countries complied with treaty obligations in 2012. Most of the media attention, though, has been on what the report says (and doesn’t say) about Russia. Since the report came out, Republican members of Congress and their supporters have repeatedly accused Moscow of violating arms control treaties, and the State Department of ignoring the problem.
Think Progress Story on Iron Dome Quotes Kingston Reif
TTop Israeli Official Dismisses Concerns About Iranian Response To Military Attack August 8, 2013 By Ben Armbruster A senior Israeli security official this week dismissed concerns about an Iranian military response to a potential Israeli military strike on the Islamic Republic’s nuclear facilities, claiming that Israel would be able to withstand any counterattack. Experts and […]
National Defense Magazine Story on East Coast Missile Defense Quotes Kingston Reif & James Lewis
Unresolved Issues Hang Over U.S. Missile Shield By Sandra Erwin August 6, 2013 For the second year in a row, lawmakers will be squabbling this fall over if and when the United States should shore up its defenses against North Korean and Iranian ballistic missiles. The lightning rod in this debate is a Republican-led proposal […]
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.