THE DEPROLIFERATOR — Few fields are as lacking in fresh perspectives as nuclear weapons. Entire decades have been spent by nuclear strategists deliberating which state would strike first and how many weapons the victim would have left to retaliate. Then they came up with deterrence. What a concept — as if equally armed forces had never arrived at a standoff before. Full Story »

THE DEPROLIFERATOR — Nuclear disarmament is usually approached from three directions. They who pursue the middle way might, by definition, be capable of appreciating the charms of those following the two paths which diverge from it. But chances are that each of those parties — one of which is an outlier; the other an in-lier — views the other with a jaundiced eye. Full Story »

THE DEPROLIFERATOR — Recent statements by its chief representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency suggest that Iran may be backing away from an agreement to ships it low-enriched nuclear fuel to Russia for further enriching. Even, though, after agreeing to the deal, President Ahmadinejad, ever the master of the sweeping gesture, said the West had “moved from confrontation to cooperation.”

Among reasons to hope that Iran relents is a fact of which many who proclaim Iran has a right to a nuclear program seem ignorant. Turns out that transubstantiating the fuel used for nuclear energy into nuclear-weapon fuel, far from a miracle, is all too commonplace. Full Story »

THE DEPROLIFERATOR — Sometimes it seems as if neither the United States nor Russia got the message that the Cold War ended almost two decades ago. Previously I wrote about the Dooomsday Device, a back-up defense system that Russia developed in the 80s. In the aftermath of a nuclear attack, it ensures that, even if no civilian and military leaders are still around to issue the command, a retaliatory nuclear attack will still be launched. Depending on your point of view, it’s either the ultimate in deterrence or the most senseless act of revenge ever. Full Story »

An article in the Sunday New York Times magazine on September 16 entitled The Holy Grail of the Unconscious caught me by surprise. When young, I’d read Carl Jung, founder, along with Freud, of the school of analytical psychology. I was familiar with his ideas about archetypes and the collective unconscious. But who knew that one of his most seminal (finally, my big chance to use that, uh, seminal word) works had never been published? Full Story »

If you start a war, we may die but the rockets will fly automatically.

Thus spake the man who was profiled in William Taubman’s masterwork Khrushchev: The Man and His Era. The Russian premier was addressing U.S. diplomat Averell Harriman, who sought to prepare the way for the Russian premier to make his contentious 1959 visit to the United States. What exactly did Khrushchev mean by “automatically”? After all, computers were still in their infancy. Full Story »

A Personal ‘Nuclear Posture Review’

THE DEPROLIFERATOR — When viewed on film, a nuclear weapons test might strike the discerning eye as a rip in the very fabric of existence. While one might view a supernova in the same light, not only doesn’t the explosion of a star occur within the confines of a planet, but in an entire galaxy. Furthermore, a supernova is ultimately a creative force that leads to the formation of new stars.

By contrast, a nuclear explosion is a “destroyer of worlds,” as Robert Oppenheimer famously described the first test, Trinity. He prefaced that expression with the words “I am become Death,” from the Bhagavad Gita. In fact, viewing a nuclear explosion can induce a variety of religious experience (apologies to William James). We’re engulfed by the sight of the mushroom cloud unfurling and billowing in slow, majestic motion. An inner peace obtains. Never mind that it’s as insidious as being aroused by a snuff film. Full Story »

Blame it on Dick Lugar. He provided Barack Obama with living proof that a Republican could work towards a bipartisan end with a Democrat. The most senior senator of his party, he’s the last of a dying breed — a Republican who’s both willing to meet the Democrats halfway and actually work with them. Lugar, of course, is most noted for the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program that he sponsored in 1992 along with former Democratic Senator Sam Nunn.

Its purpose was to secure and dismantle weapons of mass destruction in the former Soviet Union states in accordance with disarmament treaties such as SALT II. To give you an example of how positive a force a Republican can be, this program has eliminated 6,312 nuclear warheads — and that’s just the tip of its iceberg. Of course, the recent, regressed breed of feral Republicans claim that the program only frees up Russian money for new weapons programs. Perhaps, but at least they’re conventional weapons. Full Story »

THE DEPROLIFERATOR — President Obama’s appearance at the United Nations this week was intended as a show with a sideshow. First, he became the first U.S. president to chair an “extraordinary” session of the Security Council, with the nations represented not by diplomats but by actual heads of state, not diplomats. The council approved President Obama’s resolution legalizing military action against states daring to weaponize their nuclear power program.

The sideshow, at which Secretary of State Hillary Clinton represented the United States in a conference “complementary” — as opposed to extraordinary — to the Security Council session, produced a general recommitment to the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). Full Story »

THE DEPROLIFERATOR — No, the Laptop of Mass Destruction (LMD) isn’t embedded with a chip that can be programmed to blow up the world. Better known as the Laptop of Death, this computer was supposedly stolen from Iran complete with 1,000 pages of documents innocuously referred to as the “alleged studies.”

What they’re “alleged” to do is prove that Iran is building a nuclear weapon. In fact, “charges based on those documents,” wrote investigative reporter Gareth Porter in 2008, “pose the only remaining obstacles to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) declaring that Iran has resolved all unanswered questions about its nuclear program.” Full Story »

THE DEPROLIFERATOR — Two days of nuclear reckoning are bearing down fast on the Obama administration. First, it’s scrambling to complete what’s called a nuclear posture review (posture n. Position assumed by President Obama on a specified issue, e.g., supine or prone) in time for renewal of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty I in December. START I, as it’s known, has carved sizable swathes out of nuclear arsenals, a process which Obama and Russian President Medvedev indicated a willingness to further accelerate in a preliminary meeting.

Meanwhile, a special U.N. Security Council meeting (also presumably to pave the way for the new, improved START) that President Obama is convening on September 24 inspired a Newsweek piece two weeks ago entitled Why Obama Should Learn to Love the Bomb. The title was likely slapped on by an editor, but the piece itself is no less glib. Full Story »

THE DEPROLIFERATOR — In a previous post, I wrote about how the Obama administration should borrow a page from master framers like George Lakoff and Drew Westen. It should present its disarmament initiatives as honoring the man who’s a latter-day saint to many — Ronald Reagan — by realizing his dream of a world free of nuclear weapons.

And make no mistake, as Paul Boyer writes in an Arms Control Today review of a new book, Reagan’s Secret War: The Untold Story of His Fight to Save the World From Nuclear Disaster, according to authors Martin Anderson and Annelise Anderson. . .

Above all else, Reagan was a man of peace whose unwavering objective, rooted in his personal history and reinforced by his brush with death in 1981, was a world free of nuclear weapons. Full Story »

THE DEPROLIFERATOR — Ever wonder why Mohamed ElBaradei, retiring director-general of a wonkish international agency like the International Atomic Agency (IAEA), was forced to play Secret Agent Man during his tenure while the IAEA aped Interpol? After all, as conceived in 1956, the three pillars of the IAEA’s mission were nuclear verification and security, safety, and technology transfer.

Just as I was wondering at what point the IAEA went on the offensive, the answer appeared in an assessment of ElBaradei’s two terms. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is a publication from whose title many instinctively recoil. But its origins, in fact, lay in how the scientists and engineers who had worked on the Manhattan Project recoiled from what they had wrought. Andreas Persbo and Mark Hibbs wrote the article in question, The ElBaradei legacy. Full Story »

THE DEPROLIFERATOR — At New Paradigms Forum, Christopher Ford writes that an attack on our military and commercial satellites “would be no less an act of war than attacking one of our naval vessels on the high seas.” This past spring, he explains, the Obama administration “agreed to Chinese and Russian demands that the U.N. begin discussions on preventing an ‘arms race in outer space’ [by enacting] ‘a worldwide ban on weapons that interfere with military and commercial satellites.’”

Great — sounds like it’s of a piece with the president’s disarmament overtures, right? To Ford, it’s not that sample. In fact, “A ’space weapons ban’ may be an incoherent and perhaps dangerous idea [because] trying to define and prohibit space ‘weaponry,’ [is a] fool’s errand.” Full Story »

THE DEPROLIFERATOR — First, let’s tie up some loose nuclear ends with. . . Nukes in the News.

• Remember the 2007 NIE (National Intelligence Report) which declared that Iran had abandoned any development of nuclear weapons in 2007? Well, at Inter Press Service, investigative reporter and historian Gareth Porter writes:

Western officials leaked stories. . . last week aimed at pressuring the outgoing chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, to include a summary of intelligence alleging that Iran has been actively pursuing work on nuclear weapons in the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] report due out this week. [More when that appears -- RW.] … the stories suggested that ElBaradei has been guilty of a cover-up in refusing to publish information he has had since last September alleging that Iran has continued to pursue research on developing nuclear weapons. [Why? The usual charge: to] “undermine the U.S. sanctions drive.” Full Story »

THE DEPROLIFERATOR — In the eighties it became more and more difficult to kill movie monsters dead. They’d re-surface again and again like your favorite musical artist in live performance with encores upon encores. Neither were monsters, supposedly dead once and for all, immune to resurrection. In one installment of the Friday the 13th series, Jason Voorhees was brought back to life via telekinesis.

But the entire premise of the 1985 film Reanimator was reviving the dead, a subject which has also been on the mind of Joseph Cirincione, who, as the president of the Ploughshares Fund, is as able as he is visible a spokesperson for disarmament. He was recently quoted in a Global Security report (thanks to Armchair Generalist for the heads-up): Full Story »

The Deproliferator

In its constant quest to out-clever itself, Slate.com ran a series last week entitled How Is America Going To End? After readers participated via a “Choose Your Own Apocalypse” interactive feature, Slate reported:

The most popular out of 144 scenarios was loose nukes: “Taliban fighters wrest nuclear weapons from a destabilized Pakistan. Or al-Qaida acquires a small arsenal of nukes from a disintegrating Russia. … The nonstate actors launch against the United States in an attack exponentially worse than 9/11.” Full Story »

Basic cable is known for running even more commercials than network TV does. Its shows are best watched after recording them with DVR or TiVo to eliminate the need to sit through the ads. But some of us can’t wait and watch our favorite shows in real time. Cursing the commercials, we vow never again to watch without recording first.

Premium cable shows like The Sopranos and The Wire have won critical acclaim and millions of dedicated fans. Basic-cable series seldom, if ever, inspire that kind of reaction and, judging by production quality alone, perhaps they don’t deserve it. But, in recent years, basic-cable series have hired actors just as good as premium cable, not to mention network TV, which may have written them off as too old. Full Story »

The Deproliferator

The development of nuclear weapons can be a significant source of national pride. When Pakistan successfully detonated five nuclear devices during its first underground test in 1998, it was reported: “They were dancing in the streets of Pakistan. … People handed out candies, set off fireworks and fired guns into the air.” They felt the playing field had been leveled with India and its nuclear weapons.

In the years since, extremists have come to view Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal as the Islamic bomb. Perhaps they’re simply justifying their designs on it, but they hope to use it — hopefully for deterrence only — in the service of the coming caliphate. Aside from that instance, nuclear weapons are seldom considered the property of a religion. Full Story »

The Deproliferator

If Israel and Iran are playing rock, scissors, paper with their nuclear-weapons programs, Israel wins hands down. Kinetic beats potential energy to the punch and Israel is already armed.

On August 3, the Times of London published a story titled Iran is ready to build an N-bomb — it is just waiting for the Ayatollah’s order. (Since the Times is a Murdoch paper the reader is advised to proceed at his own risk.) The Times team writes:

Iran has perfected the technology to create and detonate a nuclear warhead and is merely awaiting the word from its Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to produce its first bomb, Western intelligence sources have told The Times. Full Story »