I wanted to mention that Dennis Gormley’s amazing book “Missile Contagion: Cruise Missile Proliferation and the Threat to International Security”:http://www.greenwood.com/psi/book_detail.aspx?sku=C9836 is out. I’ve read the manuscript several times already, but having just received my own copy of the actual book, I can’t wait to dig into it again. There will be an “official book roll-out”:http://cns.miis.edu/cns/media/pr080626_missile_contagion.pdf on July 24 (at the Stimson Center’s quarters in DC), moderated by Janne Nolan, which I will remind about closer to the date. You should come.

In any case, I’ve been thinking that I should blog more about my favorite cruise missile — the “BrahMos”:http://www.brahmos.com/. So, stay tuned for some BrahMos mania coming your way soon. In the meantime, as a decent backgrounder, see this slightly dated “_WMD Insights_ piece”:http://www.wmdinsights.com/I23/I23_SA1_IndiaExpands.htm that I wrote with an Indian colleague.

And here is the legend of the BrahMos, “as recalled by a former head of Russia’s NPO Mash”:http://mdb.cast.ru/mdb/1-2004/at/hy/:

bq. _Dr. Kalam had been on a trip to Russia, where he had visited St. Petersburg and walked along the banks of the Neva – he later even wrote a poem about this river. He suggested that the enterprise be called BrahmNev, combining the names of the prominent Indian and Russian rivers. We pointed out that Mashinostroyenia is located in the Moscow region, so it would be more proper to take the name from the Brahmaputra and Moskva rivers. This is how this name – BrahMos – appeared._