Author Archives: kerr

Dhanapala-Mania

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I recently learned that Jayantha Dhanapala, has a “website”:http://www.jayanthadhanapala.com/ehome.html, though I’m not sure he considers it a blog.

Among other things, Dhanapala chaired the 1995 NPT RevCon, which resulted in the indefinite extension of that treaty. He was also the UN undersecretary-general for disarmament affairs.

ACA has some stuff from him that you can check out, including his “speech”:http://www.armscontrol.org/aca/dhanapala.asp at the January 2k2 ACA annual meeting and a “1999 _ACT_ interview.”:http://www.armscontrol.org/act/1999_09-10/dhaso.asp

Bloggery

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Anya recently exhorted me to make more with Teh Blogging, so blog I shall.

For starters, check out the “Platts blog Fuel for Thought.”:http://www.platts.com/weblog/europower/

Since I’m uncreative, I’ll add a NOFX vid. They’ve been around for at least 23 years, if you wanna feel old.

Happy Birthday, Pelindaba Treaty!

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To celebrate the 12th anniversary of the signing of the African Nuclear Weapon-Free Zone Treaty (Pelindaba Treaty), the talented folks at the CNS International Organizations and Nonproliferation Program (IONP) put together a “*resource page on the Pelindaba Treaty*”:http://cns.miis.edu/research/treaty_pelindaba/index.htm.

On March 26, Mozambique became the 24th state party to ratify the Treaty, which means the African Nuclear Weapon-Free Zone needs concrete action of just four more states to become a reality. CNS has been actively engaged in promoting the Treaty’s entry into force, so aside from the all you need to know on the Pelindaba Treaty, the resource page also features presentations from a recent “workshop in Pretoria”:http://cns.miis.edu/research/treaty_pelindaba/pdfs/pelindaba_workshop_summary.pdf, organized by CNS and Africa’s Institute for Security Studies. An accompanying “piece”:http://www.cns.miis.edu/pubs/week/080331_pelindaba.htm by IONP’s Jean du Preez concludes:

If one looks at the current state of affairs regarding the Pelindaba Treaty, then the conclusion should clearly be that the *glass is half full* instead of the more negative half empty perspective.

[snip]

The *challenge before African countries*, and in particular those that have not yet ratified the treaty, *should therefore not be how to implement the accord, but who will become the 28th state party*, thereby taking credit for ensuring that the longest aspired NWFZ in the world will finally become a reality. Then the symbolism attached to the Zulu name of the treaty, which roughly translates into “the matter or discussion is settled”, will have true meaning. It will not only signal the end of the struggle to make Africa free of nuclear weapons, but it would be *a real step towards a nuclear weapons free world*, and not simply a vision of such a goal.

Foodies

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Way off-topic but the below comment from “this post”:http://blogs.tnr.com/tnr/blogs/the_plank/archive/2008/04/02/economic-indicators-fast-food-edition.aspx must be shared:

bq. Well, as a lifelong bachelor for 37 years, I’d say I stopped going into restaurants where you tip a waiter or waitress about 10 years ago. I’ve always averred that it’s woefully wasteful. Why the hell should I pay extra just for someone to bring my food to the table? I’m perfectly capable of doing that myself. And the way I see it, food is just something I need to survive. That’s why I either get 99-cent items at Burger King, Jack in the Box, or McDonalds or buy 99-cent microwavable items from the grocery store — I don’t need overpriced baby-back ribs from Chili’s and the like. It’s just frigging food any way you slice it. What really cracks me up are elderly people who go to overpriced cafeterias for food they’re perfectly capable of fixing at home, because they’re the ones who gripe that Social Security isn’t enough income yet blow crucial dollars of their income for eating out. Nowhere in the Constitution is it written that they’re entitled the money to eat out, nor is it written that a family of 4 is equally entitled to eat at Appleby’s and T.G.I. Fridays and the like every weekend like so many families robotically do as if they’re all pod people. So bravo to fast-food places that are getting improved business nowadays. They offer nondescript food at good prices that *may not be as tasty as meat at Outback Steakhouse but are perfectly fine nevertheless.*

[Via “Atrios.”:http://atrios.blogspot.com/2008_03_30_archive.html#5721364284554182839]

I cannot believe that someone typed that last sentence. Or any of the sentences above it, for that matter.

Anyway, this post’s value-added is a reaction from FoKerr _TBR_. Speaking of her former in-laws, she wrote that:

One time they were talking to my mother about visiting Charleston, where they have a condo and where my parents had just taken a trip. My mom was trying to talk to them about it, and was gushing about all the great restaurants, how the seafood was so fresh, etc. My mother in law stared at her and said, *”We just go to Applebees. There’s no need for the rest of that nonsense.”*

Then she went back to Canton, Ohio and told the rest of her family that my parents were snobs.

Snobs, indeed. If I ate seafood, Charleston would be a prime destination.

CWC RevCon Blogs

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“Cheryl Vos”::http://fas.org/blog/cw/ of FAS, as well as “Daniel Feakes,”:http://cwc2008.org/ have good blogs to keep a eye on if you wanna keep up with the CWC Review Conference, which is taking place this week.

Cheryl “blogged about”:http://fas.org/blog/cw/2008/04/highlights-from-march-issue-of-arms-control-today.html the CWC pieces in the “March issue”:http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2008_03/ of _ACT_, so I didn’t have to. Check them out as well. Speaking of which, ACA’s CWC reader is “here.”:http://www.armscontrol.org/pdf/CWC2008_READERWEB.pdf

Leopold the Cat and NATO

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This is kind of silly, but since we’ve previously talked about “Putinisms”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/1093/putin-on-iran, I just thought I’d continue the tradition by mentioning that the *”Let’s be friends, guys”* comment “made by Vladimir Putin”:http://en.rian.ru/russia/20080404/103767083.html at the NATO summit in Bucharest puts in mind of a classic Soviet-era cartoon about a cat named Leopold (“Приключения Кота Леопольда”).

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In the cartoon, Leopold gets hassled and taunted by two pesky mice, who chant “Leopold, come out, you sleazy coward!” (Леопольд, выходи, подлый трус!). At the end of every episode, the mice tell Leopold that they are sorry for causing him trouble, to which Leopold responds “Guys, let’s be friends.” (Ребята, давайте жить дружно!)

I can’t quite picture Putin with a big purple bow tie… But you should check out an episode (or more) of the cartoon “here”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhZPtWYZmUA.

Russia’s Multilateral Fuel Cycle Initiative Slooooowly Inches Forward

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Just thought I’d remind that Russia’s international uranium enrichment center at “Angarsk”:http://www.aecc.ru/eng/index.php is still alive and kicking. The center, which was legally incorporated in Sep 2007, is a joint venture (90:10) between Russia’s Tenex and Kazakhstan’s Kazatomprom. (For a recap of how this is supposed to work, see “INFCIRC/708”:http://www.iaea.org/Publications/Documents/Infcircs/2007/infcirc708.pdf, a “Tenex perspective”:http://www.iaea.org/Publications/Magazines/Bulletin/Bull481/htmls/nuclear_fuel_cycle.html, and “this presentation”:http://www.world-nuclear.org/sym/2006/pdf/kirienkoppt.pdf by Rosatom’s Sergey Kiriyenko.)

In early 2008, Russia had reportedly secured buy-in from another country — “Armenia”:http://www.rosatom.com/en/news/8276_06.02.2008. According to a Feb 25 issue of _NuclearFuel_, Moscow promised to invest an additional $3 million into uranium prospecting in Armenia. The Armenian uranium would be enriched at the center in Angarsk, “RIA Novosti”:http://en.rian.ru/world/20080306/100851195.html reported. While Armenia’s share (which will come from Tenex’s 90 percent) is not yet known, Yerevan’s commitment finally gives the center a much needed third participant.

Rosatom is still struggling to get “Ukraine”:http://www.rosatom.com/en/news/8377_13.02.2008 to commit to the project, while discussions with other reportedly interested countries — Uzbekistan, Mongolia, and South Korea — don’t seem to have advanced too far. Russia has also pitched an Angarsk “investment option”:http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/2007/11/20/stories/2007112052621000.htm to India, conditioning it on NSG exemption.

Russia very much wants Angarsk to be safeguarded for purposes of transparency. However, I haven’t seen any updates on whether Rosatom’s negotiations with the IAEA on the type of safeguards to be applied at Angarsk have concluded. (In Dec 2007, Rosatom’s Nikolay Spassky indicated that the target time frame for an agreement was “early 2008”:http://www.rosatom.com/en/news/7469_12.12.2007.) Moreover, costs of safeguards implementation at the Angarsk facility present an additional issue. (As Andreas Persbo blogged “here”:http://verificationthoughts.blogspot.com/2007/10/full-house-russia-ratifies-additional.html complete with a mishka picture.) Oh, yeah, here is the link to newly updated text of Russia’s “INFCIRC/327”:https://161.5.1.75/Publications/Documents/Infcircs/2008/infcirc327a1.pdf.

Finally, the PIR Center also has a useful “Angarsk chronology”:http://pircenter.org/index.php?id=1976&PHPSESSID=b261d51f64a50c270f17c0bb0d6cb69e.

*Update:* Just to clarify, early on in the project Russia had indicated that it wanted the LEU product and possibly some facilities of the international uranium enrichment center to be under IAEA safeguards. As I wrote above, there is no agreement in place yet, but it appears that facility safeguards are likely to be prohibitive (because of costs, manpower, etc). *Fred McGoldrick wrote in to say that based on his understanding of the present situation, the IAEA safeguards will end up applying only to the LEU product.*

My Ears Are Ringing

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Two people recently were kind enough to mention (positively) some stuff I wrote back in the day. “In _CJR_,”:http://www.cjr.org/cover_story/lost_over_iran.php Eric Umansky referred to “this piece”:http://thebulletin.metapress.com/content/747720r27638k367/fulltext.pdf I did for the _Bulletin_ about Iran. And Hugh Gusterson “mentioned”:http://cns.miis.edu/pubs/npr/vol15/151_gusterson.pdf in _NPR_ a couple of _ACT_ pieces I wrote about North Korea.

There are also some very kind words in the comments of “this _ACW_ post.”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/1819/who-debunked-the-uep

I’m an amateur media critic at best, but I thought I’d offer a few quick observations about media coverage.

* Reporters should, as often as possible, mention publications, organizations, etc. that they get information from. Press mentions help keep nonprofits around to provide said information.

* Obviously, there are bad reporters out there. But people have to remember that newspapers are organizations. Therefore, lots of other people have input in deciding which stories run, how they’re placed, how long they are, etc. So when stuff gets covered badly, or not at all, it’s not necessarily the reporters’ fault.

* Proper resources matter. One of the luxuries that I had at _ACT_ was the chance to focus on a few issues and work on monthly deadlines. Obviously, I can’t speak to the specific situations of papers like the _Post_ or the _NYT_, but newspaper reporters generally have larger portfolios than I ever did and also work on daily deadlines. It seems reasonable to think that having more reporters, researchers, fact-checkers, etc. would improve coverage.

As _The Wire’s_ David Simon said in “this _New Yorker_ profile”:http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/10/22/071022fa_fact_talbot

bq. The newsroom I worked in had four hundred and fifty people. Now it’s got three hundred. Management says, ‘We have to do more with less.’ *That’s the bullshit of bean counters who care only about the bottom line. You do less with less.”*

* As bad as press reporting can be, TV is generally about a billion times worse. And that’s where more people get their information from.

* Reporters should stop quoting hacks who don’t know what they’re talking about and constantly get things wrong.

Russian Defense Industry Bonanza

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The Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies (CAST) recently released a new issue of the “Moscow Defense Brief”:http://mdb.cast.ru/ — a one-stop shop for Russian defense industry and arms trade junkies.

This issue of MDB provides an insight into “developments in the Russian defense sector in 2007”:http://mdb.cast.ru/mdb/4-2007/item_4/article_1/, which included restructuring of Russia’s arms trade monopolist “Rosoboronexport”:http://www.roe.ru/ into Russian Technologies corporation and the continuation of Russia’s obsession with consolidation of defense enterprises into state-owned holdings. In addition, an article on “preliminary arms trade results”:http://mdb.cast.ru/mdb/4-2007/item_3/article_2/ mentions that Russia may transfer the S-300 air-defense system to Iran after all (see a “RIA Novosti backgrounder”:http://en.rian.ru/russia/20071228/94513968.html). I’ve worked with the guys at CAST and I really like them, but I am a little skeptical that this transfer is actually pending. Finally, the MDB provides summaries of “major contracts”:http://mdb.cast.ru/mdb/4-2007/item_5/article_1/ and “major deliveries”:http://mdb.cast.ru/mdb/4-2007/item_5/article_2/ of Russian weapons systems in 2007.

Speaking of the S-300, Turkey apparently still “can’t make up its mind”:http://www.todayszaman.com/tz-web/detaylar.do?load=detay&link=136740 on whether it prefers the Russian air-defense system to the U.S. Patriot. Hopefully, it will choose soon — so that it can make the awesome tables in the “Conventional Arms Transfers to Developing Nations”:http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/weapons/RL34187.pdf come fall.

Janne Nolan on the Nuclear Posture Review in The Bulletin

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I earlier “noted”:http://www.totalwonkerr.net/1591/new-blogger to Paul in a rather tongue-in-cheek fashion that I wasn’t a member of the Monterey Mafia because my master’s degree was not from the “Monterey Institute”:http://www.miis.edu/. Instead, I am allegedly a member of the much lesser known (unless one works for the GAO, from what I gather) mafia clan from the University of Pittsburgh’s “GSPIA”:http://www.gspia.pitt.edu/.

This random tiny fact is worth a mention because GSPIA’s own “Janne Nolan”:http://www.gspia.pitt.edu/new_asp/faculty_staff/bio.asp?id=52 has a timely article, co-authored with James Holmes, in the March/April issue of _The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists_, which dissects the dashed hopes for transformation of the U.S. nuclear posture during the Clinton years. Having listened to quite a few of Janne’s amazing lectures (in hand with reading “_An Elusive Consensus_”:http://www.brookings.edu/press/Books/1999/elusive_consensus.aspx and the equally compelling _Guardians of the Arsenal_), it’s really exciting to see her offer up a “primer for the next president” on ways to go about conducting a reassessment of nuclear policy. Nolan and Holmes begin as follows:

“Much as critics of the Bush administration may wish that January 20, 2009 would automatically change U.S. diplomacy and reignite nuclear disarmament efforts, national policy is not so easily remade. *Current attitudes have deeper roots, and ushering in a new president will not in itself bring about cutbacks to the nation’s nuclear arsenal or improvements to U.S. nuclear strategy. In fact, despite his stated good intentions, it was during President Bill Clinton’s tenure that some of the progress made by the first President Bush ground to a halt.* Clinton’s blind spot was that he didn’t understand enough about the nature of bureaucracy.”

You should go and check out the article, which is available for some time “here”:http://thebulletin.metapress.com/content/f1213527155n9w82/fulltext.pdf. I won’t ruin it, but just want to note that the piece details several funny and rather disturbing episodes, namely, the military’s briefings on nuclear war plans to presidents Carter and Reagan and the fact that *Pentagon officials at times perceived representatives of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency as “weirdos.”*