In fact, death rays do not exist. Not neutron bombs, not whatever is causing Havana Syndrome (Anomalous Health Incidents). I am sad to be the bearer of these tidings, but whatever role a death ray pistol plays in your fantasies, it will have to stay fantastic. The big problem is the amount of power required for your typical death ray, if you assume that there are physical and biological principles that allow killing people without leaving a mark. I’m not saying it’s impossible, just that nobody has shown how it works, the energy interaction with the human body. Yes, neutrons can fry living org ..read more

I have been involved recently in some activities labeled “feminist foreign policy.” A podcast on “the intricate world of feminist foreign policy” caught my eye, not least for the strange adjective. The page for the podcast, along with the promotion above, which came in an email, are not promising. The two featured speakers are men: William Alberque, the Director of Strategy, Technology, and Arms Control for the International Institute of Strategic Studies, and Louis Reitmann, a Research Associate from the Vienna Centre for Disarmament and Non-Proliferation since 2022. Both are given short bios ..read more

The Russians have stolen the largest nuclear power plant in Europe. Nataliya Gumenyuk, with the help of Angelina Kariakina, Inna Zolotukhina, and Hanna Sylayeva, prepared a report for the Reckoning Project, which documents Russian warcrimes in Ukraine. [CW: The report contains descriptions of torture by the Russians of plant operators. I do not include any of that description in this post.] The Russians have occupied the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant since early in the war. They have militarized the plant, storing equipment there and having mined its perimeter. The six reactors are shut dow ..read more

The Republican attempt at impeaching President Joe Biden on the basis of his son’s actions has collapsed with the revelation that their star witness, Alexander Smirnov, was working with Russian intelligence. They’re trying to put up another, even weaker, attempt at impeachment to distract from this embarrassment. The Russians have interfered in the last several US elections. They have used bots to distribute misinformation on social media along with much more complex operations. The release of Hillary Clinton’s emails had Russian involvement. And now we learn that Hunter Biden’s laptop was a R ..read more

The US Department of Justice issued a superseding indictment against Takeshi Ebisawa, a leader in the Yakuza international organized crime syndicate. Ebisawa was already charged with narcotics and weapons trafficing. Now nuclear materials trafficking has been added to the charges. Ebisawa offered an undercover agent representing himself as an intermediary for an Iranian general samples of what he said was a large amount of thorium, uranium, and plutonium in exchange for weapons including surface-to-air missiles. The fissile material was said to come from Burma, the destination of the weapons ..read more

I’ve always been dubious about the value of wargames. They may uncover weaknesses and provide some idea of how a strategy might work out, but they are played by real human beings with their own sets of unstated assumptions. Those humans are playing against other humans toward which they harbor feelings – good or bad. All that goes into the play. Trying to fully automate them is no better. The automation is done by humans with all those mixed motives. Then there is the fundamental problem that we don’t know the enemy’s mind. Other variables will be lacking. There may be some analytical usefulne ..read more

I guess I’m going to have to write something about this. It’s a tempest in a samovar. I wrote that post just after Mike Turner (R-OH) came out as Chicken Little. It has stood up well. It appears that Turner’s primary purpose seems to be to show a need to continue Section 702 surveillance. His secondary purpose may be to imply that the Biden administration is unprepared. Russia may be thinking of putting nuclear weapons into orbit. Most of the articles in response to Turner need not have been written. An enormous number of articles have been published speculating on whatever this NEW WEAPON ..read more

Both Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan spoke at Davos. Blinken was interviewed by Thomas Friedman. Sullivan gave a short talk and then did a Q&A with Børge Brende, president of the World Economic Forum. The two said very similar things; this administration controls its messages carefully. Further, their messages are consistent with a report on what they called foreign policy for the middle class. It was written in 2020, before the election, and Sullivan was a co-author. I haven’t read the report for a year or more, but its themes continue through ..read more

Robert Carlin and Siegfried Hecker are concerned that this time Kim Jong Un may really mean his threats of war. Both are experienced watchers of North Korea. There does seem to be something different about the current threats. Kim has declared South Korea no longer a missing part of the true Korea, but rather an implacable enemy. He has cut off interactions between the two countries. He has made a number of threats, including that North Korea has tested an underwater drone that can cause a “nuclear tsunami.” If that drone sounds familiar, it should. It is one of the triad of supposedly new tec ..read more

The cartoon and title of the post, of course, are from the Pogo comic strip. The new bomb that the Parson yearns for is the hydrogen bomb. Walt Kelly drew this one in the early 1950s, before Ed Teller’s triumph. The conventions were still being developed, and the Parson speaks candidly of what is now referred to as deterrence. I recently read Lawrence Freedman’s The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy. I recommend it. Nuclear strategy during the 1950s took some big swings because the idea of total destruction was new, and the balance between the contenders swung widely. By the 1960s, things had set ..read more