A blog on missiles, nuclear deterrence, alcohol, and any combination thereof
A Desire for Safety is a Headache for Arms Control A note for folks: I am going to be cross-posting everything on this website with my Substack and vise versa. Choose whichever format you want. The United States government has stopped beating around the bush and finally come out and directly accused China of conducting [ ]
Arms control is almost always discussed within the context of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. And this is for good reason. The vast majority of arms control efforts over the past 80 years have focused on finding ways to control weapons of mass destruction. But often overlooked is the fact that arms control has existed [ ]
I had thought to write something discussing what we can and cannot evaluate about the technical performance of Iranian missile systems during the 12 Day War, but in the act of writing it, I realized that such a thing could not be feasibly discussed without a more comprehensive discussion of the war itself, its causes [ ]
Well. That could have gone worse. This is the first of four blog posts I have planned looking at different aspects of the 12-Day War. This first one will deal with the question on everyone’s mind: Iranian nuclear breakout. In the coming weeks, we will also cover Iran’s missile performance, some ruminations on implications [ ]
Recently I’ve seen a couple comments on how Russian success in the domain of nuclear coercion is likely emboldening China. I’m always skeptical when “emboldening” gets thrown around, as in 99% of cases you’re relying on an effectively unevidenced causal mechanism. You’re basically saying “X is working for Y country, therefore Z country will use [ ]
Jonathan Finer, a former Principal Deputy National Security Advisor, dropped a real bombshell back in December when he mentioned during a panel that Pakistan was pursuing an ICBM capability with the United States in mind as a potential target. Pakistan’s interest in a large diameter solid motor missile is entirely unsurprising to me, because I’ve [ ]
Christmas has come early, the DoD has finally dropped this year’s China Military Power Report. Nothing in this year’s report was all that surprising, but it did reveal some interesting points about how the DoD is counting things up and where we can expect to see China deterrent go in the future. I have some [ ]
Now that Trump has been reelected and the situation on the frontline seems bleak for Ukraine, the conversation has turned to the possibility that Ukraine could somehow extract itself from its current situation by pulling a nuclear Hail Mary. Everyone – from, apparently, anonymous government officials demonstrating their ignorance by suggesting the US could “return” [ ]
Iran’s recent missile strikes on Nevatim Air Force base only achieved limited damage, but it did give us a lot of data to play with to see precisely how accurate their missiles are under real world conditions. I’ve already crunched the numbers and they’re not particularly impressive. Iranian missiles likely have a CEP of around [ ]
On October 1st, Iran launched another ballistic missile attack on Israel, and unlike last time, this time a large number of Iranian ballistic missile systems appear to have impacted various target areas in Israel. Here is what we know so far: Iran launched around 180 ballistic missiles, and this time they used some of their [ ]