Another live event starts at around 7:30 Eastern time. In honor of (or to upstage) the start of the Winter Olympics in South Korea, North Korea will parade some of its military might. Wonks love this, because North Korea frequently uses their military parades to show off new missiles. Or, with screen caps and close …
Rofer on Nuclear Issues
Victor Cha Won’t Be Trump’s Ambassador To South Korea
Victor Cha has been mentioned as ambassador to South Korea. He is the chair of the Korea program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and is director of Asian studies at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. He served as Asia director at the NSC under George W. Bush and participated in the Six-Party talks …
Victor Cha Won’t Be Trump’s Ambassador To South KoreaPost + Comments (122)
The Protection Racket
Trump has a pattern: take something that is working well – DACA, S-CHIP, JCPOA (the Iran nuclear agreement) – break it just a little, then “negotiate.” So much of the current crisis atmosphere is due to his love of chaos and his mistaking a protection racket for negotiating. He broke DACA and set up a …
The Secret For Comedy Is….
…wait for it… …wait for it… …wait for it… …wait for it… … … … Timing: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has decided to postpone its session on nuclear attack preparedness next week. Much attention had been drawn to the timing of the agency’s session, which was publicized just days after President Trump touted the …
PSA: Potassium Iodide
I see that, with Donald Trump’s threats of nuclear war, sales of potassium iodide are up. A couple of reminders. Potassium iodide protects your thyroid from absorbing radioactive iodine, which is one of the fission products that would be spread around in a nuclear war. But it’s only one, and potassium iodide doesn’t protect against …
‘Tis The Season
For another war, because why not? The ones the last Republican President started are going so well. Earlier this week, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said that he was ready to start talks with North Korea without precondition. “We’ll talk about the weather if you like,” he said. He omitted the part about their having …
Ruthenium-106 over Europe
In September, a cloud of ruthenium-106 spread over Europe. Ruthenium-106 is used in nuclear medicine, and it is extracted from used nuclear reactor fuel. The amounts were tiny – one of the things about radioactive materials is that they can be detected at very, very low concentrations. There are many atmospheric sampling stations around …