Holding the line on missile defense?; CTBT, nuclear disarmament back on the agenda; U.S. nuclear modernization: too little, too late?; ABL's blaze of glory

A funny thing happened in the skies over Norway last month. On Dec. 10, as U.S. President Barack Obama geared up to deliver his acceptance speech before the Nobel Prize Committee in Oslo, spectators outdoors were treated to a spectacular display of spiraling light. The cause was not a UFO, as some contended, but a failed test of the Bulava, Russia's newest sea-launched intercontinental ballistic missile. The episode was a telling reminder of the shifting strategic balance between Washington and the rest of the world.

U.S. missile defense: deliberately minimalist?; Chinese missile capabilities changing Pentagon's Asian calculus; More Aegist ships on the horizon; The PRC plans for conflict in space; Rethinking missile defense in Japan

GMD, RIP; Mistiming the Iranian missile threat?; The mirage of "zero"

A nuclear scramble; Khatami throws his hat in the ring; From Washington, an affirmation of diplomatic intent

NATO in search of a diplomatic "thaw" with Russia;
Tentative Russo-Ukrainian energy deal unravels

Is Iran seeking nuclear weapons? For some, despite the mounting evidence, this is still very much an open question. Not, however, for Delpech, director of strategic affairs at the French Atomic Energy Commission and senior research fellow at the Center for International Studies in Paris. "[T]he quest for an atomic weapon is the only credible explanation" for the pattern of delay, secrecy, and obfuscation exhibited by Iran's ayatollahs over their nuclear effort, she writes.

An early test for Obama;
Putin for president once again?

 Over the past few years we have been witnessing the slow rolling defeat of the United States at the hands of North Korea. In the past six years this charter member of the Axis of Evil, a country with a nominal GDP slightly less than Aruba — and GDP per capita one-thirteenth that of the island paradise — has gone from being an isolated remnant of Stalinist political theory in action to joining the nuclear club and becoming a major weapons-of-mass-destruction proliferator. This took place while the United States asserted that North Korea should not, must not, will not be allowed to go nuclear, but obviously could not figure out how to get the North to cooperate.