Honoring America's Veterans

• It is essential that we take time to express our thanks for the service and sacrifice of the men and women who have worn the cloth of this nation. But we must always take care that our gratitude -- as a people, society and country -- extends beyond symbols and words.
• Our newest generation of veterans, including the more than 1.6 million Americans who have served or are serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, faces difficult challenges. They were deployed more frequently and for longer periods than their predecessors had been in decades
• We can and must keep working to meet our commitments to our returning service members. The honor of our veterans and their families -- past, present and future -- demands nothing less.

• Despite Barack Obama’s stated goal of engagement, harsh new sanctions are seeming likelier by the day, with the U.S. Congress already approving legislation that would prohibit petroleum companies that work with Iran from doing business in the United States, and intensive negotiations already underway over what U.N. sanctions would look like.
• Tehran has spent the past two years developing a comprehensive plan to mitigate the effects of strengthened sanctions. It seeks to reduce domestic gasoline consumption, secure alternative gasoline import sources, and increase domestic production -- eventually, boosting indigenous capacity until Iran is self-sufficient.
• Here, a briefing on what to look for if sanctions become reality.
  

Confronting Twenty-First Century Nuclear Security Realities - Kenneth Luongo in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists [link]

• The challenges facing today's nonproliferation regime require that existing treaties and international agreements be supplemented with new policies and more flexible mechanisms that retain the international legitimacy of formal treaties.
• There needs to be a new global framework that can specify the threats, integrate the responses, and catalog the commitments of all nations to provide the best security possible for their fissile materials.

Just How 'Secret' is Iran's Nuclear Weapons Program? - Foreign Policy [link]

• Stories that appear in the Times tend to drive the news cycle for the rest of the U.S. media -- broadcast, print, and otherwise -- and soon the relevant experts were being bombarded with calls from other journalists. Was it really true, they asked, that the IAEA had discovered an Iranian program hitherto hidden from the world?
• According to the excerpts, the IAEA has information that the Iranians have conducted design work on a Shahab-3 missile payload that bore all the hallmarks of a nuclear warhead, have worked on the development of high explosives technology of the kind needed to set off a nuclear explosion, and possessed "sufficient information to design and build a crude nuclear weapon."
• It was that particular observation that was singled out by the New York Times and that subsequently prompted some U.S. congressional members to call for a hard line on Iran -- despite the vagueness of the claim.
• The answer to that question -- whether Iran is working on nuclear weapons right now -- remains muddled. On one count the experts agree: The press doesn't have a particularly good record of communicating the complexity of the issues involved. 

Changes at the United Nations - FAS Strategic Security Blog [link]

• In other words, the new administration recognizes the value in collective action to solve global problems, and at the 64th annual meeting of the UN General Assembly this year, the U.S. began putting some specific meaning behind President Obama’s general statements.
• More than anything, this change – if it turns out to be genuine – will help advance President Obama’s non-proliferation goals at the upcoming NPT Review Conference.

How Russian Nukes Power America - Foreign Policy Passport [link]

• The New York Times reports 10 percent of electricity in the United States is generated from old nuclear bombs. For comparison, hydropower accounts for 6 percent and solar, biomass, wind and geothermal combined account for 3 percent.  
• 45 percent of nuclear fuel in American reactors comes from old Soviet bombs. The problem is that the fuel is running out, and in order to keep powering 4.5 percent of the United States more disarmament is needed.

A View from the Dark Side

Obama's Iran Diplomacy Isn't Working - Con Coughlin in the Wall Street Journal [link]

• Five months after the first street protests against the sham re-election of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad rocked the regime to its core, it's time to assess the Obama Administration's "outstretched hand" policy.
• From the stalled nuclear talks to the Islamic Republic's deteriorating human-rights situation, it seems the mullahs have tightened, not unclenched, their fists.
• With the Iranian nuclear program making steady progress, it's time for President Obama to acknowledge that his diplomacy has failed.