Former U.S. Air Force Secretary Thomas Reed knows nuclear bombs better than most people. For starters, he designed two of them when he worked at the Livermore National Laboratory as a weapons designer.

His new book The Nuclear Express: A Political History of the Bomb and Its Proliferation, co-written with Danny Stillman, the former director of the technical intelligence division at Los Alamos National Laboratory, rewrites much of the public understanding about how countries with nuclear weapons came to acquire them. All countries that built bombs, including the United States, spied on or were given access to the work of other nuclear powers. In particular, the book is a scathing indictment of the Chinese government, alleging that it intentionally proliferated nuclear technology to risky regimes, particularly Pakistan. Read the rest of this entry »

Polish Army Col. Ryszard Kuklinski was one of the most successful CIA spies of the Cold War, and his exploits read like a manual for clandestine tradecraft. Read the rest of this entry »

The U.S. government has already spent $904 billion since 2001 to wage wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and both of those conflicts are far from over. Read the rest of this entry »

Barack Obama owes much of his political success to his early and vocal opposition to the war in Iraq, campaigning on the promise of a timeline for U.S. troops to leave the country. Two weeks after his election, the Iraqis themselves signed an agreement with the outgoing Bush administration requiring that all troops leave Iraqi cities by next year and the country by 2012. Read the rest of this entry »

The international community urgently needs to establish legal norms when it comes to computer and online crimes to help define and deter a problem that is escalating in severity, cyber security experts say. Read the rest of this entry »