The IAEA thinks that Iran has tested advanced nuclear warhead designs:

Iran has rejected most of the IAEA material on weaponisation as forgeries, but has admitted carrying out tests on multiple high-explosive detonations synchronised to within a microsecond. Tehran has told the agency that there is a civilian application for such tests, but has so far not provided any evidence for them.

LOL. You gotta love the understated British commentary:

Western weapons experts say there are no such civilian applications…

A politer way of saying “liar, liar, pants on fire.”

China starts trying to figure out how to manage piracy off Somalia:

The prospect of each country being given responsibility for a certain area of ocean, instead of having navies take part in extensive joint patrols or follow their own ships, is being welcomed by the shipping industry.

A chief captain with China Shipping Group surnamed Zhang said more extensive coverage of the waters off Africa would be especially welcome now, at a time when pirates are starting to venture far beyond the 60th meridian line, which had once seemed to be the limit of the pirates’ range.

The Chinese vessel De Xin Hai was hijacked on Oct 19 east of the Seychelles, far from Chinese navy vessels that were escorting ships. It was carrying 76,000 tons of coal, from South Africa to India.

A small step for China towards being a more responsible member of the international community. Why do they care?

“…because Chinese vessels account for about 40 percent of the vessels crossing the Indian Ocean, China is keen to secure these vital water routes,” Yin said.

The IEA will reportedly substantial reduce its long-term forecast for global oil demand. This on top of their previous forecast that all demand growth between 2008 and 2030 would come from non-OECD countries.

The Saudi Arabia of oil demand has decreased its consumption by over 6% from a year ago, dwarfing the growth in Chinese and European consumption.

A classic:

The basic failure of the physical scientists and engineers in their turbulent history during the cold war is not their lack of prescience but their acting frequently as if they had it.

-Albert Wohlstetter, “Scientists, Seers and Strategy,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 41, No. 3(April 1963), pp. 466-478.

The UN pulls 600 staff out of Afghanistan after the Taliban attacked them.

“The United Nations is fully committed to helping all of Afghanistan’s people, as it has been for more than half a century,” the statement said.

If the UN his fully committed to helping the Afghan people, how many casualties is the UN willing to accept in order to do this? I do not ask this facetiously. Insurgents targeted the UN in Iraq in 2003 and caused it to pull out. Clearly, being an aid worker by itself doesn’t assure one’s safety. So how do we expect to deal with these sorts of environments? Just stay out of them? Rely on the military to deliver basic services? Are we going to change our risk calculus for civilians deployed to unstable conflict zones? These are important questions to answer, especially for those who are concerned about American foreign policy becoming overly militarized.

When your country is 1.3 billion people, it isn’t easy to create enough jobs to employ all the young adults who enter your workforce each year. China has turned to the military to try to sop up some of this oversupply of labor.

An estimated 6.1 million college graduates entered the job market this year, joining the 1.8 million graduates who finished school last year but have yet to find work.

A friend gave me a copy of Pop Apocalypse and I started reading it last night. It reads like some of William Gibson’s more recent work, sprinkled with low-calorie shavings of Stephenson’s early work. So far, it’s fun.

For the national security geek crowd, it includes Leviathan-SysAdmin terminology.

Just read The Default Power in the latest Foreign Affairs. It is a serviceable high-level summery of the history and recent writing on American decline.

While Joffe rightly criticizes declinists for simplistically extrapolating linear trends into the future, he doesn’t spend any time justifying why the advantages he focuses upon (ranging from martial character to R&D spending to excellent universities to a demographically healthier workforce) are any more robust. Of course there is an argument to be made that these factors change more slowly that GDPs can - but the argument still needs to be made.

Joffe runs quickly past the difficulties of measuring military power (he focuses on inputs - military spending - and raw naval tonnage), missing several opportunities to move the debate forward by bringing any original or nuanced thinking to the challenge.

It cites some good sources that I’m making sure are in my library; it is a transitorily useful article.

A good LATimes article digging into how the Obama administration manages the Afghan war. It breaks out of the standard bumper stickers and discusses some of the inside baseball of the administration’s relationship with DoD:

“There is no division” between Obama and McChrystal, said a Defense official, one of several speaking on condition of anonymity when discussing the relationship. “It is just an absence of a relationship.”

Officials close to Mullen and Gates say the two men have been forceful in presenting McChrystal’s views to Obama and are comfortable with how the president prefers to be briefed on the war.

“There is a general comfort level with the manner with which the president has chosen to get his military advice,” said a military officer in Washington.

The preference appears to appeal to the Pentagon as well. Top Pentagon officials, including Mullen, wanted to avoid a repeat of 2007, when the job of defending plans to increase the number of troops in Iraq fell to Petraeus.<

Time has a good feature following up on the hijacked Chinese ship off the coast of Somalia. Bottom line: now that the ship is anchored off the coast of Somalia, the military option has become much more difficult.

Also, the Time feature has some interesting quotes from Chinese internet discussion boards. Hardly scientific, but they provide some nice atmospherics.