Every four years the White House issues a “nuclear posture review.” That may sound like an anachronism. It isn’t. In a world where the United States and Russia still have more than 20,000 nuclear weapons — and Iran, North Korea and others have seemingly unquenchable nuclear appetites — what the United States says about its arsenal matters enormously.

President Obama’s review was due to Congress in December. That has been delayed, in part because of administration infighting. The president needs to get this right. It is his chance to finally jettison cold war doctrine and bolster America’s credibility as it presses to rein in Iran, North Korea and other proliferators.

Call it geek diplomacy.

This week, in lieu of the congressmen and capitalists who typically make up delegations to Russia, Washington sent a detachment of Silicon Valley dreamboats: the 33-year-old creator of Twitter; the “chief lizard wrangler” of Mozilla; the chief executive of eBay; and — for good measure — the actor Ashton Kutcher, who has edged out Britney Spears to become the world’s most popular Tweeter.

Joel Barre, the head of Europe's tropical spaceport in French Guiana, is relaxed about letting a former Cold War rival into the very heart of the Guiana Space Center's control center.

Unthinkable twenty years ago, Europe is letting Russians into its space program because they have something Europe needs: a tried and tested mid-range rocket launcher that just happens to be a veteran of the space race.

The Soyuz rocket is expected to make its debut at the Guiana launch site in the second half of the year.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton called Monday for closer cooperation between Russia and NATO, the trans-Atlantic alliance that Moscow views with suspicion as a relic of the Cold War and a potential threat to its security.

In a speech launching an international seminar on revising NATO's mission for the 21st century, Clinton rejected Russian calls for a new European security treaty that Washington believes would lead to a diluting of NATO's influence in Europe and beyond.

Vice President Joseph Biden will begin the first push for congressional ratification of the United Nations nuclear test-ban treaty since the Clinton presidency, with a speech Thursday saying the Obama administration's large funding request for monitoring will make tests obsolete.

The speech at the National Defense University here will challenge liberal arms-control advocates to embrace a $624 million increase in nuclear-weapons funding, most of which would go to nuclear-weapons scientists to monitor the nation's aging stockpile without testing.

Russia raised Western hopes that it will support tougher international sanctions against Iran’s nuclear programme by announcing a delay in delivery of S-300 advanced air defence missiles.

The postponement for unspecified “technical problems” was made public a day after Binyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s Prime Minister, urged Russia to support “crippling” sanctions against Tehran during a visit to Moscow.

The United States and Israel have been pressing Russia not to deliver the S-300 missiles, which would make a successful military strike much more difficult if diplomacy failed to resolve the stand-off over Iran’s nuclear facilities.

A recent report by George Robertson, a former secretary general of NATO, and two co-authors, Franklin Miller and Kori Schake, criticizes the German proposal to withdraw the remaining American nuclear weapons from German territory as damaging not only to Germany, but to the alliance as a whole.

The authors argue that the proposal was driven more by populist sentiment than any long-term strategic goal. This observation is wrong and misleading. While the Robertson report is based on outdated perceptions, the arguments presented merit a substantive response.

The news that Ukrainian President-elect Viktor Yanukovych plans to visit Moscow as his first out-of-country trip—assuming that there is no successful court challenge to his inauguration—has been greeted by some as proof that this “pro-Russian leader” is planning to bring Ukraine back under the Kremlin’s sway.
 
Let’s first put this into context. Russia remains Ukraine’s largest trading partner and is still Ukraine’s principal supplier of energy. It is no surprise why a Ukrainian leader would make Russia a first stop any more than it is de rigueur for Canadian prime ministers and Mexican presidents to journey to Washington. And it bears recalling that Yanukovych’s opponent, Prime Minister Yuliya Tymoshenko, also pledged to make repairing the Ukraine-Russia relationship her first priority had she been elected to the presidential chair.

Iran's announcement to proceed with a more advanced uranium enrichment program has stepped up calls in the United States, Europe, and Israel for a new round of multilateral sanctions against Tehran. The West still faces a strenuous battle to win over China, which has insisted on the need for further negotiations aimed at persuading the Islamic Republic to place its nuclear program under greater international control. February could prove a pivotal month, with a hawkish France presiding over the Security Council and domestic pressure mounting on U.S. President Barack Obama to show results after a year of often frustrating diplomacy.

Here's a list of the key players who will be negotiating what Washington hopes will be the fourth round of U.N. sanctions against Iran:

President Ahmadinejad declared Iran a “nuclear state” today, saying that scientists had produced the first batch of highly enriched uranium, a leap towards the production of weapons-grade fuel.

Mr Ahmadinejad told crowds of cheering supporters that Iran was capable of going all the way to weapons grade but would not do so because “we do not believe in manufacturing a bomb”. “When we say we do not manufacture the bomb, we mean it, and we do not believe in manufacturing a bomb,” he proclaimed. “If we wanted to manufacture a bomb, we would announce it.”