Disarmament Diplomacy and the Ban Treaty
Quote of the week: “Our world will be a safer and healthier place when we can admit that every time we make an atomic bomb we corrupt the morals of a host of innocent neutrons below the age of consent.”…
Michael Krepon
What’s the Objective in a Nuclear War?
Quote of the week: “You show me a Secretary of Defense who’s planning not to prevail [in a nuclear war] and I’ll show you a Secretary of Defense who ought to be impeached.” —Caspar Weinberger, New York Times, August 24,…
Nuclear South Asia
Quotes of the week: “Learning is ever in the freshness of its youth, even for the old.” –Aeschylus “Education consists mainly in what we have unlearned.” –Mark Twain When you find yourself in a hole, recovery is a multi-step process.…
The American Century
Quote of the week: “Everything flows and nothing abides; everything gives way and nothing stays fixed.” —David Fromkin, The Way of the World, with due credit to Heraclitus and Gautama In an essay published in Life magazine, media impresario Henry…
Nuclear Learning
Quote of the week: “The [U.S. Strategic Bombing] survey’s task was to measure as precisely as possible the exact effects of the two [Hiroshima and Nagasaki] bombs – in other words, to put calipers on the problem so that people…
A Three-Person Rule for Nuclear First Use
Quote of the week: “We still tend to conceive of national security almost solely as a state of armed readiness, a vast, awesome arsenal of weaponry… We are haunted by this concept of military hardware.” —Robert S. McNamara, The Essence of…
The Counterforce Compulsion in South Asia
Quotes of the week: “There has been literally no chance at all that any sane political authority… would consciously choose to start a nuclear war. This proposition is true for the past, the present, and the foreseeable future. For sane…
The Ban Movement’s Moment
Quote of the week: “The great tragedies of history often fascinate people with approaching horror. Paralyzed, they cannot make up their minds to do anything but wait. So they wait, and one day the Gorgon devours them. But I should…
The Ghost Ship Anchored at Foggy Bottom
Quotes of the week: “Focus on the action, not the distraction.” – Sandra Savine “Also focus on the non-action, not the distraction.” – MK It would take a consummate diplomat to be the face of the Trump Administration’s foreign policy.…
Low Yield Nuclear Weapons (Again)
Quote of the week: “The pattern of the use of atomic weapons was set at Hiroshima. They are weapons of aggression, of surprise, and of terror.” — Bernard Brodie, The Absolute Weapon John Donnelly of CQ Roll Call was the…
