Endless Summer
The summer of love (at least in the San Francisco Bay Area) was in 1967. The summer of arms control was in 1960. Longstanding readers of these posts may recall my ten favorite books on arms control. Two of them…
Michael Krepon
Tac Nukes in South Asia
Hans J. Morgenthau was a heavyweight whose books, including Politics Among Nations (1948) and In Defense of the National Interest (1951), packed a real wallop. Morgenthau also wrote with great clarity about nuclear weapons. Check out his essay, “The Four…
Berlin and Moscow
I am a frequent flier and have a plastic, gold “Million Miler” card from United to prove it. None of my business flights have had more meaning than one I took in 1989 to watch people hammer away at the…
Hedley Bull
Hedley Bull is probably the least well-known founding father of the theory of modern arms control. He’s not very well known because he toiled under three considerable disadvantages. First, he was an Australian based in the United Kingdom, when the…
The Big Shift
Since the Cold War ended, no region has experienced more shocks or a more significant reorientation in US foreign policy than South Asia. The big shift was enabled by the demise of the Soviet Union and New Delhi’s turn away…
The Gift of Giving (II)
Back in my youth, before thumbs were essential for home entertainment, some of us played a board game called Chutes and Ladders, where you could zoom way up and down the board, depending on where your piece landed after rolling…
The Gift of Giving
Readers beware: The next two posts are ridden with conflicts of interest. Policy entrepreneurship to reduce nuclear dangers would dry up without foundations. National leaders and bureaucracies are too consumed by their daily calendars to serve as their own think…
The Moon Race
America’s race to the moon was like the competition with Nazi Germany to make the atomic bomb: the “race” mobilized immense resources while the opponent failed to compete. In the case of the A-bomb, this became evident only after Germany…
DPRK Announcement
Surprise can come in two big packages labeled pleasant and unpleasant. North Korea’s announcement that it has agreed to suspend enrichment and long-range missile flight tests while resuming IAEA inspections clearly falls in the first category. If Pyongyang reneges on…
Pakistan and the FMCT
Pakistan is blocking the start of negotiations of a global halt to the production of highly-enriched Uranium and Plutonium for nuclear weapons. The Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty can’t begin, Pakistani diplomats say, because existing stockpiles won’t be covered. But Pakistan…
