Twenty-five years ago, the world’s highest-stakes poker game was played in Reykjavik. This characterization comes from a man with a pretty good poker face, George Shultz, who was the US Secretary of State at the time. Secretary Shultz appeared to…
Is it any wonder why Pakistan produces excellent fiction writers? Fiction has to be exceptional to top newspaper accounts. The latest saga begins with outgoing Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs, Mike Mullen, who speaks the unvarnished truth that Pakistan’s…
Admiral Mike Mullen, the outgoing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, spoke plainly about Pakistan’s military and intelligence services during his last appearance before the Senate Armed Services Committee on September 22nd. Here is what he said: The fact…
The Obama administration’s arms control team has to be tired. It took great effort to secure two time-sensitive and essential agenda items – negotiating a new strategic arms reduction treaty to replace one that was due to expire in December…
September 24th marks the fifteenth anniversary of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty’s celebratory signing ceremony at the United Nations. That’s fifteen years in which the treaty has remained in limbo, due to the worst entry-into-force provision ever negotiated. A much…
The retrospectives and forecasts about 9/11 keep on coming, but little has been written about that day’s impact on the Bomb, arms control, and new nuclear weapon programs. Here’s my take, subject to rebuttals:
In the September/October 2010 issue of Foreign Affairs [“Smaller and Safer, A New Plan for Nuclear Postures”] Bruce Blair and his co-authors argue that de-alerting is an important step to prevent nuclear terrorism as well as a tool to de-legitimize…
Let’s not argue about this: the three greatest films about the Bomb are John Frankenheimer’s Seven Days in May, Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove and Sidney Lumet’s Fail Safe. All three were released in 1964, when movie-goers were still trying to…
With Washington, its partners, and interested neighbors gearing up diplomatic efforts over Afghanistan, I’d like to remind readers what George Shultz wrote in his memoirs about the previous Afghan “settlement.” The 1988 Geneva accords, reached under the auspices of the…
Alex George, the much-admired Stanford University professor, wrote Bridging the Gap: Theory and Practice in Foreign Policy (1993) to encourage academia to produce more policy-relevant work. This divide has become wider in subsequent years. Hard-pressed government officials rarely look to…
