Hawks and Doves, like practicing Buddhists, experience expansion and contraction. Both phenomena are most evident after treaty debates. Usually, but not always, the winners feel expansion and the losers feel contraction. Failure for one camp is the pathway to a…
As Mike Cooley of the Drive-By Truckers sings, “been falling so long it’s like gravity’s gone and I’m floating.” Events in Pakistan remind me of this lyric. On March 2nd, Pakistan’s Minorities Affairs Minister, Shahbaz Bhatti, was gunned down getting…
Over the eons, Planet Earth has been profoundly marked by violent collisions, including perhaps five that prompted great extinctions. The playground now known as the Chesapeake Bay was created thirty-five million years ago by an asteroid three to five kilometers…
Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had his hands full trying to set criteria for nuclear requirements at a time when the training and ethos of the Strategic Air Command called for taking the initiative and winning decisively. McNamara’s braininess, his…
Pardon the oversimplification, but Hawks and Doves, for all their polarity, are driven by the same basic motivation — anxiety. Both are pessimists at heart, worried that mankind’s worst instincts will be realized. Hawks worry about being disadvantaged by very…
Ken Adelman loves Shakespeare. The Reagan administration thought that the right stage for him would be the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, after its first appointee as Director, Eugene Rostow, became a bit too obstreperous. Rostow was a heavy hitter.…
There is no better place than Wagah to look for evidence of how badly India-Pakistan relations have eroded. Most people visit Wagah to sit in stands where they can watch an elaborately synchronized martial exhibition where extremely tall Indian and…
In 2007, Alexei Arbatov, Vladimir Dvorkin and Sergey Oznobishchev helped the Stimson Center develop a draft Code of Conduct for responsible space-faring nations, but they were unsatisfied with the result. As Sergey writes in a fine new monograph, Outer Space:…
An early shoebox posting highlighted Kenneth Waltz’s classic Adelphi Paper, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons — More May be Better (1981). Another Adelphi Paper on the Bomb that’s worth reading, in my view, is Neil Joeck’s Maintaining Nuclear Stability in…
Just three days after the bombing of Nagaski, on August 12, 1945, General Leslie Groves released an “administrative history of the Atomic Bomb project and the basic scientific knowledge on which the several developments were based.” It was known as…
