Writing on ACW 2009–2022 · 676 posts · On the podcast: 1 episode
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In late 1983, well before Mikhail Gorbachev’s elevation as General Secretary of the Communist Party, the Reagan administration switched gears in dealing with the Soviet Union, moving from a policy of confrontation to the alleviation of the Politburo’s deep anxieties.…
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Are the shoe box files metaphorical or real? Given my weak memory and computer skills, they have to be real. But I know that ACW readers are a suspicious lot, so I have asked Jeffrey to accompany this post with…
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Henry Kissinger doesn’t do remorse. The closest he came to second guessing his arms control negotiating record has become a classic quote in Wonkdom: I would say in retrospect that I wish I had thought through the implications of a…
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Thomas Schelling and Morton Halperin provided the most widely used definition of arms control in their seminal book, Strategy and Arms Control (1961): We believe that arms control is a promising, but still only dimly perceived, enlargement on the scope…
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The debate between Ken Waltz and Scott Sagan, The Spread of Nuclear Weapons (2nd edition, 2003) is a great teaching tool. Waltz, the academic Grinch of proliferation studies, argues that more proliferation is better than any of the alternatives —…
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Back in the day, Paul Warnke and I would joke that rooting for the Red Sox was excellent training for arms control. (For non-US readers of ACW, the Red Sox are a baseball team that, until the advent of new…
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Back in 1970, I had the good fortune of taking a graduate seminar taught by Mort Halperin, who was then working on his book, Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy, with the help of a very bright research assistant, Arnie Kanter.…
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Herman Kahn has a favored place in my shoe box collection because he followed his logic train to territory where other deterrence strategists feared to tread. Kahn was plus-sized (above), utterly confident, and easily caricatured. A sense of the man’s…
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A pop quiz for wonks: Question: What do the following numbers represent? 95, 93, 93, 88, 87, 80, and 74 Answer: The number of Senators voting for the SORT, START I, INF, ABM, START II, Limited Test Ban Treaty and…
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The last serious debate over ASAT testing occurred in the 1980s. In addition to advocating the Strategic Defense Initiative, Reagan administration officials pushed for the testing of a kinetic energy ASAT system employing the Air Force’s F-15 as a launch…
