Tag: abolition

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Explaining What I Do for a Living

Quote of the week: “Inspiration does exist, but it must find you working.” —Pablo Picasso Less is more. Clarity and brevity rule. Except when it comes to explaining what I do for a living. Having a job description that fits…

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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.”…

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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…

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To Hiroshima

Secretary of State John Kerry joins other foreign ministers placing flowers at the cenotaph of the Peace Memorial Park in Hiroshima on Monday. Visits by high-level U.S. officials to Hiroshima are heavily freighted, unlike those to Tokyo, where over 100,000…

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What’s Our Central Organizing Principle?

Every successful business, cause or social movement needs a central organizing principle, including the Nuclear Enterprise and the Arms Control Enterprise. Under the cloak of safe-sounding deterrence, the Nuclear Enterprise in the United States and Russia is built around Gates…

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Humanitarian Consequences (Cont.)

[See the previous post. -Ed.] Yes, every kind of weapon, if used against noncombatants, can violate the humanitarian laws of warfare. But nuclear detonations add a whole new scale to this problem. A single mushroom cloud, except under highly particular circumstances,…

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Caging the Bomb

During this Thanksgiving season, let’s try something different: Rather than focus on doom and gloom, what hasn’t been accomplished and what irreconcilables are trying to undo, let’s focus on an improbable success story. Despite the odds, prolonged efforts to cage…

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Accelerating Descent

Arms control has boom-and-bust cycles. We’re now going through very tough times. They remind me of the Carter administration. As Yogi Berra has said, it feels like déjà vu all over again – only Obama’s challenges are more severe. This…

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Alternative Nuclear Futures

The two polar-opposite alternative nuclear futures are abolition and cascading nuclear proliferation. Strategic analysts who worry most about abolition see signs of it in treaties that permit four-digit nuclear arsenals. It takes only a single additional, one-digit nuclear stockpile to…