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…
Reagan and Gorbachev at Hofdi House during the Reykjavik Summit in 1986. Ken Adelman has written an appealing, breezy account of the most extraordinary chapter of US-Soviet nuclear negotiations – the impromptu summit at Reykjavik on October 11-12, 1986 between…
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…
The Nonproliferation Review will be publishing my book review of Ken Adelman’s Reagan at Reykjavik: Forty-Eight Hours that Ended the Cold War. (Where would we be without publishing license and hyperbolic subtitles?) In the meantime, here are some quotes from…
A dedicated band of anti-arms controllers, led by Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle, sought to foil President Ronald Reagan’s pursuit of nuclear arms reduction treaties with Moscow. One tactic was to publish charge…
On March 24, 1985, Major Arthur D. Nicholson, Jr. was shot in the chest by a Soviet sentry while observing a tank shed near Ludwigslust, in East Germany. The 1947 Potsdam Agreement for the military occupation and reconstruction of Germany…
For his first term, President Barack Obama selected Significant Outsiders for his key foreign policy and national security posts. In his second term, he depends heavily on known commodities and loyalists. He promotes from within and keeps the State Department…
Are the new Iranian President, Hassan Rouhani, and his foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, taking the United States for a ride? Have they agreed to an interim deal on enrichment as part of a master plan to lull the West…
All of the significant gains in the field of arms control were the result of stubborn optimism mixed with idealism. Pessimists thought nuclear arms control was a fool’s errand, bound to end very badly, like naval arms control in the…
In the mid-1980s, many smart people predicted the death of arms control. Thomas Schelling was one of them. Others included Richard Haass, Albert Carnesale, Les Gelb, and Zbigniew Brzezinski. US-Soviet relations were in terrible shape. The White House and the…
