By Daryl G. Kimball The writer is the Executive Director of the Arms Control Association (ACA). The following article appears as the Focus of the January/February 2024 issue of Arms Control Today. WASHINGTON, D.C. | 17 January 2024 (IDN) — As the new year begins, the existential risks posed by nuclear weapons continue to grow. […]
North Korea: Short on Food but Arms Aplenty
By Thalif Deen UNITED NATIONS | 14 January 2024 (IDN) — North Korea, which has long suffered a shortage of food and medicine, has made relatively fast progress in cranking out ballistic missiles and emerging as an arms supplier to one of the world’s major nuclear powers: Russia. A joint statement issued on January 10 by […]
One Man’s Fight Against the Madness of Missiles
By Jonathan Power LUND, Sweden | 2 January 2024 (IDN) — The nuclear weapon missile business is contradictory, full of missteps, highly dangerous and prepared in its madness (Mutually Assured Destruction, aka MAD, they used to call it in Cold War days) to plunge the world into a nuclear war that will reduce most of […]
Peace and Security: Homage to a Buddhist Spiritual Leader and a Great Writer
By Ramesh Jaura BERLIN | 1 January 2024 (IDN) — “Even an old fountain pen, if it happened to have belonged to some great writer, is looked on with awe and reverence by the people of later times, for they feel that somehow it is capable of revealing the secrets of the great man’s masterpieces,” […]
The Suicidal Fallout of a Nuclear Attack in the Middle East
By Thalif Deen UNITED NATIONS | 16 December 2023 (IDN) — When a junior minister proposed dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza as “one way of dealing with the threat of Hamas”, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu instantly shot down the proposal and took the unusual step of suspending the politically far-right minister. Netanyahu’s swift […]
Iran Deal Off the Table as Nuclear Tensions Rise
By Kelsey Davenport The writer is the director for nonproliferation policy at the Arms Control Association (ACA). This article first appeared in ‘Arms Control Now’ of the ACA and is being reproduced with their permission. WASHINGTON, D.C. | 14 December 2023 (IDN) — A top U.S. official said that restoring the 2015 nuclear deal with […]
The End of An Era?
The Case for a New UN General Assembly Special Session on Disarmament By Sergio Duarte The writer is an Ambassador, a former High Representative of the United Nations Office of Disarmament Affairs., and President of Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs. BELO HORIZONTE, Brazil | 7 December 2023 (IDN) — Seventy-eight years ago, when […]
How the US Has Darkened the Nuclear Cloud Over Humanity
By Norman Solomon* This article was originally published by The Nation. SAN FRANCISCO | 6 December 2023 (IDN) — Forty years ago, across a dozen pages of The Nation magazine, I was in a debate with the English historian E. P. Thompson about the US-Soviet nuclear arms race, the relative culpability of both governments and […]
Nuclear Deterrence: An Unproven Gamble that Risks Humanity
By Thalif Deen UNITED NATIONS | 3 December 2023 (IDN) — Is it justifiable for a country to go nuclear—on the grounds that it is doing so to protect itself from nuclear attacks? The argument is based on the concept of “nuclear deterrence”: a widely-challenged theory that nuclear weapons are intended to deter nuclear attacks prompting […]
Forty Years After ‘The Day After’
By Daryl G. Kimball The writer is the Executive Director of the Arms Control Association (ACA). The following article appears as the Focus of the December 2023 issue of Arms Control Today. WASHINGTON, D.C. | 2 December 2023 (IDN) — On Sunday, Nov. 20, 1983, I left my college dorm to visit my parents’ home […]