Ellen Laipson The election of President Hassan Rouhani has augured in a wave of hopefulness that conflict between Iran and the U.S. could be avoided. But the escalating crisis in Syria has cast a shadow over prospects for improvement. The August 21 use of chemical...
Seyed Hossein Mousavian With the victory of a moderate president, Hassan Rouhani, in Iran, there is renewed hope for a diplomatic breakthrough in the stalemate over Iran’s nuclear program. There also are encouraging signs at the White House. President Obama in his...
George A. Lopez and David Cortright In light of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani’s inauguration and his declared intention to enhance transparency and improve relations with the international community, a new and significant opportunity exists to end the nuclear...
Stephen W. Bosworth I have been dealing with North Korea since the 1990s, when we tried to implement the Agreed Framework, and later when I served as the U.S. Ambassador in Seoul. When I returned to active service as the Special Representative to North Korea in...
George A. Lopez The new North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has come to power in a fledgling nuclear state that thus far has resisted pressures from the West and the Security Council to denuclearize. As he scans the political horizon, Kim may arrive at several conclusions...
David Cortright and Linda Gerber-Stellingwerf The history of nonproliferation teaches that nations must be persuaded rather than forced to give up nuclear weapons capability. This is a difficult challenge with a regime as truculent as North Korea, where the primary...
David Cortright Old thinking retains its grip at the Pentagon. The vested interests that profit from excessive military spending remain a formidable lobby. Congress sustains nuclear postures that are inherited from the Cold War and continues to fund unneeded weapons...
Cardinal Roger Mahony Few challenges are more urgent for Catholic teaching on war and peace than the awesome and unprecedented power of nuclear weapons. In evaluating nuclear deterrence, the U.S. bishops have proposed an “interim ethic” whereby nuclear deterrence...
Kelsey Davenport President Obama has declared that the United States is committed to creating “the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons,” but the policy debate in Washington often lags far behind this lofty vision. Some progress has been achieved in...
Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite Four senior U.S. statesmen — George P. Shultz, William J. Perry, Henry A. Kissinger, and Sam Nunn — captured world attention in January 2007 with their call for “A World Free of Nuclear Weapons” in the Wall Street Journal. Their premise is...
Kennette Benedict The end of the Cold War has made it possible to contemplate vast reductions in nuclear arsenals—and even their elimination. The United States and Russia already have reduced their nuclear weapons stocks from a high of nearly 70,000 in 1986 to fewer...
Stephen M. Colecchi Advocates for a world without nuclear weapons in the United States frequently lament the fact that the general public is not much interested in the issue of nuclear disarmament. People are legitimately concerned about more immediate issues like the...
An Interview with Hon. Margaret Beckett Former UK Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett was a keynote speaker at a recent conference, “The NPT and a World Without Nuclear Weapons,” in Helsinki, Finland, co-sponsored by the Kroc Institute and the Finnish Institute of...
David Cortright This post includes video content. (4:20) A few years ago, the notion of a world without nuclear weapons was merely an aspiration. Today it has become a widely accepted goal of international policy. In September, U.S. President Barack Obama presided...
Gerard F. Powers In 1983, at the height of the Cold War, the U.S. Catholic Bishops issued a pastoral letter on nuclear weapons, The Challenge of Peace, which is still considered a seminal analysis of the ethics of nuclear weapons. The bishops concluded that most...