Nuclear Issues

Stephen Walt argues that the ultimate goal should be conflict resolution in Ukraine—not just an end to the fighting but a political arrangement that makes a resumption of war later on less likely.

Stephen Walt offers a tentative and far-from-comprehensive survey of what scholars have to say about the war in Ukraine.

Russia's war in Ukraine has brought questions of nuclear deterrence back to the fore, reminding world leaders that risk reduction must remain a top item on the global agenda. Because political and technological change will always introduce new issues, the work of maintaining a "just deterrence" is never done.

Joseph Nye argues that prudence results from the fear of creating unintended consequences in unpredictable systems and can develop into a norm of nonuse or limited use of certain weapons or a norm of limiting targets. Something like this happened with nuclear weapons when the superpowers came close to the brink of nuclear war in 1962, during the Cuban missile crisis. The Limited Test Ban Treaty followed a year later.

William d'Ambruoso explains why high-level engagement, built on a baseline of deterrence, lessens the chances of war and opens the way for future cooperation in North Korean–U.S. relations.

The historian Fredrik Logevall has written a grand fresh take on the life of John F. Kennedy, as if to reignite an old flame. He's given us a chance to remember politics as the sport of great minds and hearts, high language, serious stuff.

Calder Walton writes that autocratic regimes — China, Russia and Iran — have been using social media to try to influence U.S. public opinion. History reveals how and why a one-party regime used disinformation to salvage its reputation following a disaster — the Soviet Union's 1986 Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe, whose history also reveals how such disinformation can be countered.

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has published a document from the Pugwash Conference on Science and World Affairs concerning nuclear problems and tensions in the time of COVID-19. The document has been co-signed by a large number of Pugwash colleagues and personalities.

Nathaniel Moir reviews Maxwell Taylor's Cold War: From Berlin to Vietnam by Ingo Trauschweizer.

The arguments in favor of the United States' declaring that the only purpose of its nuclear weapons is to deter others who possess them from using theirs — in other words, that in no circumstances will this country use nuclear weapons first — are far stronger than the arguments against this stance. It must be hoped that the next US administration will take this no-first-use step promptly.