On the Road to Nuclear War

On January 27, 2026, the editors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the hands of their famous “Doomsday Clock” to 85 seconds to midnight―the closest setting, since the appearance of the clock in 1946, to nuclear annihilation.

This grim appraisal has impressive evidence to support it.

The New Start Treaty, the last of the major nuclear arms control and disarmament treaties between the United States and Russia, read more

Eighty Years of Nuclear Terror

Ever since the atomic bombings of Japanese cities in August 1945, the world has been living on borrowed time.

The indications, then and since, that the development of nuclear weapons did not bode well for human survival, were clear enough.  The two small atomic bombs dropped on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed between 110,000 and 210,000 people and wounded many others, almost all of them civilians.  read more

The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons Provides a Way to Avert Nuclear Catastrophe

Will the world ever be free of the menace of nuclear annihilation?

There was a promising start along these lines during the late twentieth century, when―pressed by a popular upsurge against nuclear weapons―the nations of the world adopted a succession of nuclear arms control and disarmament agreements.  Starting with the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963, these agreements helped curb the nuclear arms race and prevent nuclear war.

But the tide gradually turned during the final years of the twentieth read more

Einstein’s Postwar Campaign to Save the World from Nuclear Destruction

Although the popular new Netflix film, Einstein and the Bomb, purports to tell the story of the great physicist’s relationship to nuclear weapons, it ignores his vital role in rallying the world against nuclear catastrophe.

Aghast at the use of nuclear weapons in August 1945 to obliterate the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Einstein threw himself into efforts to prevent worldwide nuclear annihilation.  In September, responding to a letter from Robert Hutchins, Chancellor of the University read more

Time to Abandon International Anarchy?

In December 1934, Arthur Henderson, a leader of the British Labour Party, declared in his speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize that the immense human suffering caused by World War I “led to the very clear realization that international anarchy must be abandoned if civilization was to survive.”

Unfortunately, that realization did not go very far or very deep.  Although, since that time, international law has been refined, nations remain far from adhering to its provisions or accepting its read more

World Peace and Security Require a Stronger United Nations

Addressing the UN Security Council on September 20, 2023, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky delivered a heartfelt plea “to update the existing security architecture in the world, in particular, to restore the real power of the UN Charter.”

This call for strengthening international security under the aegis of the United Nations makes sense not only for Ukraine―a country suffering from brutal military invasion, occupation, and annexation by its much larger, more powerful neighbor, the read more

From the Partial Test Ban Treaty to a Nuclear Weapons-Free World

This September is the sixtieth anniversary of U.S. and Soviet ratification of the world’s first significant nuclear arms control agreement, the Partial Test Ban Treaty.  Thus, it’s an appropriate time to examine that treaty, as well as to consider what might be done to end the danger of nuclear annihilation.

Although the use, in 1945, of atomic bombs to destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki unleashed a read more