A Dream Deferred, But Still Alive

On March 1, 1945, only six weeks before his death, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered an address to Congress that pointed toward a sweeping transformation of international relations.

With the Axis powers tottering toward defeat in World War II, Roosevelt reported that the recently concluded Yalta conference of Allied leaders had agreed upon “a common ground for peace.”  It would “spell read more

How the International Community Obtained a Nuclear Weapons-Free Agreement with Iran–and Lost It Thanks to Donald Trump

If the objective of the U.S. war upon Iran is to ensure that that country does not develop nuclear weapons, that goal was attained more than a decade ago through a far different approach than the one now being followed by the Trump administration.

Iran, as a signer of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty of 1970, had agreed to forgo the development of nuclear weapons.  Even so, fears grew during the early 21st century read more

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

A Bold Campaign to Confront Global Crises

Although the world is experiencing severe global crises, there are new efforts underway to create a more effective means of coping with them.

The crises are clear enough.  They include vast slaughter in horrific wars, worldwide climate catastrophe, massive population displacement, and deepening poverty.

Moreover, these disastrous situations are likely to worsen in coming years.  Modern wars are fought with increasingly devastating weapons, and preparations for nuclear war have escalated to the 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