The Doomsday Clock is an internationally recognized design that conveys how close we are to destroying our civilization with dangerous technologies of our own making. First and foremost among these are nuclear weapons, but the dangers include climate-changing technologies, emerging... Read More
My colleague Ehud Eiran argued in his first essay that "the seeming failure of the WMD-free zone initiative carries negative but not disastrous consequences for the nonproliferation regime." I wrote in my own first essay that cancellation of the 2012 Middle East WMD-Free Zone Conference was not
The cancellation of the 2012 Middle East WMD-Free Zone Conference is not the end of the world. But it could have poisonous effects on policy at the national, regional, and international levels.
Nearly 40 years ago, the UN General Assembly first adopted a resolution endorsing the establishment of a nuclear-weapon-free zone in the Middle East. At the 2010 Review Conference for the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), specific measures to advance this vision were agreed upon.
In November of last year, when efforts to organize a Middle East WMD-Free Zone Conference collapsed, the US State Department chalked up the failure to “present conditions in the Middle East and the fact that states in the region have not reached agreement on acceptable conditions for a conferenc
In the fall of 2011, everything seemed to be in place to convene a 2012 conference on establishing a WMD-free zone in the Middle East. The meeting was to be sponsored by the United Nations as well as by the United States, Russia, and the United Kingdom.
In her first Roundtable essay my colleague Manpreet Sethi analyzed the tactical and strategic levels of US policy on nuclear proliferation and terrorism and concluded that, in principle, the United States is on the right track.
The practice of keeping nuclear weapons on alert evolved during the Cold War, as the United States and the Soviet Union deployed fully-armed nuclear weapons that could strike the adversary before it could retaliate.
