The second hand of the Doomsday Clock is now only three minutes to midnight. This is the closest to apocalypse we have come since 1984 – the coldest of Cold War years, just a year after Able Archer, the…
Many in the West suddenly seem to think we’re on the road to a new Cold War. Talk of a return to the era of nuclear rivalry swirls around Russia’s muscular and belligerent grandstanding over Ukraine, and…
With the end of the Cold War, the nuclear arms race came to a virtual halt, but the nuclear threat remained. In regional rivalries, such as those in the south Asia subcontinent, northeast Asia, and the…
Nowhere was the relief over Scotland’s decision last week to remain part of the United Kingdom more acutely felt than with those responsible for Britain’s nuclear deterrent system, Trident. The Scottish…
Ever since I was a teenager in the renewed Cold War of the 1980s, I have feared losing not only my life, but the lives of everyone, absolutely everyone, in a nuclear conflagration. It is easy to forget…
When we agree to send our young men and women to war, we expect the reasons why to be made clear. At least some of us will want to subject that explanation to scrutiny at the time, and often even more…
This week marks the tenth anniversary of the the United Nations Security Council adopting resolution 1540. The resolution – an important, but perhaps underappreciated, element of the non-proliferation…
As the curtain fell on the 2014 Nuclear Security Summit, the Dutch organisers must surely have experienced mixed emotions: relief that the summit was a success, yet frustration that media attention was…
South Korea has made a suprisingly public announcement that it plans to develop cyber-weapons for potential use against North Korea. The decision to make its plans known is baffling and the potential consequences…
Amid warnings from Washington that the US will be watching very closely, the interim deal agreed late last year to scale-back Iran’s nuclear programme has come into force, a positive development in a slow-burning…
Jessica Jewell, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA)
UN inspectors descend on Iran this week to visit the Arak heavy water plant, and engineers at the wrecked Fukushima nuclear power plants in Japan attempt one of the most challenging nuclear salvage operations…