Author: Kevin Martin

Sixty years ago this week, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, I was in my mother’s womb. My young, sweet mom was terrified she’d never get to see me be born, as the world teetered on the brink of unimaginable calamity. It’s bewildering to me that nuclear crises bookend my life at this point.

I’ve worked for nuclear disarmament since 1983, but here we are, perhaps closer to nuclear catastrophe, with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s thinly veiled nuclear threats in his disastrous war against Ukraine, than at any time since John Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev found a path back from the brink six decades ago.

Decades of progress in reducing the overall number of nuclear weapons in the world has recently been undercut by backsliding on nuclear weapons treaties, lack of progress on disarmament (in fact, the opposite, a new arms race with all nuclear states “upgrading” their arsenals), and hypocrisy on non-proliferation by the nuclear powers.

Continue reading “Let’s Defuse Nuclear War, Together”

The developments regarding Korea this week are astonishing. We may be witnessing a breathtaking outbreak of peace, when not very long ago a nuclear war seemed possible. Now that the Koreas have gotten the diplomatic ball rolling, can President Donald Trump do his part?

For Trump’s planned meeting with Kim Jong-un, announced at the White House by South Korea’s security director Chung Eui-yong, to be successful, the administration will need to do a lot more diplomatic leg work than it’s used to. It will also be important to set expectations appropriately-we can’t expect one meeting between the two leaders to end in a comprehensive agreement like the Iran nuclear accord, which took years to negotiate. But challenges aside, it’s hard to imagine how Trump could scuttle this progress, short of calling off the meeting or throwing in the towel at the first disagreement and pivoting back toward threats of war.

Now South Korea, with its right-wing opposition to budding Nobel Peace Prize candidate President Moon Jae-in, or North Korea, with its unpredictable leader Kim Jong-un, could well mess things up on their own, so the extremely hopeful thaw in relations brought about by the Olympic Truce is far from a done deal.

However, it seems North Korea has put so much on the table, probably more than President Moon could have asked for, that there should be no going back. And for his part, Trump already made one wise decision, agreeing to President Moon’s request to postpone the massive U.S.-South Korea military exercises after the conclusion of the Paralympics in South Korea in late March. Now that Pyongyang accepts that the exercises will proceed next month (an astonishing concession given North Korea’s legitimate security concerns in relation to the war games), Trump has the chance to do what no president has done in seven decades-help achieve lasting peace on the Korean Peninsula.

Continue reading “Trump Can Help Bring Peace to Korea, by Following South Korea’s Lead”