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...
Early this year, legislators in the U.S. House of Representatives and in the U.S. Senate introduced resolutions that call upon the U.S. government to lead a global effort to halt and reverse the nuclear arms race. Co-sponsored by 36 members of the House and 5 members...
Late January of this year will mark the first anniversary of the entry into force of the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. This momentous international agreement, the result of a lengthy struggle by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons...
In late November 2018, Noam Chomsky, the world-renowned public intellectual, remarked that “humanity faces two imminent existential threats: environmental catastrophe and nuclear war.” Curiously, although a widespread environmental movement has developed...
In July 2017, by a vote of 122 to 1, with one abstention, nations from around the world attending a United Nations-sponsored conference in New York City voted to approve a treaty to ban nuclear weapons. Although this Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons...
The reckless threats of nuclear war flung back and forth between the North Korean and U.S. governments remind me of an event in which I participated back in the fall of 1961, when I was a senior at Columbia College. At the end of August 1961, the Soviet government had...
